Tendring Topics…….on line

A Glimpse into the future?

The above news cutting from a German regional newspaper was sent to me by a friend living in the Black Forest area. It shows a ten-years-older (and wiser) German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, commenting in 2020 on the failure of the Copenhagn Climate-Change Conference to come to a satisfactory concluson. It is doubly prophetic since the newspaper is dated 4th December, before he Conference had even begun!

The print of the caption is, I regret, too small to read on this blog. My ability to read German is distinctly limited. However I have managed to work out that it is headed 'Late Repentance' and goes on to say that this is one of the posters that greeted Angel Merkel, and other national leaders when they arrived at Copenhagen airport for the Conference. It was part of a Greenpeace Poster campaign.

I don't really think that Chancellor Angela Merkel (or Prime Minister Gordon Brown) need be repentant about their roles at Copenhagen, except perhaps that, unlike Greenpeace, neither of them had foreseen inevitable failure.

A Lucky Year?

To ethnic Chinese, ‘eight’ is a lucky number. That, so I am told, is why they were so keen to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Ariel, my elder grandson’s Taiwanese girl-friend was convinced that the year that is coming to an end would be an extremely fortunate one for me. It was the year of my 88th birthday and my house number is also 88!

Myself and Ariel, Grandson Chris’ Taiwanese girlfriend

Actually, I often feel that I have been blest by good luck all my life. No, I have never won the lottery…..but as I have never bought a lottery ticket that is hardly surprising. Over and over again though my life has been punctuated by extraordinary coincidences, and circumstances that seemed to be disasters, but have turned out to be blessings in disguise.

Right -grandson Nick and Romy, his Belgian girlfriend.

2009 isn’t quite over yet, but yes, despite the recession it has so far it has been a good one for me. I had an enjoyable Easter, attending with my daughter-in-law a wonderful Choral Eucharist in Southwark Cathedral that was televised and transmitted on BBC tv. To celebrate my 88 years I visited Brussels with my son and daughter-in-law, to see my grandson Nick who lives and works there. I was introduced to his girl-friend….a charming young lady whose native tongue is French but who also speaks fluent, and virtually unaccented, English. Returning to England for the actual birthday, my son, daughter-in-law and I had a celebratory meal at the very posh Essex pub run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the well-known tv chef.

Left:Me on my 88th birthday.

Right: Jo

AKA Miss Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc.

Later in the year my other son and daughter-in-law drove me Sheffield for a weekend to spend time with my granddaughter, an M.A., B.Sc., of whom I am immensely proud. Still in her mid-twenties she works as a social worker attached to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. We drove out into the Peak District and, for the first time in my life, I was able to see traditional Derbyshire ‘well dressing’.

In July I was able to return to Zittau in Germany for my third (and, I think, final) time since the end of World War II. It was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the town’s restored Lenten Veil (in the 500 year history of which I am believed to have played a tiny part) in its own museum/church of the Holy Cross. Grandson Nick organised the visit and accompanied me. This time I travelled by rail, from London to Brussels by Eurostar and then, with Nick, from Brussels to Dresden with just one change of train at Frankfurt. By booking well in advance we travelled first class at second class prices and, believe me, first class on a German long-distance train really is first class!

Nick drove me from Dresden to Zittau, sixty-odd miles, in a pre-arranged hired car. It was a great pleasure to meet again my friends Dr Volker Dudeck and his wife Julia, and Ingrid Zeibig and her family, including her little niece Maja, now almost three! This time I managed to get to the summit of Mount Oybin, where I had helped take the heavy cases containing the famous Lenten Veil, in February 1945.

From the Left: Ingrid Zeibig, Maja, Ingrid’s mother Frau Ingrid Kulke, Ingrid’s sister-in-law Kornelia (Konnie) and brother Andreas. Konnie’s second baby was born in September; a boy, Tom Friedrich, a brother for Maja.

The view from the summit of Mount Oybin the far distance, swathed in mist, is the town of Zittau.

