Tendring Topics……on line

Essex Social Workers

It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that Social Workers are concerned only with those at the extreme ends of their lives…..with the very young and with the very old. However I have little doubt that it is with these two groups that they have most problems and find themselves spending most of their working time.

My own experience has, naturally enough, been with their concern for the old. When, at the age of eighty, my wife was discharged from Clacton Hospital disabled, after having fallen and broken a hip six or seven weeks earlier, I was her sole carer. I was eighty-three myself so I was mildly surprised, and perhaps a little relieved, that no Social Worker looked in to see how I was getting on, to find out what support I might need and to tell me what I was doing wrong.

I was sometimes having trouble parking my car in the road immediately outside my bungalow – and my driveway was much too narrow for me to get my wife’s wheelchair beside the passenger seat so that I could get her into and out of the car. I phoned social services asking if I could have a ‘disabled parking’ notice on the road. I already had a narrow driveway with a dropped kerb and it would be necessary only to extend the width of that vehicle access by two or three feet to achieve this. I expected to get a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but instead I was told that my wife would have to be ‘assessed’ and that that would be done in about three months time!

It didn’t actually take quite as long as that. A very pleasant lady visited us with a form with lots of questions to answer (‘Can the patient feed herself unaided? was, I remember, one of them) and boxes to tick. I was told, as I could have been told over the phone two months earlier, that the County Council’s policy was not to provide a ‘disabled parking’ space where there was a dropped kerb and a driveway, however narrow and inadequate. They could concrete over my front garden to provide a parking space there if I wished. I didn’t. They could also make a concrete ramp to provide access for the wheel chair to my front door. I already had a perfectly satisfactory wooden ramp provided by a friendly, and very competent, neighbour. After a friendly chat the social worker departed – and that was that!

A couple of years later, after my wife’s sad death and following another phoned query, I too was assessed. Again, after a long wait, another, equally agreeable and eager-to-be-helpful lady called on me and we had a chat. It turned out that I had already provided for myself all the services that she would have been able to offer me. We parted with a warm handshake and, in her case I think, a sigh of relief.

My impression was that the County Council’s Social Services Department was able to offer valuable services to the old and disabled who needed them (I mustn’t forget that they are the source of my blue disabled-parking badge!). There are though, far too few social workers for them to be able to deal rapidly with people whose needs are brought to their attention, and to seek out those – whose cases may be even more urgent – about whom they have not been informed.

The same seems to apply at the other end of the age spectrum. Essex County Council has been repeatedly criticised by public service watchdogs for the standard of its child protection. An Ofsted report published last March described children’s safeguards in Essex as ‘inadequate’. A recent report in the Daily Gazette recorded that 1,000 Essex children who are on the ‘at risk’ register do not have a social worker looking after their interests. Bob Russell, Colchester’s MP is reported as saying ‘This is a failing of the officers at the highest level and the political leadership at the Essex County Council. They cannot hide behind the national shortage of social workers as the excuse’. It is clearly only by good luck that Essex has so far not made the national headlines with one of those tragic child neglect or abuse cases that attract national opprobrium and condemnation.

Perhaps the county council would do better if they concentrated on the boring old jobs with which they are charged by parliament, such as care of the young and the elderly, highway maintenance, refuse disposal, and education, even if that meant their members and senior staff spending a little less time jetting round the world, seeking customers for Essex manufactures in mainland China, running banks and post offices, and buying (with our money) advertising space for ‘Essex Apprenticeships’ on commercial tv.

One thing (just a coincidence I’m sure) that I have noticed is that whenever there is a news item that appears to cast credit on the County Council’s activities, a photo of the Council’s Leader, and a few of his wise words, appear in the press. Whenever there is criticism of the Council, some other previously little known face will be on the news pages, together with his apologies, excuses or explanations. On this occasion it was County Councillor Peter Martin, ‘responsible for children’s social services’.

Our Broken Society

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that my views don’t all that often coincide with those of the leader of the Parliamentary Opposition or of the leader writers of The Daily Mail and the Daily Express. I do agree with them though that in Britain today we are living in a ‘broken society’, and not all the reassuring statistics produced by the government and its supporters will convince me otherwise.

I see the signs of it every day both in tv news items and with my own eyes. There may be less reported crime (though that could be due to victims seeing little point in reporting it – or being scared to do so!) but there is certainly more binge drinking, hooliganism, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, vandalism, and, in schools, indiscipline and truancy, today than there was in the past*. It isn’t just the lure of ‘the telly’ that has reduced the number of Sunday evening church services, and weekday evening meetings of social and cultural clubs and associations. Many people (I am among them!) especially pedestrians and cyclists, are reluctant to venture out of their homes after dark. Others hesitate to respond to callers at their front door outside daylight hours.

Where I possibly disagree with Mr David Cameron and the popular press is on the causes and possible cure of our fractured and disintegrating society. I believe that it was in the ‘avaricious eighties’, the 'Thatcher years' that the rot set in. It was then that greed and avarice, disguised as ‘wealth creation’ became virtues, that ‘the nanny state’ was derided, the public services denigrated, and the super-rich became our role models and super-heroes. Everybody benefited, it was claimed, when the multi-millionaire made another couple of millions – because the wealth ‘trickled down’ to the rest of us. What rubbish!

