Week 1. 2011 4th Jan. 2011

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Always Winter…….but never Christmas!

Since I last posted a blog I have spent several happy hours in C.S. Lewis’ imaginary world of Narnia. I watched ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ on tv before I left Clacton to spend Christmas with my two sons. On Boxing Day my elder son took me to watch the recently released ‘Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ and on my return I watched Prince Caspian that had been recorded for me by my ‘freeview box’ in my absence. I liked the first – ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ best, though The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ came a close second. I had – some years ago – read all the Narnia books. There are three others yet to be filmed; The Horse and his Boy, The Silver Chair and the award-winning The Last Battle.

Those acquainted with ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ will know that prior to the fortuitous arrival of the evacuated Pevensea children in 1940, Narnia was under the spell of the Wicked Witch. It was a world in which it was always winter – but never Christmas.

C.S.Lewis must have had truly prophetic vision since that seems to be the fate that awaits us. Our world hasn’t been taken over by the Narnian Wicked Witch. We are threatened by another witch though, Courtesy’s ugly sister – Political Correctness. Increasingly ‘Christmas’ is being phased out in the ludicrous belief that its mention might offend non-Christians. Greetings cards manufacturers nowadays prefer to offer ‘Seasons Greetings’ rather than ‘Happy Christmas’. Christmas (the time of thanksgiving for the birth of Jesus Christ) has become The Festive Season or The Mid-winter Festival.

I was disappointed to discover that Tendring Careline, a local institution for which I have the highest regard (and on which at some time or other my life may depend!) has fallen under the evil spell. I and – no doubt – all other Careline clients have received a useful Careline Calendar indicating when they would like us to check the efficiency of the system. The calendar didn’t come with the Christmas Greetings of the Careline Staff (Christmas is becoming one of those words that are not used in polite society) but with Seasons Greeting. Recipients are told that The Careline team would like to offer all our service users a Happy Holiday Season and a safe and peaceful New Year.

There’s nothing wrong with being wished a safe and peaceful New Year, but a Happy Holiday Season is a pretty poor substitute for a hearty and sincere Happy Christmas! To many of us Careline clients – old, possibly disabled, living alone, almost or completely housebound – ‘holidays’ are things of the past, suggesting activities that are now far beyond our capabilities.

Christmas though, is something different. It is a time when we hear, if only via scribbled Christmas cards, from almost-forgotten friends and relatives far away. A time when, on the whole, people are nicer to each other, and to us, than at other times in the year; when we can enjoy the fairy lights and decorations in other people’s homes even if we can’t manage them ourselves. We can enjoy Christmas church services on radio and/or tv. Some of us, perhaps with help, can get to a Christmas church service ourselves. Had I spent Christmas in Clacton my mobility scooter (my iron horse) would have made it possible for me to attend 8.00 a.m. Mass at St. James’ Church followed by a special Christmas Meeting for Worship at the Quaker Meeting House. As it was, on Christmas Day my younger son Andy took me to a Choral Eucharist that I thoroughly enjoyed at St. Mark’s Church of England parish church in Enfield.

It is a time too when we can enjoy our memories of Christmases past, though ironically it is the happiest memories that are most likely to make us feel sad.

A happy Christmas memory. My late wife Heather manning the Quaker ‘white elephant’ stall at the annual CCVS (as it then was) Christmas sale in Clacton's Princes Theatre in, I think, the early '70s.

I hope that, should I still be around next Christmas (not a possibility on which I would advise anyone to bet too heavily!) Tendring Careline will feel able to send me, and all their other clients, a traditional Christmas greeting. In recent years, our winters have been long, cold, dark and miserable. Please don’t rob us of the interlude of warmth, love, light and joy that Christmas brings!

The Big Freeze – the aftermath!

When, a fortnight ago, I warned in this blog about the risk to domestic plumbing systems arising from successive days and nights of sub-zero temperatures, I hardly expected my gloomy forebodings to be realized quite so spectacularly. On 29th December news bulletins recorded that 40,000 Northern Irish homes were without a mains water supply because of the loss of water from tens of thousands of burst pipes. Scotland, although it had more severe weather for a longer period, was not so badly affected and there have, so far, been no reports of interrupted water supplies in England as a result of burst pipes. The Irish Republic where, in many areas, the weather cannot have been wildly different from that in Northern Ireland, has had many crises recently – but widespread loss of water supply has not been among them.

The Northern Irish Government and the Water Authority are being criticised for not having reacted quickly and effectively to the situation. I think that there should be an investigation into the cause of the crisis as well as into the ineffective attempts to alleviate it. Do building regulations in Northern Ireland incorporate proper frost precautions and, if so, are those regulations rigorously enforced? I saw, on a tv news bulletin, water jetting from a burst in what appeared to be a supply pipe from the water main rising to the upper storey of a house on an external wall. On the same news bulletin we saw a branch pipe taken several feet along an external wall to an outside tap. If builders can get away with such obvious and easily spotted design faults what about the less obvious and invisible ones?