To my great surprise and pleasure, I was also given by Dr Dudeck proof copies of a long article of mine entitled ‘Return to Zittau’. It had been translated into German and published as a glossy booklet, illustrated with photographs taken locally, and pictures culled from my Flickr web site, www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea More copies of this booklet have since been published and are on sale in the tourist shop at 5€, profits going to the upkeep of the Lenten Veil, which has recently had its 300,000th visitor (an English tourist!) in the ten years that it has been on public display.

Inspired by the German booklet, I am self-publishing a similar booklet entitled ‘Zittau…..and I’ Incorporating my original Return to Zittau’, but with a great deal of additional material and half a dozen or so photographic illustrations. I am having 150 copies printed for family and friends. The typescript has gone to the printer and I hope to have them before the end of January..

Yes, it has been a good year, though I don’t think that ‘all the eights’ has had a great deal to do with it. Those who read this blog a year ago may remember that my New Year Resolution was to ‘count my blessings, count them one by one’. Two thousand-and-nine certainly gave me many to count. As, in two thousand-and-ten I shall, if I am still around, be entering my ninetieth year, I ought perhaps to hope that it will be a little less action-packed!

‘Incapable of running a bath!’……..yet the best in Essex!

It was, of course, our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell who claimed that the previous ‘Clacton First’, non-Conservative coalition administration of Tendring Council, was incapable of running a bath. Not everyone however regards him as the greatest living authority on local and world affairs. Rather more reliable is the Government’s Independent Audit Commission which awarded the Council three out of four for performance, and declared it not only to be the best local authority in Essex, but in the top twenty-five of the two hundred plus local authorities in the country! I wonder what Mr Carswell, who is perhaps best known as a climate change sceptic, and for his purchase (at public expense) of ‘a love seat’ and a £60 kettle for his second home in Thorpe-le-Soken, has to say about all the other Essex authorities. Unlike Tendring Council, several of them invested their tax-payers’ money in high-interest-earning banks in Iceland…..and are now regretting it!

Most of the data on which the Audit Commission’s report was based was garnered during the previous non-Conservative administration of which Mr Carswell was so scathing. Possibly that is why the reaction of the present Council leader, Mr Neil Stock has been distinctly low-key. He praises the Council’s staff (not the Council!) for their hard work but says that the Audit Commission has given a loud and clear message that they still have some serious concerns. The report had pointed out that the council’s public image was poor, with less than half of local people surveyed expressing satisfaction with the way it ran things.

He added encouragingly that the report said that Tendring had ‘a firm foundation for future improvement’ (under Mr Stock’s new Conservative administration of course!)

There are, of course, several reasons why Tendring Council has a poor public image. The current in-fighting between the two, almost equal, opposing Parties doesn’t help. Then again many people imagine that all public services are the responsibility of the district council. Mobility scooter users like myself for instance, are particularly conscious of the atrocious state of many of the pavements away from the town centre. How many, I wonder, realize that these are the responsibility of the Conservative County Council (who received only an ‘adequate’ rating from the Audit Commission) to whom the greater part of our Council Tax is paid. I think that many of Tendring Council’s services, including, for instance the refuse collection and recycling collection services and the street cleansing service, that are second to none.

Then again, for both the local and national press, local government disasters provide much more attractive stories than local government triumphs. The news story about the Audit Commission’s findings is to be found only at the bottom of Page 7 of the Clacton Gazette of 17th December, with the headline, ‘Council staff earn a pat on the back’. I suggest that had Tendring been rated the worst, instead of the best, local authority in Essex, the story would have been on the front page with some such headline as ‘Tendring First’ Council comes Last! and a story about how the new administration was doing its best to clear up the mess left by its predecessor.

Week 52.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Christmas!

I hope that everyone (anyone!) who reads this blog will have a very Happy Christmas and that their New Year will be one of peace and hope. It will not be a very happy one for many people – for the bereaved and lonely for instance (and the kindness and sympathy of friends and relatives may only make that bereavement and loneliness seem even harder to bear!), those rendered homeless or jobless by the recession, and those who know that for any other reason, this Christmas will be a pale shadow of Christmases past.