‘New-Labour’, to its shame, did nothing to reverse that trend. Last week it was reported that in this country the gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and those of the poorest of our fellow citizens is wider today than it has been for forty years. For over a quarter of those forty years Britain has been ruled by a party founded for no other purpose than to secure social and economic justice for everybody! 'What shall it profit a man (or a political party) to gain the whole world – and lose his soul?'

Closing that yawning gap must be a first step taken toward mending our fractured society. It has been established beyond doubt that more equal societies have fewer and less serious social problems than widely unequal ones like our own; less crime, fewer broken homes, fewer illiterates, fewer teenage pregnancies, a lower infant mortality rate, smaller prison populations.

Those who yearn, as I do, for a fairer society are sometimes accused of being motivated by envy. That simply isn’t true. My income isn’t large, but then my needs are few. I don’t envy those who can buy yachts, mansions on the shores of the Mediterranean, and British football clubs. They’re welcome to them.

I don’t mind paying my share of taxation – in income tax, in VAT and in customs and excise duties. However, I do bitterly resent the fact that taxpayers on low incomes pay back to the state a much greater proportion of their incomes than do the seriously wealthy. In the forthcoming General Election I shall vote for any candidate whose Party, in power, would take serious steps toward narrowing that gap between the highest and the lowest incomes.

Helping the poor is not, on its own, enough. There is no gain without pain – and Britain’s less-than-wealthy have born that pain too long. Sharing it is overdue.

*Since writing the above I have read in the local press that for protection against vandalism and theft, Colchester’s Greenstead Public Library has had to install seven CCTV cameras and employ a fulltime guard!

A Royal Visit

The furore over the sale of Cadbury’s to the American firm Kraft reminds me of a story told me in the late 1940s by Jessie Adams, a Quaker lady in Ipswich, then well into her eighties. She had been among those present on 21st May 1919 when King George V and his consort Queen Mary had visited Bournville Model Village, designed and built by the Quaker Cadbury family to house the workers in their nearby chocolate factory.

It was decided that the Royal Party would visit one of the worker’s homes, which were shining examples of their kind. Formally dressed in top hats and frock coats, King George and George Cadbury walked in front while Queen Mary and Elizabeth Cadbury followed. Both ladies were known as being of strong character and forthright manner.

As the King and the Quaker were welcomed into the model home, Elizabeth Cadbury raised her voice and addressed her husband decisively, ‘Take your hat off George!’

Instantly and instinctively, King George’s hand went up to his hat!

The Inscrutable Chinese?

I have mentioned my grandson Chris and his Taiwanese girlfriend Ariel on a number of occasions in this blog. At the beginning of 2009 Chris was named as ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the Joy Organisation (educational providers) by whom he is employed. I thought that blog readers might like to see him with the children whom he taught during his first year with the school.


Chinese are often popularly described as being to ‘inscrutable’. To me, these children look anything but that. They look remarkably similar to any group of European kids of the same age – and every bit as cheeky and mischievous! I particularly like the shy little girl right at the back who almost didn’t make it into the picture. I am assured though that, unlike some British kids, they are obedient and eager to learn. Teaching them is a pleasure.

Week 4.10

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Making the Punishment fit the Crime

I’m not a "Hang ‘em and flog ‘em” man, or even one who believes that long gaol sentences should be the automatic penalty for virtually every major crime. I don’t think that before they set out on their nefarious activities, criminals give a great deal of thought to the penalty they may incur if caught. They are convinced that they’re not going to be caught, so the possible penalty is irrelevant. When the penalty for sheep stealing was hanging, there were still plenty of sheep stolen. And in the days when the punishment for treason was hanging, drawing and quartering, treason was more common than it is today. I think that persuading the potential criminal that he or she stands a less-then-fifty-percent chance of getting away with it would have a far greater deterrent effect than increasing the penalty for those who are caught.

That said, I have every sympathy with Tendring District Council’s indignation
at the fact that a convicted fly-tipper was given a conditional discharge with the payment of £250 costs at Colchester Magistrates Court earlier this month. Twenty-eight year old Rodney Fisher had been spotted in Clacton’s Holbrook Close dumping a carpet from a lorry in the early hours of 29th October last year. A vigilant neighbour noted the lorry’s registration number and informed the Police. Tendring Council decided to prosecute. I’m not surprised that Chris Kitcher, acting head of environmental services, should have been reported as saying, ‘I feel bitterly disappointed over the sentence and feel we have been badly let down’. I’m a former Environmental Health Officer myself (though we were called Public Health Inspectors in my day!) and I would have felt the same.

The maximum penalty for the offence for which Rodney Fisher was convicted is twelve months imprisonment or a fine of £50,000. His only penalty was payment of £250 costs and the knowledge that, if he were again to be convicted of the same offence, he would be more harshly treated. Catching a fly-tipper once is difficult enough. The odds against catching the same offender again for the same offence must be astronomical!