Are water mains buried at a sufficient depth below the streets or footpaths? And what about the connecting pipes (or ‘rising mains’) from the water main to the premises? That connecting pipe should be at least 1ft 6in below ground level throughout its length. In a large housing development reducing that depth by a few inches overall can save quite a lot of money and – once the trenches have been filled in – no-one is aware of anything wrong until, of course, there is a cold spell like the one that we have recently experienced!

We all know, because we have heard it so often from know-it-all politicians, that pettifogging regulations enforced mindlessly by faceless bureaucrats, stifle enterprise and inhibit wealth creation. It is worth remembering that they also prevent disasters like that which, as I write these words, we are witnessing in Northern Ireland.

Footnote – I was disquieted to hear the Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Water Authority, who really should have known better, blame all those burst pipes and leaking water mains on ‘the suddenness of the thaw’. Had he been a reader of this blog he would have known that it was the severe and prolonged freeze that damaged the province’s plumbing systems. The thaw merely made it evident.


‘Give all thou canst. High Heaven rejects the law of nicely calculated less or more’

The above quote by William Wordsworth was inspired by the government’s wish to encourage us towards charitable giving, and their making it easier (by any means other than putting extra cash into our pockets or handbags!) for us to do so. Little ‘nudges’ to urge us toward philanthropy are to be included in Council tax and income tax demands and other official communications.

One of the now-totally-useless skills that I acquired as a PoW in Germany was that of driving an ox-cart (yes, oxen were quite commonly used to pull heavy loads in Germany in 1943/’45). The ox would have a single cord attached to the right-hand side of its mouth, connecting it to the driver. When the driver wanted the ox to turn to the right, he pulled long and hard on the cord. That pulled the ox’s head round to the right and it followed its nose in that direction. If, on the other hand, he wanted the ox to turn to the left he gave a series of short, sharp tugs on the cord. This, the ox disliked and instinctively turned his head away from it – toward the left. ‘Simple!’ as the meerkat says in the well-known tv advert!

I have a feeling that those little nudges toward charitable giving, especially when accompanying some kind of a tax demand, are likely to have the same effect on us as those irritating sharp tugs had on the ox. It’ll turn us away from them.

Most of us, in any case, get plenty of reminders of charitable giving landing on our doormats almost every morning, as worthy charities ply us with heart-rending stories and gifts (ball-point pens, pictorial calendars, greetings cards, shopping bags, electric torches – even a few small coins!) to make us feel guilty if we fail to support them. There are two or three charities that I regularly support as generously as I can. If I attempted to give to all who ask, I’d be in need of charity myself.

I don’t think that I am being unduly cynical in suggesting that the government is well aware of the sterling work that many charities perform, and that they realize that their funding cuts to local authorities are limiting, if not stopping altogether, the financial help that charities have come to rely on from that source. They are hoping that their ‘give more to charity’ campaign will encourage us, as individuals, to make up the shortfall.

Possibly men and women of good will, will respond as generously as they are able to. Surely though, it is the government’s job to ensure that less benevolent citizens also make their fair contribution towards the well-being of the sick, the disabled and those otherwise in need. There’s just one way to do that. Reform the Income Tax system, adding a penny or two per pound to the general rate and making it more progressive, so that the seriously wealthy pay their fair share towards national recovery. Stamp out tax evasion and currently-legal tax avoidance. Those are options that, so far, do not appear even to have been considered in the corridors of power.

‘On the twelfth day of Christmas……..’

…..down come the Christmas trees, the holly and the ivy, the fairy lights and the tinsel. In medieval times that was the end of twelve days of celebration. The fact that Shakespeare wrote a play ‘Twelfth Night’ especially for the occasion suggests that the final day of Christmas (6th January) was reckoned to be almost as important as Christmas Day itself.

On the twelfth day – ‘The crib’ at St James’ parish church in Clacton-on-Sea depicts the Magi arriving and presenting their gifts to the new-born Messiah.

It was remembered and celebrated as the anniversary of the day on which the ‘Three Kings’, ‘Three Wise Men’ or ‘Three Magi’ from the east arrived in Bethlehem to give their gifts of gold, frankincense and Myrrh to the newly born Jesus. It was Epiphany (the ‘showing’), the day on which the Christ Child was presented to the Gentiles, whereby God made it clear that the Christ was his revelation of himself to the whole world, not just to the Children of Israel. All the man-made decoration could therefore be put away because ‘The Light of the World’ had come.

Week 52.10 28th December 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Christmas – for Quakers!

Way back in September I wrote an article with the above title for ‘The Friend’, a Quaker Weekly Journal. It expressed my thoughts about the importance of Christmas to Quakers. The Editor thanked me but said that it was rather too long for ‘The Friend’. Could I reduce it from 1,300 to under 1,000 words? I could and I did.

The resultant abridged version was duly published in the Christmas/New Year issue of ‘The Friend’. I felt though that the article might be of interest beyond the confines of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and have decided to publish the original unabridged version in this blog. It could even be of interest to some who don’t consider themselves to be Christians.

Here it is – I hope that you may find it interesting:

Christmas - for Quakers

‘How will you your Christmas keep: feasting, fasting, or asleep? asks Eleanor Farjeon in her poem ‘Keeping Christmas.’