Those who wish to denigrate the Christian message often point out that the birth of Jesus, if it occurred at all, almost certainly didn’t take place ‘in the bleak midwinter’ and that our Christmas festival is simply an adaptation of much more ancient pagan festivals, Yule for instance in northern Europe and Saturnalia within the Roman Empire.

I have always felt that that supports, rather than impedes, the Christian message. No one knows exactly when in the year Jesus Christ was born. What could be more appropriate though, than to celebrate the advent of the Light of the World just a few days after the shortest day and longest night………when pagans were celebrating the very first indications that the world’s plunge into darkness had halted? The sun was once again returning to restore life and light to all creation. C.S.Lewis, author of the Narnia books, and great Christian scholar, always maintained that God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ was the fulfilment of the pagan religions of Europe as well as that of the people of Israel.

The Nativity story, even if not all historical fact, surely tells us a great deal about the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He was born to a working-class girl whose home was in one of the few places in the Holy Land that don’t even get a mention in the Old Testament. By many of his contemporaries his parentage would have been considered dubious. At the time of his birth his parents were temporarily homeless, taking shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’, with a manger having to serve as a cradle for the baby.

The first people to be told of his birth were neither wealthy and powerful nor wise and pious. They were neither princes nor priests, neither prophets nor scholars, but farm labourers looking after sheep on a hillside. The first people to bring him gifts were not even his own compatriots but Gentiles who would have been considered to be among the ‘heathen’ by his fellow-countrymen.

Finally, very shortly after his birth, his parents had to flee with him for their lives, to become asylum seekers in a heathen foreign land. Christ’s Nativity and its aftermath is a theme that resonates throughout the history of mankind, today no less than at any time in the past! If part of it is mythical it surely is a magnificent myth, unequalled I believe, in any other culture.

One of the late Sir John Betjeman’s lesser-known poems is Advent 1955. It discusses the way in which we celebrate Christmas, comparing greetings and presents given with those received, and possibly mentally pricing both.

It concludes with the following lines:

The time draws near the birth of Christ,
A present that can not be priced,
Given two thousand years ago.
And if God had not given so,
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the Manger.

The God revealed to us through Christ’s nativity, life, death and resurrection is not ‘a distant stranger’. He is to be seen in the loving mother, the baby in the cot, the workman at his lathe, tending his sheep or, nowadays, bending over his lap-top, the suffering victim on the cross and in the modern ‘interrogation cell’…….and in the risen Christ triumphant over evil and over death.

Iraq – Before and After

It may seem inappropriate, even sacrilegious, to consider those under scrutiny in connection with the Public Enquiry into the War in Iraq at the same time as our celebration of Christ’s incarnation. However our God is one, ‘to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid’ and one of the titles of the Risen Christ is ‘Prince of Peace’.

Possibly to pre-empt the questioning to which he will undoubtedly be subjected at the Public Enquiry in the New Year, Tony Blair who, as Prime Minister, led us into that war, has been talking to national tv about his motivation. This, it appears, was not the threat posed to Britain by Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as we may have imagined, but the need for ‘regime change’. Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and, even had he known that there were no WMDs, our Prime Minister would have found some other justification for invasion!

That, I must say, is very frank. Just think. There was no need for that ‘dodgy dossier’ that was said to establish, beyond a shadow of doubt, the existence of these terrible weapons. There was no need for the ‘leaked intelligence’ that gave rise to scare headlines about ‘our boys in Cyprus’ being in danger from them. All Mr Blair had to do was to persuade the rest of us that getting rid of Saddam would amply justify the certain loss of scores of British and American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi ones, not to mention the laying waste of Iraq’s cities and destruction of its infrastructure.

Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, but was not the only such ruler in the Middle East. In some ways his government was an enlightened one. There was a substantial and influential Christian minority that worshipped regularly and in safety. Where are they and their churches now that Iraq has been ‘freed’? Where are they in the lands of our Middle Eastern allies? Women in Iraq under Saddam enjoyed a freedom and the ability to develop their potential that their counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries would (and often do!) die for.