I suppose that the magistrates considered that fly tipping is a pretty trivial offence. It isn’t. Most criminal activity – breaking and entering, or mugging for instance – affects just one person or one household, though of course it may affect the victims very severely. Fly tipping (like litter dropping – its ‘little sister’!) is a crime against the whole community. It disfigures a whole neighbourhood and one act of illegal tipping on a piece of unused land quickly attracts more. Usually too, the whole community has to pay to clear it up.

What is more, fly tipping (unlike litter dropping) is a premeditated crime. No one gets out of bed on an impulse at two o’clock in the morning to load an old carpet, or a mattress, or a rusted water tank onto a car or lorry and take it somewhere where it can be dumped unseen. The time and the destination are carefully chosen in advance.

Bearing those factors in mind, I would have hoped that, having decided that the defendant was guilty, the magistrates would have imposed a penalty that if not causing actual pain, would at least have caused him serious inconvenience. A conditional discharge is not even a metaphorical ‘rap on the knuckles’. It certainly doesn’t encourage those whose job it is to enforce the law.

My new front fence

Here is my new front fence. I am very pleased with it. It is neat, unobtrusive and, I think, vandal-resistant. Perhaps I ought to thank the vandals who, on three successive nights, destroyed the low wall that had marked the front boundary of my home for over half a century. It was old, weather-beaten and nearing the end of its useful life (not unlike me, in fact!) but I shall miss it……and I wish it were still there.

It may seem absurd to feel sentimental about an ageing collection of bricks, but they have been a part of my life for fifty-four years. I was thirty-five and Heather thirty-two when we moved into our home in Dudley Road in 1956. We had two young sons, one three years old and the other under a year. The wall was there as they grew up, as they left home and as they have returned home from time to time as adults with their own wives and families. Subsequently it has become familiar to our now-grown up grand-children. Heather and I saw it every day of our lives and have watched it, like us, show signs of age.

Now the wall has gone – just as the life that Heather and I had together has gone. It is as though yet another chapter of my life has come to an end.


My family in November 1957. We had been married for ten years and had lived in Dudley Road, Clacton, for just over a year. Peter, aged four, is clambering over his Mum while I am holding on to nearly-two-year-old Andy. Like us, the wall seems to be young and unmarked by age and decay!









Essex takes the lead…..again!

Whatever other people may think of Essex County Council, there’s no doubt about it, Essex County Councillors think well of themselves! At the beginning of March they’re to host a national conference of highway authorities to consider how they can improve the way in which they deal with snow and ice.

Readers of the local Daily Gazette have their own views on this forthcoming event. One says ‘I expect this beanfeast will be held in a five-star hotel. With no expenses spared. My preference would be a village hall out in the sticks where, when it snows, it’s not on the gritting route’. Another says that what’s needed is more gritters, more salt and grit stocks, more salt and grit stores around the county, and more yellow bins stocked with grit and salt on locations such as hills – ‘no expensive and time consuming conference required’.

The trouble with that, apparently obvious, solution is that doubling, trebling or whatever the grit and salt stocks would almost certainly be followed by a succession of mild winters – and outrage at Highway Authorities wasting taxpayers’ money on enormous stockpiles ‘that any idiot could see wouldn’t be needed’.

The comment that most appealed to me was from a correspondent with the appropriate pseudonym of OntheBall,Colchester. He, or possibly she, urges, ‘Return the gritting responsibility to Colchester Borough. The whole recent effort by Essex in our area was slipshod and half-hearted. When Colchester had the responsibility, at least the local main road, bus routes and school routes used to be gritted, along with pavements in key areas. I couldn’t agree more. The more local services that can be handed over to local control the better. Then, at the very least, we’d know whom to blame when things went wrong.

Mind you, I think that we are all losing the point. There really isn’t a chance that anything said or decided at that conference will make even the least difference to future snow-clearing operations. It will give Essex County Council the chance to take the lead again – as in running a banking service, opening a branch in China, advertising (at our expense) its apprenticeship scheme on tv, and farming out to private enterprise many of the tasks for which it is responsible. Oh yes, and it’ll give Lord Hanningfield a chance to feature in the local press, and on regional tv - perhaps even to make it to the middle pages of the national tabloids.

In that sense the conference is likely to be a great success. Discussing a crisis in depth is much more fun than actually dealing with it. It’s easier too.


Help for Clacton’s old and disabled

Just before Christmas Tendring Council had an unexpected cash windfall ‘to help support town centre enterprises’. It seemed to me that it might usefully be spent on a last-minute rescue of Clacton’s Shopmobility service which hired out, at cut price rates, mobility scooters to the old and disabled. This, I said, would enable such people to get into the town centre to do their shopping and thus help fulfil the purpose of the grant.

Goodness knows whether the idea was ever considered but, if so, it was rejected and – as was inevitable – Shopmobility closed down on New Year’s Eve. No doubt the Council, or rather its inner ‘cabinet’, decided that those who used the service would manage to do their shopping by other means, or that their friends and neighbours would do it for them. Clacton’s town centre traders would be none the worse off.

