Week 47.09

Tendring Topics……..on line

In Defence of the Government!

I’m by no means a blind supporter of the government. However, I’m not a blind and unthinking opponent either. I think that during the past week or two, the government, and the Prime Minister in particular, have twice been subject to quite unjustifiable criticism.

First, there was ex-chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, who resigned in a well-publicised huff when his advice wasn’t followed to the letter. Cannabis, he insisted, was less dangerous than either tobacco or alcohol and its use, if not exactly encouraged, should be regarded tolerantly. If either tobacco or alcohol were newly invented I have little doubt that they would be treated as dangerous drugs…..but they’re not. Alcohol has been with us from the beginning of time. I am told that there is no human society so primitive as to have failed to find a way of producing it!

Tobacco has been in use in Europe since it was brought back from America in the 16th Century. It is only relatively recently that we have realized quite how dangerous it is. Since then successive governments have done their very best, short of actually banning it, to discourage its use.

The function of a scientific adviser is to advise. It is the elected politicians who have to make the decisions and they are, quite rightly, guided by other considerations than purely scientific ones. Politics, it has been said, is the art of the possible. A columnist in the East Anglian Daily Times recently wrote that he had three friends ‘with adult sons with schizophrenia after teenage kicks with cannabis. One has been in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years, another is periodically sectioned (once after having set fire to the family home) and the third lives with his parents on a strict regime of medication’. Try telling those parents that cannabis is less dangerous than this that or the other substance that is freely available!

The other occasion has been the vilification that Gordon Brown has received because of a couple of human errors in a letter of condolence to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. I was amazed and rather touched to learn that the Prime Minister sends individual hand-written letters to the next-of-kin of such victims of the war. Did Tony Blair? Did Margaret Thatcher?

The mother in question was a Mrs Janes. I’d be very surprised if this lady’s name isn’t fairly frequently misspelled, either because it has been misheard or, with typed correspondence, because the ‘m’ key has been tapped by accident instead of the ‘n’. As for the letter having a hand-written correction – I’d have taken that as evidence that it was actually hand-written by the Prime Minister, and not some clever facsimile produced by the wonders of modern technology!

I certainly wouldn’t criticise Mrs Janes for complaining. Had I been in her position I’d have been so full of grief and anger that I’d have raged at anyone who had the misfortune to cross my path. What was beneath contempt was the Sun’s exploitation of Mrs Janes’ grief and anger for its own miserable propaganda purposes!

A Correspondent in Mexico

Many regular readers of this blog will already know that I have a Flickr site www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea on which there are over 300 of my photographs, many family pictures but others of general and historical interest. This has brought me some interesting correspondents, including two Canadian distant cousins whom I hadn’t known existed, and a fundamentalist and ‘far-right’ Baptist truck-driver from America’s ‘deep south’ with whom I have had interesting (if inconclusive!) theological and political discussions.

The latest, and among the most interesting, of my email correspondents has been a lady from Mexico City, seeking permission to use one of my Flickr photos. She is Giulianna Laurent and is obviously deeply involved with the museum of Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City. This is what she wrote:

‘Memoria y Tolerancia (Memory and Tolerance) is a non-profit organisation with the mission to promote tolerance through the historical remembrance of genocides (Holocaust, Armenia, Guatemala, Former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur).

From its inception, Memoria y Tolerancia projected a museum and educational center in Mexico City, keeping in mind that the best tools for the creation of awareness are learning and education.

I am working in the Yugoslavia permanent exhibition of the museum and I saw a picture of Bosnia posted on your page that we’ll like to expose.

The picture is the following:
http//www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea/418109226/

I want to ask your permission to use the picture only inside the museum. If you agree please let me know. Thanks, Giulianna Laurent, Memoria y Tolerancia A.C.

Below is the picture that Giulianna wanted to use:

It is of the old Turkish pack-horse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, and was taken during Heather’s and my visit there with our motor-caravan in 1980. It was the year of Marshal Tito’s death and Yugoslavia was still one country, to all appearances a happily multi-ethnic and multifaith one. When we took the picture, young Bosnians were demonstrating their machismo by diving from the apex of the bridge into the fast-flowing water of the river below!

