‘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!
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