Whatever Mr Blair may have known and kept to himself, he won that vote for war in the House of Commons for no other reason than that he had persuaded sufficient of its members that Saddam Hussein did possess terrible weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. Without having done that he would have, and should have, lost the vote.

I believe moreover that Messrs Blair and Bush were fairly confident that there were no such weapons. Had they not been, they would surely never have allowed that relatively leisurely build-up of troops, weapons and war supplies just over the Iraq border in Kuwait. Saddam would only have had to wait until the build-up reached a critical point, and then destroyed the lot with his WMDs!

I am more than ever proud of the fact that my sons, grandsons, wives and girlfriends were all part of the million strong march that protested in vain against the war through the streets of London. I only wish that I had been physically capable of joining them!

The Christmas Crib

To get away, if only momentarily, from the rather grubby world of the 21st Century, here’s the Christmas crib at St. James Anglican Church Clacton-on-Sea, taken at Christmas time last year. Similar cribs will appear on Christmas Eve in tens of thousands of Christian churches world-wide, to remind worshippers that Christmas is not about illuminations, Christmas cards, over indulgence in food and drink, or even about Santa Claus. At its heart is the story of a temporarily homeless couple who found shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’ where a young mother gave birth to a baby who was the ‘Light of the World’.

‘And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth’
St. John 1.14

Week 51.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

A Third Millennium Nativity!

I hadn’t been to a live play in a theatre for many years. I was determined though to see CHRISTMAS NOW (a Play for our time) at Clacton’s West Cliff Theatre on 4th and 5th December. Sponsored by 'Churches Together in Clacton', it was proclaimed to be a Nativity Play of the here and now…..its leading characters contemporary young people and something like half its action taking place in Clacton-on-Sea! What’s more, I knew both the producer and the Director. The former was Susan Wiggins, an active member of St. James’s Anglican Church and the latter, Rev. Roger Parsons, the one-time Minister of Trinity Methodist church.

During his time with Trinity Methodist Church Roger Parsons had been responsible for several very successful musical productions there. I recall once referring to him in Tendring Topics (in print) as Clacton’s Rogers and Hammerstein! I was sure that CHRISTMAS NOW, would be a great success, and so it was. It was a truly ecumenical event. I went to the Saturday matinee performance with a small party of Quakers but it was an extra pleasure for me to encounter personal friends from St. James’, from Christ Church URC Church and from Trinity Methodist Church. The theatre was well filled as, so I am informed, it was for the other three performances.

The plot followed that of the original Nativity Story (with a ‘voice from outer space’ – actually that of Fr. Anthony Spooner of St James – reading the appropriate passages from the King James Bible), but Mary was Maria, a waitress in a far-from-posh café in a big city and Joseph an out of work young immigrant, a carpenter of course, finding difficulty in getting a job because he was ‘a foreigner’.

The actual birth took place in a storeroom behind a take-away in Clacton-on-Sea. Maria and Joseph had been lured here with a false promise of a job and accommodation by a crooked property developer (the equivalent of King Herod). ‘The shepherds’ were contract cleaners and ‘the Magi’ three people of different talent from America, Eurasia and Africa. It must be said that the actor who stole the show at the end was a real, live baby (I believe it was a little girl) who, acting the baby Jesus, was wheeled onto the stage in a baby-buggy. I know from personal experience that babies can be pretty unpredictable. This one though might have read the line from Away in a Manger, ‘Little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes’, because she put on a superb performance, smiling, gurgling happily, playing with a ball of wool and, so it appeared, waving to the audience. Could she possibly have managed it for all four performances?

It was a very memorable, enjoyable, and thought-provoking, production.

Afterthoughts

Christmas Now was, as I said, thought provoking. What, I wondered, would really happen if a twenty-first century teenage girl from a church-going working class family experienced an angelic visitation and, immediately after, discovered that she was pregnant? Christmas Now didn’t have an unequivocally ‘happy ending’, but I have an idea that ‘in real life’ the outcome might well have been even more disquieting.

