Week 31.10 3rd August

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Queen…….and I

The Queen and I haven’t a great deal in common. We’re both members of the human race, we’re both well past the first flush of youth and we both wore uniform during World War II, though hers was a good deal more elegant, and more comfortable, than mine was. When, in a mood of patriotic fervour, I volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939, she was included when I took my enlistment oath to protect her father King George VI and all his lawful heirs and successors. Oh yes, and my wife and I were very pleased when the Queen sent us a card and message of congratulation on our sixtieth wedding anniversary.

That was about it until very recently, when I learned that, like me, she had a collection of photographs displayed on the Flickr Web Site. This site displays many thousands of photographs submitted by people all over the world and is recommended to art teachers and students seeking inspiration and example.

Trooper Hall, F.C. 17th Lancers 1901

I have over 400 pictures on display – a great many family ones of course, with some of me as a tiny baby with my proud parents, culminating with some of me as I am now. There is a picture of my father in 1901 (one of Queen Victoria’s Redcoats) newly enlisted as a trooper in the very dashing 17th Lancers which, just fifty years earlier, had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War.

Right: Younger Son Andy with granddaughter Jo

There are pictures of my now-middle aged sons, and of my grandchildren as babies and, as they are now, in their late twenties.

Above - Myself, Chris girlfriend Ariel,Chris, Pete

Right - Arlene, Pete, Nick, Nick's girlfriend Romy

There are pictures of record too, some unrepeatable; a glance into a girls and a boys primary school class in the 1930s, pictures of a frozen sea off Clacton during a now-long-ago winter, and pictures of the famous Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia, taken in 1980 before it was destroyed in the Jugoslav civil war.

The old Turkish pack-horse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia taken on a never-to-be-forgotten holiday in 1980. Through the archway a mosque can be seen in the distance. The bridge was destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

You can see my flickr pages by accessing www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson Chris, who set the site up for me). The website has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA’s ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence, in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from mine.

Clacton's Bashful Fountains!

Clacton’s water feature, on what was once called ‘Christmas Island’ but is now ‘The Town Square’ has had a short history but a distinctly chequered one. When first installed in 2008 (amid inevitable accusations of its being ‘a waste of taxpayers’ money) it resembled similar water features in many other English towns. Fountains of water shot up into the air from hidden nozzles at pavement level.

It was attractive to look at. In what passed for a summer that year, it attracted small boys who enjoyed running through it and getting soaked. A great many adults enjoyed watching them do so!

Outside Sheffield’s Town Hall. This is how Clacton’s water feature is supposed to look

It was too good to last. First of all some joker introduced washing powder to it and the jets squirted bubbly suds! (Clacton, I’m sorry to say, has more than its fair share of such humorists.) The water feature was switched off, emptied and cleaned. It was at about that time that the Council realized that their fountain hadn’t been provided with an adequate water purification plant. It had been an economy measure, a typical case of spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar, though in this case it would have been a pretty big ha’porth.

Stray cats and dogs, and even seagulls, could be fouling the water through which little children were innocently disporting themselves! The possible threat of expensive lawsuits initiated by the kind of ambulance-chasing lawyers whose ‘no win: no fee’ adverts keep daytime commercial tv on its feet, began to haunt the dreams of Councillors and senior Council Officials. What if some child developed an unpleasant disease, blamed it on the fountain, and the parents sued? Playing safe, they switched off the fountain and off it remained for several months.

Last summer, again not much of a summer, the fountain started up again – but with an instantly derided (and expensive) fence all round it. The only justification for the fountain’s existence was the contribution its attractive appearance made to the town centre. The fence effectively destroyed that!

This year they are having another try. The ugly fence has come down and the fountain again enhances the attractions of the town centre.

Now though, thanks to electronic wizardry, it resembles the bashful heroine of a mid-Victorian romantic novel. The general public is invited to enjoy its beauty but strictly on a ‘keep your distance and touch me not’ basis. Get too close and electronic sensors send it into the equivalent of a Dickensian swoon – the fountains of water start to fail and eventually shut down altogether.

Nineteenth Century novels usually include ‘some blackguard’ managing to break down the young heroine’s reserve and threaten her virtue. So it is with our water feature. Already, so I understand, small boys have discovered a blind spot in the electronic barrier and have managed to get past it to frolic in the fountains without activating the protective screen!

A few days ago (28th July) I drove my mobility scooter to the town centre to get a photo of that accident-prone fountain. The jets weren’t working; presumably closed down again while someone sought an answer to the latest problem. I wonder what the one after that will be?

‘Essex Works’

‘Essex Works’, proclaims the headline on the latest edition of the County Council’s self-congratulatory newsletter. No one would doubt it, though I am by no means so confident that the same can be said about its County Council.

In the newsletter are set out five ways in which that Council proposes to save £300 million pounds – Buying better, Working smarter, Working together, Thinking ahead, and by means of Sharing and Trading Services. It reads to me more like a wish list than a programme for action but it ends with the bold claim that, by means unspecified, they have already saved £60 million!

I hope that they are successful. They have certainly been very good at spending our money. It seems likely that they’ll have to spend a good deal more of it if they are going to bring all their services up to an acceptable standard. Their child-care services, in particular, have long been below standard. I remember a year ago it being promised that they would take immediate effective steps to improve them. They don’t seem to have been very successful. During 2009/2010, 148 enquiries and complaints about the ECC were received by the Local Government Ombudsman, compared with 139 the previous year. Complaints relating to children and family services rose from 4 to 14 and those relating to adult care doubled from 9 to 18. There were also 36 complaints about education. As a result of these complaints the County Council had to make eleven local settlements in compensation, costing the taxpayers £16,456. This is trivial compared with the £300 million they are hoping to save but, as they say when commenting on these, ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’. The converse is also true, ‘Squander the pennies and you soon won’t have any pounds to save’.

In an attempt to improve their failing Children’s Services they have appointed a new Director of Schools, Children and Families. Dave Hill, the new Director, will be moving from a similar job in Croydon. His salary is not reported but it certainly won’t be peanuts! They are also offering a two-year contract of up to £150,000, not for new staff, but to a company able to bring in non-EU social workers to reduce reliance on agency staff. I’d have thought that non-EU workers from cultures and traditions very different from our own would be particularly unsuitable for social work.

I mentioned a few weeks ago in this blog that, despite their enthusiasm for saving, Essex Councillors had just voted themselves increased allowances. I now learn that during the last financial year they paid out £90,000 in staff bonuses, not to hard-pressed social workers and the like, but to top officials already on six-figure salaries. I have also discovered that they have spent no less than £800,000 (now that isn’t a trivial sum by anyone’s standards!) redesigning the Council’s website. Of this extravagance Emma Boon, campaign manager of the Taxpayers’ Alliance says, ‘The Council already has a site designed and built at the public’s expense. They shouldn’t spend more of our money doing it all over again’.

And so say all of us!

Above left: myself, Ariel Chris' girlfriend, Chris.

Right: Arlene, Pete, Nick, Romy Nick's girlfriend

The Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar, taken while we were on holiday in 1980. The bridge was to be destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

There are some pictures of record too, some of them irreplaceable: a glimpse into boys and girls classrooms in primary schools in the '30s; the sea frozen over off Clacton Beach in a cold winter many years ago; the Turkish packhorse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, destroyed in the civil war.

You can see my flickr pages by clicking on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson, who set the site up for me). The website site has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA's ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with their requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from HM from mine.