They were wrong. Colchester Community Transport and Shopmobility is offering Clacton residents the opportunity to come and shop in Colchester’s town centre. Those who join the scheme will be picked up at their homes and taken to St. Mary’s car park in Colchester where a mobility scooter will be available for their use. The scheme will begin on 2nd February and will be available from 10.00 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays.

It seems a good idea to me. For details phone Sylvie on 01206 570643.

Tendring Council has certainly managed to help town-centre traders ……but it's those in Colchester’s town centre, not Clacton's!

Oh dear!

A former Chairman of Tendring Council arrested in connection with suspected corruption and money laundering. £30,000 seized from his home. Councillors who served between 1990 and 2009 ‘helping the police with their enquiries’! I’m glad that I’m no longer the Council’s Public Relations Officer and that I took early retirement in 1980!

Everyone suspected of a crime is deemed innocent until proved otherwise. It may well be that this whole affair will soon be cleared up and forgotten. I am uncomfortably reminded though of the ending of a poem Executive by the late Sir John Betjeman. In the poem a thrusting young executive explains to an acquaintance how it is that he has possesses an expensive sports car and speed boat:

And how did I acquire them? Well, to tell you about that
And to put you in the picture, I must don my other hat.
I do some mild developing, the kind of thing I need
Is a quiet country market town that’s rather gone to seed.
A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire,
I fix the Planning Officer, the Town Clerk and the Mayor.
And if some preservationist attempts to interfere,
A ‘dangerous structure’ notice from the Borough Engineer
Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way -
The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay.

When I first read that that I was a serving local government officer, with decades of experience. Much as I admired and enjoyed Betjeman’s work I was convinced that that particular poem was rubbish. I still hope that it was - and is!

Week 3.10

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Vandals!

I have been familiar with the effects of vandalism for many years. I have seen young, newly planted street trees broken off and destroyed, windows smashed, public toilets wrecked – apparently with a sledge hammer – beach huts and public shelters set on fire, and telephones (that could be needed for some life-threatening emergency) torn from the public phone box in which they were installed.

When I was Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I publicised with some enthusiasm, the council’s reward scheme for those who provided information leading to the prosecution of vandals. I made certain that the very few occasions on which this reward was paid out were well publicised. I often wondered what on earth could be the motive for vandalism. Why and how could anyone derive pleasure or satisfaction from defacing something that was beautiful, destroying or disabling something that was useful, or desecrating something that others considered to be sacred? Theft, fraud and even homicide seemed positively reasonable by comparison.

Vandalism had rarely affected me personally. In the pre-mobile phone age I had, on occasion, been annoyed when I found a public phone box out of order because of it. I had been displeased when I had found a public convenience closed for the same reason. But nothing of mine had ever been vandalised. I had no reason to suppose that I would ever be the vandals’ target.

I was wrong. A low brick wall marked the front boundary of my property in Clacton’s Dudley Road. It had been provided when the bungalow was built in 1953 (three years before Heather and I had bought it and moved in) and had been showing signs of its nearly fifty-seven years of use. The top course of brickwork had weathered and was probably due for replacement. However, it was perfectly serviceable when I departed from Clacton on Christmas Eve. When I returned home five days later, the top few courses of one section of the wall had been knocked off and were lying in my front garden.

Left – the wall as it was before Christmas. Photo taken about 18 months ago. The top course of bricks is looking distinctly weather-beaten!
.
It was no big deal; not worth claiming on the insurance. I asked a builder friend if he would fix it and he promised to do so directly the temperature dropped below freezing. Sadly, that wasn’t the end. On Sunday night, 10th January and again on Monday night, 11th January, the wall was again attacked, finally leaving barely a quarter of the original wall standing.

Its replacement is covered by my ‘Age Concern’ home insurance – which is just as well, as clearance of the site, removal of rubble and construction of a new wall or other boundary is unlikely to cost less than £1,000. As I write I am considering whether to replace it with another similar wall (which might well be subject to immediate vandal attack!) or some kind of a wooden fence. The latter, I think, might be less attractive to vandals and if any parts of it were damaged they would probably be easier to repair or replace.

Right – the wall as it was on Tuesday 12th January. The rubble had already been cleared from between the two concrete posts in the foreground

As I am claiming on my insurance policy I had to notify the police. A very pleasant young police officer visited me and, in a friendly chat, apologised for the fact that there really wasn’t much possibility that the culprits would be brought to book. I had already known that to be the case and, rather to my surprise, I realized that I didn’t particularly want them to be caught and ‘taught a lesson’. I think it likely that all they would learn from such a lesson would be to take greater care not to be caught next time.

It would be nice to be able to claim that I forgive them, as I assure God that I do every time I recite Our Lord’s Prayer (‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’). It wouldn’t be quite true though. It isn’t so much that I forgive them as that I can’t be bothered to judge them. I think that I feel quite sorry for them. What sad and empty lives must be led by young people whose pleasure in life comes from destroying, defacing, or damaging things that give other people service or pleasure. Towards what a joyless, purposeless and loveless adult life and old age they are heading!

Essex Works (wonders – thanks to other people’s efforts!)