Within a year or two of our visit the bridge had been destroyed by artillery bombardment during Yugoslavia’s bloody civil war. The Serbs are usually depicted as the villains in that conflict, but the destruction of the bridge, and the violent deaths of hundreds of men, women and children in the Mostar area was the result of conflict between Croats and Muslims (Serbs and/or Croats whose ancestors had converted to Islam during the many years of Turkish occupation).

The museum of Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City is furthering a cause that I would wish to support. I willingly gave permission for the picture to be used in any way that Giulianna wished, and told her that I would like to hear more about the museum’s progress. In expressing her thanks she attached a photo of it. Here it is. It is certainly impressive!

In a further email I drew her attention to this blog-spot. I felt that last week’s blog, in which I suggested a world-wide ‘White Poppy Day’ in which the millions of civilian victims of conflict could be remembered, and funds raised for the support of survivors, might be of interest to her and her colleagues

It’s not what you say…..it’s the way that you say it,

That’s what causes offence. This thought, hardly a new one, came back to me with extra force recently.

Have you been watching Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain? In the first episode, dealing with the Edwardian age and Edwardian moral values, Andrew Marr recounted the occasion on which Marie Lloyd, a very popular Music Hall performer, was questioned by MPs about the bawdiness and explicit sexual content of some of the songs for which she was well-known.

Marie Lloyd gave a little demonstration. With a straight face and the demeanour of a vicar’s daughter singing at an evening gathering of her father’s parishioners, she sang to the committee a couple of her most popular songs full of outrageous double entendre. Not an eyebrow was raised.

She then sang ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, a romantic poem by eminent Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson that had been set to music. It was a song with which members of the committee would all have been familiar. They may well have heard their own daughters or wives sing it to their guests after dinner. Marie Lloyd though, sang it with winks, gestures and knowing smiles that had the worthy MPs writhing with embarrassment. It’s not what she sang but the way that she sang it!

It made me think of once-harmless words that are now banned because they might possibly cause offence. Newcomers to Essex Police, for instance, have recently been advised that they should never use ‘black’ in a negative context such as ‘black mark’, ‘black sheep’, ‘blacken’ someone’s character, for instance, though ‘blackboard’ and ‘black and white’ referring to newsprint, are OK.

I would ask the (I feel fairly confident) white people who make these rules if they take offence when a government report is said to be a ‘whitewash’, when someone is described as ‘showing the white flag’ or of being ‘white with fear’, or indeed with the Biblical reference to hypocrites as 'whited sepulcres' If not, isn’t it patronising and insulting, racist even, to assume that someone with a skin colour different from their own must necessarily be more ready to take offence?

What the world of 2009 badly needs is courtesy (it used to be called ‘common politeness’) in our dealings with one another, whatever may be our skin colour. Political correctness is a very, very poor substitute.

A well-deserved honour

I was very pleased to learn that Clacton’s seafront gardens and west greensward have been awarded the Green Flag of excellence by the Keep Britain Tidy organisation. The gardens had been demonstrated to be welcoming, healthy, safe, secure and well-managed. It took me back to the days when Tendring had its own direct labour gardening department that regularly displayed, and won the top prizes, at county and district agricultural and horticultural shows.
Clacton-on-Sea's clifftop Memorial Garden

Late News – from Mexico City!

As I was about to post this blog I received a further email from my new friend in Mexico City who is deeply involved with the nearing-completion Museum of Memoria y Tolerancia there. Here is what she writes:

Hello Ernest,

I have read your blog and your proposal about the white poppy. I think it is a great idea and it will make an awareness in all civilian people about the innocence of the victims. Through which organisation do you propose that the money will be given to civilian victims??

The museum includes a part called ‘Tolerance’ where we invite the visitor to question the value of tolerance and diversity. I think it will be a good idea to promote your white poppy project there. I will let you know when the museum opens, it will be around June 2010 to see what we can do.

Kind regards,

Giulianna

I have to confess that I hadn’t even thought of the distribution of the proceeds. I suppose probably the Red Cross/Red Crescent. Then there is Christian Aid – if they could get together with equivalent organisations of other world faiths.