The modern Mary would confide in her parents, who would find it impossible to believe her when she assured them that neither her boyfriend, nor any other man, was responsible. Being practising Christians though, they would promise to stand by her and help her with her expected baby. As loving and concerned parents, they would also insist that she should be seen by a psychiatrist (‘She never has lied to us before. She must surely be delusional’) a gynaecologist and an obstetrician. I can imagine that, after thorough examination and long consultations with both Mary and her parents, these experienced professionals might issue a statement on the following lines:

We have interviewed and thoroughly examined Patient M. (her name cannot be revealed for legal reasons) and we have confirmed that she is, as she has always maintained, a virgin. She cannot therefore possibly be pregnant, as she believes she is. We have come to the conclusion that changes taking place within her uterus are symptomatic of a very rare (though probably not unique) psycho-gynaecological condition producing physical indications of pregnancy. Even more serious is its psychological effect, its victims being subject to convincing delusions and hallucinations. The experience of Patient M clearly demonstrates the power and persistence of these.

Fortunately this patient has presented at a very early stage. We are unanimously of the opinion that a surgical hysterectomy carried out without delay could provide a complete cure and make it possible for Patient M. to live a perfectly normal life. She would not, of course, be able to experience maternity, but that would surely be a small price to pay for being freed from a crippling and probably fatal condition.

This straightforward surgical procedure normally requires patient consent. Patient M. however is just over 18 years of age and resolutely refuses to sign the consent form, insisting that she is pregnant. This refusal is symptomatic of her condition and was to be expected. It might well have been over-ridden were it not for the fact that her parents and boyfriend, who drew our attention to Patient M’s condition in the first instance, are now firmly backing her refusal.

We hope that a positive decision on this issue will be made in time to save Patient M’s life and sanity.

If I were making a modern nativity play out of all the above (which I am quite incapable of doing) I think that I would leave it at that point and let the individual members of the audience go home to think about it and make up their own minds about probable subsequent events.

Would Mary weaken? Would the parents and the boyfriend yield to pressure from the experts? Is it possible that the medical experts would, to quote our Quaker 'Advices and Queries', ‘consider the possibility that they might be mistaken’? or…….. could they possibly not be mistaken, but absolutely right in their assessment of the situation? If the case went to Court what would be the likely outcome?

That would be something to discuss over the sherry and mince pies!

Essex’s Telecare Home Safety Service

When, a few weeks ago, I fell over, broke my glasses and gave myself the blackest of black eyes, I didn’t suffer serious or long lasting injury. My black eye has long since faded. I have new glasses and have abandoned the bifocals that I think may have contributed to my accident. I am now one of those irritating old men who never seem to have ‘the right pair of glasses’ with them!
It did make me think though. I am definitely less steady on my feet than I once was. If I fall, even if I am completely uninjured, I find it impossible to get up again without help. Out of doors there is usually someone available to help. I never (well hardly ever!) go out without my mobile phone for use in an emergency.

Indoors though, a fall could have a very different outcome. If I were uninjured I might be able to crawl to a piece of fixed furniture and laboriously pull myself up, or at least reach a phone to summon help. If I twisted an ankle or broke a limb, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I am fortunate in having caring and attentive neighbours, but it would obviously be hours at least, before they realized anything was amiss.

'Tendring Careline' came to mind. They, as I knew, install a special phone in the homes of their members, who are issued with a pendant alarm button to hang round their necks at all times. Provided that the wearer is within 50 metres, indoors or out, of the phone, pressing the red button raises an immediate alarm at Careline’s HQ. It also activates a loud-speaker system enabling the wearer to communicate with that HQ. It is a tried-and-true system from which hundreds of elderly and/or disabled Tendring residents have benefited.

I was on the point of phoning them when I learned that Essex County Council is currently offering a more comprehensive alarm system that, for me at any rate, seemed to offer positive advantages over the more local one. They have available no less than six ‘telecare’ sensors that cover virtually any possible emergency in the home. These are, I have little doubt, all part of an overall plan to keep us oldies in our own homes for as long as possible, rather than clogging up spaces in a care or nursing home.