'Essex Works' is the bold claim to be found on all Essex County Council published material. You'll see it on their leaflets and on their, quite wexpensive, tv adverts. A few weeks ago I wrote enthusiastically in this blog about Essex County Council’s ‘Telecare Home Safety Service’. This service was intended for ‘vulnerable adults who would like to feel safer, more protected and independent in their own home, particularly perhaps for ‘older, infirm or disabled people’.

The 'Telecare Home Safety Service' of the Essex County Council provided, according to need, a personal alarm that enabled the user to summon immediate help if he or she were suddenly ill, fell over or had some other emergency while at home or in the garden; a bogus caller button by the front door for use when a stranger tried to gain entry to the home; a smoke detector; a fall detector; a flood detector; and a ‘movement detector’ that would verify and record the presence of an intruder or alternatively detect prolonged inactivity. What was more the service required was available on twelve months free trial to those over 85.

I am less steady on my feet than I once was and, if I do fall, am unable to get up unaided. The personal alarm system would obviously provide an answer to some of my problems. At eighty-eight I possibly wouldn’t need it longer than the twelve months trial period. If I did the monthly charge of £16.47 wouldn’t make a serious impact on my financial resources. I filled it in the form, posted it off to the County Council and awaited developments.

As I waited I felt just a little remorseful about some of the less-than-kind things that I had written about the County Council and its hierarchy in this column. I had, for instance, said that I thought that the County was a stratum of local government that could well be dispensed with. I had urged that all Essex District and Borough Councils should be accorded unitary status and, within their own districts, should carry out the tasks entrusted by central government to county councils. There was every reason to believe that they would do so more economically and more effectively. Tendring Council, for instance, had been declared by the Audit Commission to be the best performing council in Essex while the County Council’s performance had been designated only as ‘adequate’.

Perhaps I had been wrong and, at least in providing the Essex Telecare Home Safety Service, the County Council was performing a valuable countywide service.

Here is the front of the brochure publicising the Essex Telecare Home Safety service

My written request was attended to with commendable speed. An appointment was made by phone and, at the time and date arranged, a very friendly and helpful lady appeared at my front door to explain and install what I understood to be the County Council’s service. It transpired though that the service had nothing whatsoever to do with the County Council. I had been a little surprised when the lady had turned up in a Tendring District Council vehicle. In conversation it soon emerged that she was, in fact, a Tendring District Council employee and that the service for which I had asked was not a new, or even an old service of the Essex County Council. It was, in fact, the long-established Tendring Careline, founded and run for at least the past twenty years, by the Tendring District Council.

It is indeed a very worthwhile service and I am glad that I have had it installed in my home. An unobtrusive ‘Lifeline Home Unit’, functioning rather like the ‘router’ of a wireless broadband installation, is connected to a power point and to a nearby telephone socket. The user is issued with a pendant having a large red activating button, that is worn round the neck at all times (after an hour or so you forget you’ve got it on). In an emergency anywhere within 50 metres of the Lifeline Unit, pressing the red button will alert the operators at base. The Unit then acts as a radio station with which you can converse and which will set into motion whatever is needed to help you.

On the very back page of the County Council’s publicity brochure all the district and borough councils are listed with a little notice stating Essex County Council – working in partnership with local service providers to support independence in your own home. Well, that’s some sort of an acknowledgement of the work of district authorities, I suppose. If you are interested though, I suggest that you phone Tendring Careline at Clacton Town Hall 01255 222727 email: careline@tendringdc.gov.uk Don’t bother with that expensive and self-satisfied ‘middle-man’ in Chelmsford.

My belief that, in Essex at least, the County Council is an extravagant, uneconomical, and unnecessary tier of local government has been reinforced!

Disaster in the Caribbean

My own worries about my garden wall, my concerns about the future of democratic government in this country, even my occasional worries about my friends and family, pale into insignificance before the appalling disaster in Haiti. How sad it is that the world’s worst natural disasters always seem to afflict the world’s very poorest communities, whose members have to struggle for survival during the best of times!

The Haiti earthquake rivals the south-east Asian tsunami in its catastrophic effects. I find the depiction of human misery, despair and desolation in tv news bulletins almost unbearable to watch. How much more shattering they must be on the spot and in reality!

Over the Christmas/New Year period I have received an unprecedented number of appeals from thoroughly deserving charities in desperate financial straits due to the recession. Most I have had no alternative but to ignore. I do intend though to give as generously as I possibly can, to either the British Red Cross Society or to Christian Aid for the Haiti Disaster Relief Fund.

I hope that all readers of this blog will be prepared to do the same.

Week 2.10

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘Snow had fallen, Snow on Snow, Snow on Snow, in the bleak mid-winter’ – Here and Now!


My back garden in Clacton-on-Sea’s Dudley Road on 8th January 2010. There appears to be over two inches of snow on the roof of the bird table. At 1.30 pm on 9th January, it was four inches!

Who would have thought it? In last week’s blog I said that we were going through a cold spell, but that we had seen worse and that, in any case, we had had less snow and ice than anywhere else in the country.