Early Quakers would have answered without hesitation, ‘We don’t keep it at all, nor do we keep any other Christian festival’. This was not because they doubted the virgin birth of Jesus, or that he was God’s Word made Flesh, or the accounts of his crucifixion and resurrection, but because they claimed to celebrate those events in their hearts every day of the year.

There are Quakers today who maintain the testimony against observing ‘times and seasons’ but very few, I think, for the same reason as those early Friends. It is likely that many believe that the Gospel accounts of the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, the shepherds’ angelic vision, and the visit of the Magi are all a myth, invented to add some ‘magic’ to an otherwise prosaic narrative. It is no more literal historical truth, and of no more importance, than the story of Adam and Eve or, come to that, the Greek myth of Pandora and her box.

Nowadays, they say, no one really believes the Christmas story and it’s just an excuse for a spending spree, overeating and boozing! Best to forget the whole silly business and get on with daily life, as those early Quakers did some three centuries ago.

Like early Quakers, I do believe that Jesus Christ was God’s word incarnate (made flesh, personified – whichever you prefer). Unlike them though, I think that it is right to commemorate and celebrate his birthday. Do Friends who pay no heed to ‘times and seasons’ ignore their own children’s birthdays or their own wedding anniversaries? If they do, they must have unusually tolerant and understanding families. I think it unlikely that Jesus’ birth occurred exactly as recounted in the Gospels, but I do think that the Christmas story contains a measure of historic truth. I believe too that even if the whole thing were invented, it would be no less important because of the insight it gives us into the deepest convictions of the early Christian Church.

Think about it. The traditional Christmas story proclaims that the mother of the man who was human but also divine was Mary, an ordinary village girl born and living in Nazareth and engaged to be married to a carpenter. She was to bear her son under circumstances that would bring into doubt his paternity and could even have resulted in her facing an accusation of adultery. He was destined to grow up in an obscure village in the remote province of Galilee, far from Jerusalem and the Temple, the centre of Jewish faith and culture. The first reaction of Nathaneal, when he was told of Jesus, was incredulity; ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’

After having been told that she was to be the mother of the future Messiah Mary composed a triumphal revolutionary anthem that makes The Red Flag appear pale pink in comparison!

He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts’
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

It can only have been thanks to the Grace of God that the Magnificat has survived generation after generation of rule by ‘the proud, the mighty and the rich’ to give hope to the poor and to inspire such martyred Christian leaders as Fr. John Ball of Colchester in the 14th century and Archbishop Romero of El Salvador in the 20th.

The birth took place in Bethlehem. The only inn in the town was fully booked. There was no room available. Temporarily homeless, the expectant mother and her husband found shelter in a stable. It was there that their child was born, a cattle trough serving as a cradle.

These were surely strange circumstances to have been invented by those trying to deceive the world into believing that the child was the long-awaited Messiah, destined to redeem Israel.

More equally inauspicious events were to follow. Those who were first informed of the newborn Messiah were not, as might have been expected, the prophets, scholars and priests of Israel. Nor were they the land’s temporal rulers. Rome was ignorant of, and would have been indifferent to, his birth. When Herod heard of it he sought only the baby’s death!

It was shepherds, tending their flocks on the hillside near Bethlehem, to whom the news of the birth was first given. They were well down the social scale and would have been even lower in the estimate of the rulers of the Temple and arbiters of spiritual life. Shepherds couldn’t, by reason of their occupation, obey the Law of Moses to the letter. Sheep need to be guarded and cared for seven days a week. Nature does not heed the Sabbath. Yet, they were chosen by God to welcome the baby who was to change the whole world.

The first to bring the baby gifts that were symbolic of his kingship, his divine nature – and his cruel and untimely death, were neither Children of Israel nor Jewish converts. They were Magi from a distant land, heathen idolaters of the kind that had been roundly condemned throughout the Scriptures. They were surely symbolic of the fact that Jesus was God’s gift to the whole of humanity, not to Israel only.

More was to follow. Within weeks, Mary and Joseph, with the baby Jesus, were political refugees, fleeing for their lives into the land of Egypt. How long did they stay there? No one knows. At least one apocryphal gospel suggests several years. Other authorities believe a matter of months only. Perhaps it didn’t happen at all and was just part of that meretricious ‘Christmas myth’. Perhaps – but early Christians (and early Friends) believed that, at least in the first instance, the Holy Family was dependent upon ‘the kindness of strangers’ and that they lived for months, perhaps years, among the idolatrous heathen.

Those first Chapters of St Luke’s, St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels tell us that when God’s ‘Word’ (‘that was with God and was God from the beginning and without whom was not anything made that was made’ – and is also the ‘True Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the World’) was ‘made flesh and dwelt among us’, he did not make his home and find his friends among the powerful, the most wise or the most outwardly religious. Throughout his life he made a point of his own lack of worldly possessions (‘The Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head’) and of his identification with social and religious outcasts, with the poor and the homeless, and with ‘foreigners’ dwelling in a strange land. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things (good or bad) to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’. This, early Christians clearly believed, was the nature of their, and our, God.