There is the Personal Alarm that appears to be much the same as is offered by Tendring Careline. Also available is a ‘Bogus Caller Button’, fitted unobtrusively near the front door, enabling the householder to summon assistance when a dubious stranger requests entry, Smoke Alarms (I already have them fitted), a Flood Detector (never a problem in my part of Clacton), a Movement Detector (a kind of ‘burglar alarm’ that can detect the presence of an intruder and raise the alarm) and a Fall Detector which is said to detect serious falls and alert the monitoring centre.

What makes the County Council’s service of particular interest to me, and to my contemporaries, is that these systems are available on a twelve month free trial to all Essex Residents aged eighty-five and over (those living within the unitary authority areas of Southend and Thurrock are, of course, excluded).


I would, I think, only be interested in the Personal Alarm, though I ought perhaps also to find out a bit more about the Fall Detector. I have already written off asking for further details. ‘A twelve months free trial!’ Goodness, at eighty-eight that’s very likely as long as I shall need it!

Particularly if you are elderly and living alone, or with a disabled husband or wife, and especially if you are eighty-five or over, do make further enquiries. It is a service you have paid for with your Council Tax. Make the most of it. What have you got to lose?

Leaflets about the service are available at Public Libraries. To learn more, write to Essex County Council (Telecare), FREEPOST CL3636, County Hall, Chelmsford, CM1 1XZ or phone 0845 603 7630 (quoting 857) If you are on-line, contact www.essex.gov.uk/telecare I understand that they are prepared to send a speaker if requested, to explain the service to voluntary organisations.

I’ll keep blog readers informed of developments in response to my own enquiry.

Why not support Shopmobility?

Tendring Council is one of fifty local authorities throughout the country that have received a windfall grant of £52,000 ‘to support their high streets and town centres during the recession’.

The Council (or, I suppose, its inner ‘Cabinet’) is considering how best so spend it to create the maximum impact. One scheme they have in mind is for the Council to acquire the leases of boarded-up shops ‘and offer attractive rates to start-up businesses and entrepreneurs to give them a foot on the ladder’. It overlooks the fact that the reason the shops are boarded up is that their previous owners couldn’t attract enough customers to stay in business. Why should ‘start-up businesses and entrepreneurs’ succeed where experienced shop-keepers have failed. In any case, boarded up shops aren’t really very conspicuous in Clacton’s High Street and Town Centre since occupiers have been found for both the Woolworth and the Co-op sites.

I think that by far the best use for that unexpected £52,000 windfall would be to keep Clacton and Tendring Shopmobility afloat. It is a charitable enterprise that has the sole purpose of enabling Tendring residents with mobility problems to visit surviving shops in the High Street and town centre and help to keep them alive. It was for just such a purpose that the money was entrusted to Tendring Council!

Without the cash injection that Shopmobility had every reason to expect from the Council, this vital service, both to town centre shops and to the elderly and disabled, will close down on 31st December and its stock of electric mobility scooters, wheel chairs and so on will all be sold off early in the New Year.

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Christmas is coming!

Christmas is coming……..and as sure as that there will be Carols from Kings and the Queen’s televised Christmas message, there will come a headline-grabbing little lecture calculated to dampen down and spoil the faith and joy of others. Sadly, it is often delivered by a no doubt well-meaning cleric.

This year, it is the Bishop of Croydon (did you know that there was one?) who, it seems, dislikes our traditional Christmas carols. Many of these, he says are the product of Victorian sentimentality and nothing to do with God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. Particularly the subjects of Episcopal displeasure are two of the best known and, I think, most loved of carols; ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘O come, all ye faithful’.

The lines in ‘Away in a manger’ to which the Bishop takes exception are, ‘The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes’. The point is presumably that the Church has always taught that Jesus was wholly human as well as wholly divine and that, as a human baby, he would have woken up crying. Perhaps …. .but if a baby is warm, full of milk and comfortable, and wakes to hear the gentle lowing of cattle, he may well remain silent on waking. Perhaps the Bishop has had an unfortunate experience of parenthood, but human babies really don’t cry all the time.