Well, it’s still true I suppose. The sea hasn’t frozen over as it did in 1963 and most other places have had deeper snow and more traffic chaos than we have. But we have certainly had more snow laying ‘round about, deep and crisp and even’, and for much longer, than we have for many years. I haven’t heard much about traffic chaos in Clacton (there hasn’t been that much traffic about!), but I gather that they have had their share of it in Colchester.

It has effectively put my electric scooter out of action for the present. I don’t know how deep the snow would have to be to halt it in its tracks and I’m not inclined to find out! What’s more, I think that my rear, driving wheels could spin on ice and leave me stranded. For the first time I am having a taste of being housebound.

It is only a taste though. I can always summon a taxi if I really need to go out. Not everyone is in a position to do that. I have enough provisions in my bungalow to withstand a siege! Kind friends offer me lifts, a neighbour offers to do shopping for me, the Lloyds Pharmacy in Pier Avenue, informed on the phone that I was unable to collect a ‘repeat prescription', sent a courier through the snow to deliver it to my door. The local Daily Gazette continues to be delivered as regularly as clockwork (I’m glad that I left the delivery boy a small ‘Christmas box’!), as does the post. I am able to keep my home warm and comfortable. The phone and the internet allow me to assure my far-flung family that I am perfectly well despite the weather, and that there is little prospect of my starving or freezing to death in the immediate future.

In short, I’m much better off than a great many other people and certainly much better off than my parents or grandparents would have been under similar circumstances. I’ll still be very pleased indeed though when the thaw sets in, the snow and ice disappears and we begin to see a few signs of the coming spring!

An Election Year

It happens only very occasionally that it can be said with certainty, ‘There will be a general election within the next six months’. This is one of those occasions. The political campaigns for that election (for which June is the latest possible but May the most probable date) are said to have begun with New Year speeches from the party leaders. I think that they began before that. The pre-Christmas visits of both David Cameron and Gordon Brown to ‘our boys in Afghanistan’ were surely opening salvoes in a verbal conflict that we will have to endure for at least another four months.

Neither of the two main parties is likely to be able to extract much political capital from the continuing public enquiry into the war in Iraq. It was a New Labour Government that misled us into that disastrous and (I believe) illegal conflict but, with a few honourable exceptions, they did so with the enthusiastic support of the members of the Conservative Opposition. The flag-waving Europhobes of UKIP were, of course, banging on about loss of British sovereignty to ‘Brussels’, while two of the most important aspects of that sovereignty – defence and foreign policy – were being surrendered without protest on the other side of the Atlantic.

I am glad that Iraq is unlikely to become a serious issue in the election campaigns. The prospect of professional politicians wringing the last drop of electoral advantage from the blood of those slain by their folly and incompetence is an unappealing one.

Nor am I very enthusiastic about the fact that there are to be televised debates between the leaders of the three main political parties. I don’t quite see how the Scottish Nationalist Party, whose policies are of little interest to most of the population of the United Kingdom, could possibly be included in these debates. On the other hand, it is clearly wrong for tv and radio debates to be beamed into Scotland that exclude the leader of that country's current governing party while including those of his opponents, The idea of televised debates between the party leaders is a continuation of a developing trend. Most of us are old enough to recall that on our election ballot papers there used simply to be the names of the candidates. We voted for those candidates, not for the party (if any) that they represented. It was assumed that those electors who were more interested in the party than the individual, would take the trouble to discover which candidate was a member of their preferred party before turning up at the polling station.

Apparently they couldn’t or wouldn’t. So (some may say it was part of a process of ‘dumbing down’ society) a political allegiance had to be appended to each candidate’s name on the voting paper. It had become officially recognised that many, probably most, electors voted for the party, rather than for the particular candidate.

Televised debates between the leaders of the main parties indicate a further development. The emergence of ‘New’ Labour has meant that the differences between the objectives of the two main parties are, to say the very least, less clear-cut than once they were. The voters’ choice is nowadays less about policies than about who is to carry them out. We are also evolving from a parliamentary democracy into a prime ministerial dictatorship. The majority party leader, as Prime Minister, holds the keys to promotion, to ministerial office, even to jaunts abroad at the taxpayers’ expense. Only backbenchers who have abandoned all hope of political advancement dare defy the party whip.

This is an era of celebrities, people who are ‘famous for being famous’. With televised debates between Party Leaders we shall be given an opportunity to decide which ‘political celebrity’ we want to rule us, rather like voting in a popular tv ‘reality show’. Which Party Leader has ‘the X factor’? After we have watched their performances on tv we’ll have our chance to help decide the issue, by voting for our preferred candidate’s Party in the General Election,

We’ll be choosing a Prime Ministerial Dictator, rather like the American President, but without the checks and balances to his power that are provided in the USA by the Judges of the Supreme Court and by Senate and Congress.

‘They’re not like they used to be!’

I think that those of us who can remember the television of the 1960s and ‘70s think from time to time that the programmes of today are a pale shadow of those that we remember from the past. The Tudors in particular, with Anne Boleyn portrayed as nothing but a gold-digging tease who probably deserved her come-uppance, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (author of the Church of England’s incomparable Book of Common Prayer) as a time-serving buffoon, and a dark-haired Henry VIII as young and virile (despite his leg ulcer!) as he neared the end of his marital adventures as he had been at the beginning of them, surely didn’t bear comparison with the BBC’s Six Wives of Henry VIII that I remembered from the ‘60s.