I do not know how much of the Gospel stories of Christ’s Nativity is true. I have no doubt though about the truth of that summation. If the Christmas story is ‘just a myth’ what a magnificent myth it is; a myth that reveals fundamental truths more clearly than could any cold recounting of historical events! For Quakers (whether believing, half-believing or disbelieving the familiar Christmas story), this revelation of the nature of God deserves to be remembered and celebrated, if not every day of the year, at least at Christmas time.

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.

‘Advent 1955’ by John Betjeman

HAPPY NEW YEAR?

I had intended to put the customary exclamation mark after that New Year salutation. I altered it to a question mark because it is clear to me that for a great many, perhaps most, of us 2011 threatens to be a far-from-happy year. Not for everybody, of course. The chief difference that the seriously wealthy are likely to notice is that when they get their P.A. to insert an advert in the press for an under-gardener, a nursemaid, scullery maid or some other member of the lower classes to perform a menial task ‘about the mansion’ or on the estate, they are likely to have a really tedious number of applications to sort through.

But there, I expect that they’ll get the P.A., the Press Secretary, the Chef or the Estate Manager to sort through them! Strange how – after ten years of ‘New-Labour’ government - the ever-widening gap between the really wealthy and the poor is beginning to replicate the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ of Edwardian days, but in a third millennium context. It’s much the same really – just that the upper servants; the butler, housekeeper, cook and head gardener, now have different, and rather less servile, designations.

As for the rest of us, I reckon that until now most of us have only ‘heard of’ the government’s saving plans. We have been able to persuade ourselves that they’ll really only affect ‘other people’. We’ll be immune.

We won’t be. As we move into the New Year, whatever may be our age, physical condition or financial situation (unless, of course, we’re millionaires) we’re going to be affected by the swingeing reductions in governmental financial support for public services. Perhaps we’ll be losing our job, either because we are employed in the public service or because we’re in the private sector but much or all of our work is under contract to a public authority. We may be losing our home because we can no longer keep up the mortgage payments and, in any case, falling house prices may mean that we now owe more than our home is worth!

You’re fit, you intend to stay fit and you use the Council swimming pool and fitness centre? It is likely to close, have restricted hours of opening, or vastly increased charges. Perhaps you’re not so fit, or you’re elderly, and you use the public library. That will be affected in the same way. Meals on wheels, social services generally? Expect increased charges and a reduction in services. Refuse collection and street cleaning? Weekly collection is likely to become a thing of the past. Our streets will become shabbier and more litter-strewn. Potholes and broken paving stones will remain unrepaired. Economies with policing are likely to lead to an increase in crime. Going out alone after dark could be unwise – especially as the highway authority may be economising on street lighting!

And, of course, it will be local councils who collect the Council Tax and will have to impose the cuts, who will get the blame! Central Government will be seen as the knight in shining armour to whom the public can appeal to save them from ‘rapacious and incompetent bureaucrats at the Town Hall’.

Well, I do wish all blog readers a happy and peaceful New Year! – there’s no harm in wishing, and no harm in hoping!


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Week 51.10 21 December 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

There is a, possibly apocryphal, story of a young couple doing their Christmas shopping and looking at all the depictions of Santa Claus, Rudolph the reindeer, gnomes and fairies in the shop windows. The young woman spotted one shop window with a baby in a manger and shepherds and wise men in attendance. She called to her husband or (since they were a
thoroughly modern couple) her partner. ‘Look at this dear’, she said, ‘would you believe it! They’re even dragging religion into Christmas now!’


In an article in the Christmas number of the Radio Times Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes of the modern practice of describing Christmas as the Midwinter Festival and replacing traditional junior school Nativity Plays with winter morality plays having no religious theme. This is presumably because we now live in a multi-faith society and it is feared that a purely Christian festival might offend those of other religious faiths or of none. Dr Rowan Williams points out that many adherents of other faiths are happy to join with Christians in remembering and re-enacting the Nativity story. Muslims, in particular, accept the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, while rejecting his crucifixion and resurrection. Dr Williams says that one of the best film versions of the Nativity that he has seen was made by an Iranian Muslim film company.

In any case, don’t the apostles of ‘political correctness’ who are so mindful for the feelings of those with other faiths, ever consider the possibility that Christians (still quite a substantial religious group in the UK!) could be offended by their festival having been taken over by secular materialism; what in an earlier age might have been described as the worship and service of Mammon?

Looking at the colourful illustrations of happy children in the pages of the daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette during the week before Christmas, I was cheered and relieved to note that by far the greater number of end-of-term primary school Christmas dramas were straightforward old-fashioned Nativity Plays with a baby in a manger, a bashful Joseph and Mary, shepherds, wise men and angels. Long may they remain so!

I feel no need to conceal my Christian faith, shaky and full of doubt as it often is. I wish all blog readers a joyful Christmas and a peaceful and fulfilled New Year. May the God revealed to us in the manger of ‘a lowly cattle shed’ bless us all.

'In a lowly cattle shed'. The Christmas Crib at St. James' (Church of England) parish church, Clacton-on-Sea

‘Black is actually white'

Nobody is saying that – yet. But, when I hear some of the claims of the present government, I am expecting to hear it any day! There is, for instance, the claim that reducing unemployment pay helps the jobless – it gives them an extra incentive to look for a non-existent job!