There are actually two lines of that carol that do make me feel uneasy. ‘I love thee, Lord Jesus look down from the sky, and stay by my side until morning is nigh’. I tell myself though that it is a carol intended for children. It is difficult enough for an adult to understand that Jesus can be ever-present while being outside time and space as we know them. ‘Above the sky’, is however a metaphor easily understood by children.

‘O come all ye faithful’ with its echoes of the Nicene Creed is surely the most magnificent of all the carols, and the one with which every carol service should end. The Bishop says it should be ‘O come all ye faithless’. I think he means that our message should be to those outside the Church. And so it should be, all through the year. Surely though, on the anniversary of the day that ‘the Word was made flesh’, if on no other, the faithful are allowed to be ‘joyful and triumphant’!

There are plenty of other hymns that do have lines that set my teeth on edge. How about ‘sufficient is thine arm alone and our defence is sure’, sung with gusto at an Army Church Parade, 'Take my silver and my gold, not a mite will I withhold’, sung by a comfortably-off middle-class congregation and ‘The vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus his pardon receives'? Surely there must be contrition as well as belief. St. James in his Epistle says ‘the devils also believe – and tremble!’

Lord Bishop, do have a look through the rest of the hymnbook by all means, but please leave our Christmas carols alone!

A Fateful Decision

I was delighted when Barak Obama was elected as President of the US. I hope that it wasn’t simply because he wasn’t George W. Bush. It was obvious though that he was going to have a fight on his hands in a country where any good work carried out by a public authority is liable to be denounced as ‘communism’!

Since his election he hasn’t disappointed, and he has certainly had to fight every inch of the way. He has, for instance, made it clear that (unlike George W. Bush – not to mention our own MP, Mr Douglas Carswell!) Mr Obama does accept the threat from global warming and humankind’s responsibility for this danger. He is, in fact, attending the Conference of World Leaders and leading scientists that opened in Copenhagen this week to discuss climate change and how best to combat it.

He has ordered the dismantling of the rocket sites in central Europe that the Russians regarded as a threat (well, wouldn’t the Americans have regarded Russian, or Chinese rockets sited in Canada or Mexico as something of a threat?). At home he is desperately trying, despite ferocious opposition, to ensure proper health care for the millions of US citizens who simply can’t afford adequate insurance cover.

Is he making another wise decision in deciding to send another 30,000 US troops to Aghanistan, or is it one that he will regret for the rest of his political life? The time that he took to consider this issue suggests that he is well aware of the possibility of disaster. Generals commanding armies stalemated by their enemies are always confident that, if only they had more troops and equipment, they could make one final push and sweep on to victory. They are not always right though!

Supposing the Taleban are defeated and their fighters simply disappear from the scene? No doubt their leaders are well known and may well be captured or killed. There must be hundreds of rank and file though. Most of them could just disappear among the Indian sub-continent's teeming millions and concentrate on terrorist acts there and elsewhere. They could, of course, reappear in Afghanistan when the Brits and Americans decided that they had won and withdrew their troops.

We are desperately trying to transform the Afghan government’s army into a force that can stand up to and defeat the Taleban without our help. Are we absolutely sure that they will want to? We gave covert financial and practical support to the ‘gallant Mojihadin’ in their guerrilla war against the Soviets only to see them transform themselves into ‘fanatical insurgents’, every bit as determined to get rid of us as they were the Russians. The western trained Afghan policeman who turned his weapon against his trainers, and the Muslim medical officer, who in the USA, is accused of suddenly murdering his comrades, could be straws in the wind.

Why are our forces in Afghanistan? Is it to introduce the Afghans to the joys of freedom and democracy; to encourage the education of girls and to ensure justice for women; to encourage religious tolerance? Hardly. It is surely to protect ‘the West’ from terrorist attacks like those in New York, London and Madrid.