In that series Anne Boleyn had been portrayed as the intelligent, witty and courageous young woman that she probably was, Cranmer as sincere and, by 16th century standards, essentially humane, though terrified (who wouldn’t have been?) of his royal master, and Henry VIII played by Keith Mitchell as a charming and gifted young man transformed by self-will and unlimited power into a bloated and impotent monster. The Six Wives of Henry VIII was followed by the equally convincing Elizabeth R. I remember too with affection The Forsyte Saga, I Claudius, and Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'.

Could it be, I sometimes wondered, that we oldies tended to regard the past through rose-coloured spectacles and that those televised epics were not as good as we had imagined? Nowadays we can decide for ourselves. DVDs of many of those classic serials are available and are advertised with the Radio Times. I have so far been able to watch The Six Wives of Henry VIII and, since Christmas, have watched War and Peace (all twenty one-hour episodes!) They were every bit as good as I had remembered – a bit better in fact. When they were first transmitted Heather and I had had only a black-and-white tv. Now I was able to watch them in full colour!

There was lot less explicit sex in those old serials than in their equivalent today, and a lot less bare flesh. Mind you, if the ladies of the Imperial Russian nobility really wore dresses as low-cut as some of those shown in War and Peace, they must have had remarkably efficient heating systems in their palatial St. Petersburg mansions!

On reflection, I came to the conclusion that those old tv series were every bit as good as I had remembered them but that, in comparing them with The Tudors I wasn’t comparing like with like. No doubt there were rubbishy programmes in the ‘60s that I have long forgotten. Some recent programmes are very, very good. I think, in particular, of Cranford, of Little Dorrit and Bleak House, Lark Rise to Candleford (despite the enormous difference between the book and the tv series!) and of the BBC’s adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, in particular perhaps, their definitive Pride and Prejudice. In those productions the BBC was most certainly maintaining the standard of excellence that had been established forty years earlier.

A Calendar Girl!

Among my very nicest Christmas presents was a homemade pictorial calendar, sent me by my German friends Andreas and Konnie Kulke of Zittau. On the cover, and heading each month, is a picture of their three year old daughter Maja and/or her baby brother Tom, born early in September. I am proud to be their honorary English 'uncle’. I particularly like the February picture with Maja wearing a headscarf. You can see exactly what a very attractive young lady she will be in fifteen or sixteen years time!

Week 1.10

Tendring Topics……..on line

The First Decade of the Third Millennium

There were people, very knowledgeable people, who assured us that in celebrating the beginning of the third millennium on 1st January 2,000, we were doing so prematurely. Unless there was a year 0 between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D. (sorry, I can’t be bothered with this ‘Common Era’ business!) the new century and millennium wouldn’t begin until 1st January 2,001. The same people would tell us that the first decade of the 21st Century wouldn’t end until 31st December 2010.

They would, strictly speaking, be correct. However this is one of those occasions on which boring old facts are of less importance than public perception. It was the change in the date from 1999 to 2,000 that was seen by most people as the beginning of the new millennium and it is the change in the date from 2009 to 2010 that is seen as the end of its first decade. One thing about the next decade is certain; ‘Twenty-ten’ rolls off the tongue rather more euphoniously than ‘Twenty-o-nine’!

What a decade that first one has been! It has seen ten years of New Labour government that must have had the founders of the Labour Movement turning in their graves. Who would have thought that during a decade of ‘Labour’ government we would have seen continuing privatisation; the continued sale at bargain basement prices of homes bequeathed by former far-seeing councils to eradicate overcrowding and homelessness; a parliament with many of its members unmasked as extravagant, self-serving cheats; the gap between Britain’s richest and poorest wider than ever in living memory; and Britain engaged in two ‘colonial wars’ one of which was illegal and the other unwinnable? Finally came the collapse of a financial system motivated by greed, for which the best remedy advanced by our political leaders (and their opponents) has been handing over billions of pounds of our money to the Banks, the avarice and incompetence of whose top management had triggered the crisis.

Ramsey Macdonald is said to have failed as a Labour leader as a result of being ‘dazzled by duchesses’. The current and recent Labour leadership appears to have been blinded by billionaires.

I wish that I could say something cheerful and positive about the decade that we are entering. Some lines from G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Ballad of the White Horse’ come to my mind.

I tell you naught for your comfort.
Yea, naught for your desire.
Save that the night grows darker yet,
And the waves rise higher.

Nature made its contribution!

The final line of the verse quoted above reminds me that ‘the noughties’, as people are beginning to call that first third-millennial decade, was a period of natural as well as political, economic and foreign policy disasters. Standing out above all others was, of course, the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, which cost over two-hundred-thousand lives, including those of many Britons and other north Europeans who had been seeking the Southeast Asian sun during their Christmas break.