Then there is the insistent claim that government is divesting itself of its powers and returning them to ‘the people’ and ‘to local communities’. I have been urging that for years! Ever since the end of World War II central government has been taking responsibility for running local services from the representatives of local people, their elected district councils and either controlling them directly itself or handing them over to giant private corporations. Was that to be reversed?

Not a bit of it. Central government is now taking over the control of the letting of socially provided housing accommodation from elected councils ‘Nanny knows best dear’. It is also taking control of schools away from local democratic control and handing it, with the cash that goes with it, over to head teachers. But ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ as those head teachers will discover if their syllabuses and teaching practices begin to stray too far from what central government (not local people) consider desirable.

Political control of Police Forces is to be taken away from existing Police Committees (whose members, though not directly elected, did at least represent local communities) and handed over to single, directly elected, Police Commissioners (no doubt on a fat-cat salary!) Similarly the government would like to transform local authorities, as they exist today, to be presided over by directly elected Mayors with executive powers. These measures may make for greater efficiency, but they certainly don’t ‘give power to the people’. They would mean that control of the police and of local administration would pass from representative committees to elected dictatorships. It is always easier to bribe or bully a single individual than the members of a committee!

Then there is the matter of university tuition fees, an issue that has provoked, and will continue to provoke, both strong peaceful protest, and angry and destructive riots. But ‘students don’t have to pay a penny up front’ the government insists plaintively. ‘Don’t they understand that no-one has to pay anything at all until his or her income exceeds £21,000 a year. Many students will never pay off their nominal debt. More, rather than less, students from poorer families will be attracted to University education’. Perhaps some, the irresponsible, will be attracted. It will be the more responsible less-than-wealthy who will be deterred. I know that my wife and I would never have encouraged a child of ours to incur a debt of perhaps £40,000 or £50,000 (what’s an odd £10,000 to the seriously wealthy!) hanging over his head for all his working life. The fact that he might never pay it off would have made the prospect additionally abhorrent rather than more attractive. It might have been thought that the current financial crisis would have made even members of the present government (few, if any, of whom have ever known financial hardship) appreciate the fear of debt felt by what used to be known as ‘the deserving poor’ – but apparently not!

But that’s not all. We all know, because top politicians have told us so often, that they’re very keen on keeping seriously and chronically ill patients in their own homes so that they don’t have to spend their last months or years in hospital or a care home. Could it be to facilitate this that the government is phasing out the disability living allowance that pays for carers and other necessities for the bedridden and housebound. This takes effect immediately for new applicants. For those at present in receipt of the allowance it will be phased out in 2015. Perhaps it is to give the disabled an added incentive ‘to rise, take up their beds, and walk’!

‘Black’ may not yet have been officially declared to be ‘white’ but it is certainly beginning to look distinctly ‘greyish’. And now, I learn, the government is trying to find means of measuring the happiness of the electorate! I was about to write that Britain today is looking more and more like George Orwell’s vision of 1984 – but not even George Orwell’s fertile imagination had hit on the idea of a Happiness Gauge!

A bit less seriously!

As Christmas is now just days away, it occurs to me that some readers – or younger members of their families – might be amused by a couple of light-hearted Christmassy pieces of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren. You can guess roughly how many years ago by the fact that all three of those grandchildren are now in their late twenties!

When Santa got stuck in a Chimney….

When Santa got stuck in a chimney
Long ago on a cold winter’s night;
You never heard such a commotion,
You never did see such a sight!

There was soot over mother’s best carpet –
There was soot on the furniture too –
And Santa Claus thought that his boots were on fire
The night he got stuck in a flue.

The reindeer pulled hard on their traces.
(You’d have thought he was stuck there with glue!)
Till at last, in a rush, with a huff and a puff,
Old Santa popped out of the flue.

He sent his red coat to the cleaners
And he said, as he scratched his grey head.
‘Next year I’ll wait till the family’s asleep
And creep in through a window instead!’

Good King Wenceslas

Good King Wenceslas is, as far as I know, the only Christmas carol with no reference to the Nativity. It is also not strictly a Christmas carol at all but a ballad for St. Stephen’s Day, better known to most of us as Boxing Day. It does though carry the strong Christian message of the responsibility of the wealthy and privileged towards the less fortunate.

When I was a small boy I quite thought that the King’s name was Wenslas and that he ‘last looked out’. I had a vision of an important looking man with a crown on his head and wearing a dressing gown who, before going to bed, opened the front door of his palace to put the cat out and leave a note for the milkman in the morning. When he did this on 26th December he spotted this poor old man grubbing through the snow looking for a few sticks of firewood!

Many years later, as a prisoner of war, I spent two Christmases in what had been King Wenceslas’ Kingdom of Bohemia. The snow there really was deep and crisp and even. Looking across snowfields toward distant forest and mountains it was easy to imagine the scene that King Wenceslas had surveyed on that Boxing Day night centuries earlier. Later, hitch-hiking my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia after the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945, I found my way to Prague where I celebrated with jubilant Czechs before moving on. In Wenceslas Square (Prague’s main square), there was the King himself, on his charger, dominating the scene. He, like me, had survived World War II!