I think it likely that the best way to do that might be to withdraw our troops completely from every Muslim country. That is what both extremist and moderate Muslims would like us to do. It would, at a stroke, remove a factor that turns ‘moderates’ into ‘extremists’ and feeds Al Quaida with a constant trickle of enthusiastic recruits. It would release NATO troops for their job of defending the peace of Britain and Mainland Europe.

A Question of Mobility

I have remarked before that although I feel far from comfortable with the zeitgeist of the 21st century, I am more than thankful for the many twenty-first century blessings that help to make life worth living, even in old age. None of my family lives very near and I would have little contact with them were it not for the telephone (particularly perhaps the mobile phone), my laptop and the Internet. And, of course, my sons living in London both have fast cars with which they come to see me regularly. Failing eyesight makes me less inclined to read than I once was (though oddly enough, using my laptop doesn’t seem to tire my eyes!) but radio, television, a video tape recorder and a DVD Player make good the deficiency

I think though, that the modern convenience that makes the biggest difference in my life is my electric mobility scooter, my ‘iron horse’. Luckily I have a shed large enough to house it, to which a kind neighbour has taken an electricity supply so that I am able to keep its batteries charged. I use it almost every day…..for shopping, for going to the Post Office, to Church and to the Quaker Meeting, for keeping doctor’s or optician’s appointments, for visiting friends and, on occasion, for going to the seafront for a breath of fresh air.

As the months pass I find myself less and less able to walk. Were it not for my ‘iron horse’ I would be totally housebound, able to leave home only with a taxi or when someone was able to give me a lift in his or her car. My electric scooter gives me freedom and mobility. It is the possession that I would be least willing to give up.

For all of those reasons I was totally shocked when I read in the Clacton Gazette that lack of funding is compelling Clacton and Tendring Shopmobility, a charity that has served local elderly and disabled local people for over a decade and a half, to close down for good on New Year’s Eve.

Shopmobility, based in Clacton’s Pier Avenue, rents out mobility scooters to those who need them for short periods at cut-price rates. It has provided a first class service to people like myself who are unable to purchase a scooter of their own (they are quite expensive!) or who would have nowhere to store it if they did purchase one. Last year they rented out scooters no less than 4,000 times and their membership almost trebled!

Shopmobility is staffed by volunteers but it does cost £45,000 a year to run. Earlier this year its management applied for lottery funding which would have secured its future for five years, but they were unsuccessful. Nor would Tendring Council help them despite the fact that the charity expects to be in a position to support itself within two years.

Shopmobility’s manager, Julie Hewes-Gardner, says, ‘People are distraught. Many will now be housebound. They won’t be able to get out to the shops and banks, or to socialise’.

I wonder on what Tendring Council is spending our money that is more important than brightening the lives of some of Clacton’s least privileged and most vulnerable residents? It is tempting to denounce them as Scrooges but that is hardly fair on Ebenezer Scrooge. He did, you’ll recall, mend his ways just in time for Christmas. There’s little sign of the Council doing anything of the sort.

Bankers’ Bonuses

Those with brilliant brains at the top of the Banking World will, so they say, desert us and sell their brilliance elsewhere if they do not receive their accustomed astronomical ‘bonuses’ on top of their already more-than-generous salaries.

I think that the instant reaction of most ordinary people is ‘let them go – and good riddance. If they are that brilliant, how is it that we had to bail them out with millions of pounds of our money?’

I think though that the threat raises a more fundamental issue. Most people whose work demands skill and experience, work primarily because they enjoy exercising those qualities. The only skill that I have ever possessed is that of stringing words together to produce the kind of material that I hope others enjoy reading. It was very nice when I was paid for doing so. Nowadays, I am not. My income is however sufficient for my quite-modest needs and I exercise my writing skills, in producing this weekly blog for instance, because doing so gives me satisfaction and pleasure.

Can it be that those whose skill lies in the manipulation of finance, come to believe that this is life’s only reality, and that work has no purpose or meaning beyond the acquisition of more and more money, from whatever source it may come? If so, I feel truly sorry for them. Despite their great wealth they are poverty-stricken indeed!