Though the world’s worst natural disaster during the decade, the tsunami was by no means the only one. There were appalling earthquakes. The one nearest home was in southern Italy where a whole village was totally destroyed. Then there were devastating bush fires in Australia, California and southern Europe, and almost equally devastating floods, avalanches and mudslides elsewhere. Britain, most recently in the Lake District, has had its share of floods, though the threat here has been more to property and the infrastructure than to human life.

Frozen Sea at Clacton. January 1963

Earthquakes and tsunamis are beyond human control. The most that we can ever hope to do is to predict their occurrence and evacuate the threatened populations. Most bush fires though are a consequence either of human carelessness, human malevolence or human irresponsibility. Floods are made worse by building over, and concreting over, land into which rainwater would otherwise be absorbed. And both bush fires and floods result from the extreme weather conditions produced by the global warming that the recent Copenhagen summit tried and failed to address effectively

As usual, our corner of Southern East Anglia has been spared the worst of these extreme weather conditions. We have had no serious inundations from the sea since the tidal surges of 1953. We have had, by our standards, very heavy rain recently – but nothing compared with that in the Lake District and the West Country.

Wellesley Road, Clacton. New Year's Day 1979

We are experiencing bitterly cold weather as I write – but we have had worse in the past (see photos!), and today it is even worse elsewhere, both in Britain and throughout mainland western Europe.

Perhaps that is why we seem to have a more than average number of climate change sceptics (including our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell) in the area. So far, the most serious effects of global warming have been to ‘other people living elsewhere’. I sincerely hope that circumstances never put those of us who do take climatic change seriously in a position to say, ‘We did tell you so!’

………and my own experience.

That first decade of the new millennium was catastrophic for me personally too. In fact for over two years I was so absorbed in my own concerns that I didn’t consciously read a newspaper or watch a tv news or current affairs programme. I was in a world of my own, a world that was to be shattered, and I was completely oblivious of whatever triumphs and disasters might be going on all round me.

On 27th April 2006 my wife Heather and I celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary. It was Hitler who had brought us together in 1939! She was then a schoolgirl, a fifteen-year-old evacuee from Greater London. I was an eighteen-year-old soldier, newly called up with the Territorial Army. We kept in touch throughout the war and were married on 27th April 1946, just four days after my discharge from the Army.

Our Diamond Wedding celebration was a somewhat muted one. Almost two years earlier, in July 2004 Heather, who had suffered from osteoporosis for some time, had fallen and broken her hip. She went into hospital and had the hip repaired, but was never again able to walk independently, and she became increasingly disabled as the months passed. I was her sole carer, determined to carry out her wish to remain in her own home for as long as she lived.

The celebration, like the one for our 25th, 40th and 50th anniversaries, was held in Clacton Quaker Meeting House where Heather and I had worshipped on Sundays for half a century. A short, half-hour or thereabouts, Meeting for Worship and Thanksgiving, was followed by a friendly chat accompanied by refreshments provided by Clacton Quakers. All members of our extended family had been invited to attend and all (except grandson Chris in Taiwan!) had managed to get there. There were also members of Clacton Quaker Meeting and other friends of ours. It was a bittersweet occasion for me because, in my heart, I knew that Heather would be seeing some of those friends and relatives for the last time


Diamond Wedding Celebration – sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces and, of course, Heather and myself. It proved to be the last photograph ever taken of Heather.

Sadly, my forebodings were realized. Heather’s life came to an end, at home, in her sleep and in her own bed, on 12th July.

Since my retirement from local government service in 1980 I had been working from home as a freelance writer and we had grown even closer together than we had ever been. For two years she had been the sole purpose of my existence. Her death left a gaping gap in my life, the extent of which I took several months to appreciate fully. We had been separated before. After we first met I was four years overseas with the army. She had had several spells in hospital, including two years in a TB Sanatorium just two years after we were married. It took time for me to realize that this time there would be no happy ending. Never again would she be waiting for me when I came home. Never again would I see her sweet smile or hear her happy laughter. Despite her intermittent ill-health Heather had been essentially a very happy person. After her death a former member of the Quaker Sunday School Class that she once ran, wrote to tell me that she always associated Heather ‘with fun and laughter’.

I desperately tried to fill that gap with busyness. My family helped magnificently. Andy, my younger son and his wife visited me, and still visit me, regularly and are constantly in touch. They have twice driven me up to Sheffield to spend time with granddaughter Jo. Chris, my elder grandson arranged for me to have a Flickr site on the internet, www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea on which I have posted some 400 photographs, while Nick, his brother, arranged first the blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and then the web site www.ernesthall.net on which I post these blogs.

Elder son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, together with Ni ck, have encouraged, and made it possible for me to visit Zittau the small town in Germany where I have found new interests and new good friends. They have also on several occasions taken me to Brussels, where Nick works and lives.

They, together with Heather’s nephew and nieces and their families, and with good friends in England and now in Germany too, have helped me to find a new purpose in life when it would have been all too easy to slide into a pit of loneliness and depression. Life has become worth living again, though Heather is never out of my mind. Over and over again, after I have finished a piece of writing with which I have felt particularly pleased, or when I have been travelling abroad, or visiting London, or Sheffield and the Peak District, I have thought ‘If only she were here to share all this with me!’