Many more years passed and one Christmas, to entertain our grandchildren, my wife Heather and I composed a piece of verse that could have been a prelude to the events recorded in the carol. It was hardly fair on King Wenceslas who, I have little doubt, was a kind and generous man throughout his life. After a thousand years I hope he won’t mind. Here it is:

King Wenceslas hung his stocking up on 24th December.
‘Will Father Christmas call on me. I hope he will remember’.
He early went to bed that night, woke early in the morning;
Roused his pageboy with a shout, as the day was dawning.
‘At the bottom of my bed, there should be a present;
A new gold ring would be quite nice, or a fine fat pheasant!’
At the bottom of the bed, the pageboy found a letter:
Dear King, Be nicer to the poor and I’ll like you better.
It’s a rich man’s job to see beggars don’t go hungry.
If this warning you ignore, I’ll be very angry.
Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s Day. Please look out of doors.
Help the poor man you’ll see there.
Yours truly, Santa Claus

Not great poetry – but it amused the grandchildren!

Happy Christmas to all!

Week 50 14th December 2010

Tendring Topics……on Line

Just imagine!

Just imagine what would have happened if, during the course of the last General Election campaign, a number of very influential politicians had hurried across to Brussels to declare their undying devotion to the European Cause. They might perhaps have said that they regarded the European Union as their ‘other homeland’, that if their party were to be elected they would make sure that the government’s policies were resolutely pro-European, and that any arms contracts to be awarded would go to European manufacturers.

It wouldn’t have been entirely unreasonable. The UK is geographically, culturally, politically and economically part of Europe. The greater part of our overseas trade is with our fellow-Europeans, we have an equal and influential part to play in EU decision-making, and we are bound to that Union by Treaty obligation.

Yet can you imagine the fury and outrage that such a visit would have evoked in the UK? The MPs concerned would have been branded as traitors and lapdogs of Brussels, eager to give away our country’s precious sovereignty and independence. The flag-waving Europhobes of UKIP (and those who support its policies) would probably suggest that the election of those politicians should be declared null and void. MI5 would be urged to find grounds for their prosecution. The headline writers of The Sun, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph would be apoplectic in their efforts to outdo each other in denunciation and insult!

You may perhaps have been astonished to have learned (via Wikileaks) that a number of top politicians did, in fact, go to a foreign power – though not to Brussels – and make just such promises and declarations of loyalty! They were prominent Conservative politicians and the foreign power concerned was the USA, a country with which we are said to have a ‘special relationship’ but whose history, political and legal structures, traditions and culture are different from our own and from those of our European neighbours and partners. That ‘special relationship’ has led us into an illegal war in Iraq, the main effect of which has been to encourage the terrorism it was intended to combat, and to an unwinnable war in Afghanistan that is taking an almost daily toll of British lives. I am thankful that half a century ago we had a Prime Minister who, whatever other faults he may have had, had the courage and independence to keep us out of the USA’s disastrous war in Vietnam. Had he not done so we would have had to make room for even more names on our war memorials, and there would have been even more tearful British widows and orphans on Remembrance Sunday.

Was there outrage about the MPs who were promising unequivocal support (and arms contracts!) to the USA? Not a bit of it. The headline writers of the Mail, the Express and the Sun have been unwontedly silent, despite the fact that one of those MPs is now Foreign Secretary and another Minister for Defence! Nor has there been a squeak of protest from the flag-waving patriots of UKIP (I have always suspected that they were motivated more by hatred of Europe than by love of Britain)

Only an incorrigible romantic can imagine that Britain, bereft of its once mighty Empire, can stand alone in today’s world. Today we are facing a stark choice of closer political and economic integration within a new United Europe in which we would have a powerful and influential voice, or of accepting the status of a protectorate of the USA, having no say in its policies but being always ready to do its bidding, thankful for the occasional smile of approbation and the metaphorical pat on the head. Can it really be possible that a majority of the people in this once-proud country would be happy to see Great Britain reduced to such an abject role?

Within a reborn and truly united Europe we could have a new – and more balanced – special relationship with the USA and with the world’s other emerging powers.

Going away for Christmas? Will your plumbing be safe from frost?

Glancing at my once-popular manuals on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage on my bookshelves as the outside temperature plunged below zero, I remembered that in the past – while they were still in print - arctic weather had encouraged both their sales and the number of times they were loaned out from public libraries, thus boosting my royalties and public lending right payments! It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

In recent years the Christmas period has tended to be quite mild over the whole of the UK. Cold spells were most likely to come in January, February and March. It was usually safe enough to leave your home for a few days over Christmas without worrying unduly about the possibility of a frozen or burst pipe greeting you on your return.

This year things have been – and still could be – very different. We have already had very cold weather with subzero temperatures day and night for several days at a time. Thought should be given to frost protection even if you expect to be absent over Christmas only for a couple of days. The suggestions in my plumbing books are some twenty years out of date. Domestic heating systems and home insulation have made spectacular advances in those two decades. Basic principles and basic problems remain the same though.

Practically everything in the world contracts (shrinks, gets smaller) as it gets colder and colder. Water is an exception. It contracts until it gets to within a few degrees of zero Celsius – then it expands as it ‘changes state’ and becomes ice. It is that expansion that bursts pipes and damages plumbing systems. Many people imagine that pipes burst with the thaw. That’s not true. They burst, if they are going to, when they freeze. You don’t know about it till the thaw though, because the ice blockage prevents water flowing from the damaged pipe.

Lagging, although essential, will not, on its own, protect a plumbing system from freezing during a prolonged icy spell. There will always be some loss of heat when a house is unoccupied and its fabric chills off completely. The best way to protect it is to introduce a regular source of warmth. If you have a reliable automatic gas or oil fired central heating system it is a good idea either to have a ‘frost stat’ or to make sure that it comes on, perhaps for an hour or two when it is likely to be most cold – in the ‘small hours’ of the morning. That should be sufficient to prevent freezing.

The most vulnerable part of your plumbing system is up in the roof space and if you have – as recommended – insulated it to prevent heat loss from the rooms below, it will be that much more vulnerable. While the house is empty it is a good idea to prop the trap-door leading to the roof pace open by perhaps an inch, to allow slightly warmer air from the house to flow up into this vulnerable area. Don’t forget to close I again though, directly you are home!

The above really does no more than alert readers to the risk and suggest one or two obvious precautions. If in doubt it would be a good idea to consult the heating engineer who regularly services your boiler.

I hope that you have an enjoyable – and carefree – Christmas break and return to find your home as warm and comfortable as it was when you left it.

Perfect Timing

I hope that the Guardian will forgive my lifting a few paragraphs from a recent edition. On 7th December, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Lasange, was arrested on a Swedish extradition request, was refused bail despite enormous sums being offered as surety, and was incarcerated in Wandsworth Prison. Mr Lasange is charged with sexual offences that he hotly denies. (Meanwhile we learn today, 10th December that a suspected murderer wanted by the South African Government has been granted bail while awaiting a court hearing!) Strident but influential voices in the USA have been loud in their condemnation of Wikileaks’ exercise of its freedom of speech, and in demanding the arrest of the organisation’s founder. It really doesn’t need an incorrigible devotee of ‘conspiracy theories’ to see the hand of the State Department and the CIA in the sequence of events.

The Guardian reports that meanwhile, on the same day (7th December)………..

5.30pm: With perfect timing an email arrives from Philip Crowley at the state department:
The United States is pleased to announce that it will host Unesco's World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from 1-3 May in Washington, DC.
Ironic? Read the next paragraph from the press release:
The theme for next year's commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.
I particularly like the bit that I have printed in ‘bold’ type! I am sure that it would be appreciated by Mr Lasange!

There really isn’t anything that I can add to the Guardian’s brief comment. ‘Shameless, you couldn’t make it up’

Essex County Council breaks new ground – yet again!

It’s quite like the old days when Lord Hanningfield was at the helm! Once again Essex County Council is leading the way with a revolutionary policy that, as far as I know, has never yet been tried by a local authority.

One of the statutory duties laid on County Councils by central government is the welfare of children in care – and it seems that Essex C.C. is not very good at it. An Ofsted report says that the Council’s care homes are ‘unsatisfactory’ and Mrs Sarah Candy, the county councillor responsible for these homes says with endearing candour, ‘We are more than aware of the Ofsted judgement against us. Essex County Council does not have the best record and we have not been delivering the services children need.’

It might have been thought that the County Council would now be making mammoth efforts to improve those services – even if it cost money, even if it meant digging into those reserves-held-for-a-rainy-day, even if it meant foregoing the increase in allowances that the councillors voted for themselves earlier this year.

Not a bit of it. Innovative lateral thinking has produced a solution that will enable the Councillors to put all those unkind criticisms behind them, and make some money in the process! They are simply going to privatise their failing children’s homes – sell them off as they sold off their old people’s homes a few years ago. It is expected that this will result in the loss of 128 jobs (tough luck – but you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs) but it will save the County Council an estimated £3 million a year!

Mrs Candy insists that it is the children’s welfare that they have at heart and that the privatisation has nothing to do with money. No wonder though, that she was smiling when pictured in the Coastal Gazette.

Week 49 7th Dec. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Prepared for the weather?

Do you remember last winter, how it went on and on? And do you remember how, directly it was over, Essex County Council, as one of England’s largest highway authorities, called a conference of all such authorities, to discuss dealing with snowed-up highways in future years. I can’t remember what the conference decided. I do remember though that Lord Hanningfield (then leader of Essex County Council) announced that it had been a great success. It was, he claimed, yet another example of Essex County Council leading the way and others following!

Well, winter has undoubtedly come onto us early this year and, before the end of November snow covered a great deal of the country. We had the usual toll of traffic accidents and of traffic halted or reduced to a crawl. Highway authorities began salting and gritting major roads in an effort to keep traffic moving. Most of them, (who knows, perhaps they had been inspired by that conference!) announced that this year they wouldn’t be caught out. They had enormous stocks of grit and salt available and had ample reserves accessible if they needed them.

I think that they may have been a little over-confident. They started using up their salt stock before the beginning of December. No-one can possibly know how long the winter will last and how many days and nights of freezing temperatures and lying snow we would have to endure before the spring. Shelley concludes his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ with the rhetorical question, ‘O Wind – if winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ The only honest answer to that is, ‘Yes, sometimes it can be!’ There are no certainties where the weather is concerned.

There were no such boasts from County Hall in Chelmsford. Unaccustomed modesty? Perhaps – but on 25th November the Coastal Gazette carried the alarming report that, ‘Essex may run out of road gritting salt if this winter becomes as bad as last year’. The report goes on to say:

‘Despite improvements to the quality of the salt and closer relationships with other authorities to improve gritting, another bad winter could make public highways dangerous for pedestrians, shoppers and drivers.

Figures in Essex County Council’s winter operational document for 2010/2011 show that Essex will have less than the minimum material recommended every week for the winter. Some depots do not have the capacity to store even the minimum.‘
‘
Norman Hume, county councillor responsible for highways and transportation agreed that the council had made provision only for a ‘normal’ winter and not for the conditions that we had experienced during the past two years. ‘We started with the salt barns full to capacity but the problem was re-supply. As a nation we can’t put resources into a policy not required except in exceptional circumstances’

I would hardly think that conditions that prevailed throughout the last two winters and look set to continue this year could be regarded as particularly exceptional!

The weather has been worse. Here is the sea frozen over near Clacton Pier in the early months of 1963. That year we had hard frosts until well into early spring

The county council does not plan to salt residential or minor roads, but will concentrate on major routes with local councils helping in town centres. Where, I wonder, will local councils find the funding to carry out this Highway Authority task?

Altogether, unless the weather gets much kinder, it is a pretty poor outlook this winter for local motorists, cyclists and pedestrians (and, of course, mobility scooterists; snowfall is the only circumstance that keeps my ‘iron horse’, confined to stable!) It’s not really what those who live in a county with a council that claims to ‘lead the rest!’ would expect.

In Vino Veritas

No, I didn’t have a classical education (I envy those who did!) but along life’s way most of us pick up a few Latin phrases and In Vino Veritas (Truth is in the wine) is one of mine. It means that alcohol loosens the tongue, frees us from our inhibitions and reveals our true nature. Thus, under the influence of a couple of drinks, a road sweeper may be revealed as a true gentleman and a Duke as something of an oaf.

The leaked (by Wikileaks) report of Prince Andrew’s indiscreet speech at a ‘brunch’ in Kyrgyzstan that he had attended as a British trade representative, suggests to me that His Royal Highness should have had a little more ‘tonic’ in his host’s pre-meal vodka-and-tonic. Surely he wouldn’t otherwise have made unflattering remarks about our American cousins with the American Ambassador present.

More serious though was his claim that it was ‘idiocy’ to investigate the allegations of bribery having taken place during the course of a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and to have denounced snooping Guardian journalists investigating bribery and corruption in other overseas trade deals. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that the American report on the incident said that the other Brits present had greeted these remarks not with disapproval but with enthusiasm.

Perhaps they too had had a drop too much. I hope so. It would be very sad indeed if, when stone cold sober, representatives of our country believed that there was some moral difference between offering a bribe and accepting one, and that it was quite all right for Britons to bribe influential ‘foreigners’ to obtain lucrative overseas contracts for British firms.

Can they really believe that morality, like religion, is a private matter for the individual conscience ………but that business is business and obeys no rules but its own?

Healthy North-East Essex?

I have always believed that the Tendring District, and in particular its coastal area is a good and healthy place to live. Low rainfall, fresh air blowing in off the sea, and lots of sunshine, combine to account for the fact that there are a great many oldies in our district. Some, like me, have grown old here, others have chosen to come here on retirement. More of us than in most areas survive and even thrive, into our eighties.

This is just as well because a recently published NHS report makes it clear that appreciably less is spent by the NHS in north-east Essex, in the Colchester and Tendring Districts, than in other parts of our county. The North-East Essex Primary Care Trust spends up to £8,000 per 1,000 residents less on cancer treatment (cancer is a condition more likely to afflict the old than the young) than Trusts in south Essex. Our primary care trust spends between £140,00 and £170,00 on mental health while in the south-east of the county they spend between £200,000 and £240,000.

People in north Essex are less likely to receive a needed hip replacement than their counterparts in the south and patients with chronic lung disease (another affliction of the elderly) are likely to face a longer hospital stay in Colchester and Clacton than elsewhere in the county. This, says the report, ‘does them more harm than good’.

Will the government’s plan to abolish primary care trusts and put commissioning of health care in the hands of GPs help reduce these inequalities. Bernard Jenkin, North Essex and Harwich MP thinks so. He is reported as saying, ‘What the government is going to do is remove the bureaucrats from the decisions about who gets treated, and the doctors are going to be put in charge of health treatment budgets. GPs choosing what treatments are made is the best way to create greater equality.’

Perhaps – but in the same issue of the Coastal Gazette that carries the NHS report we learn that a Dr Shane Gordon is the joint chief executive of the new GP consortium that will take over health-care budgets for Colchester and Tendring by 2013. I reckon that Dr Gordon will need quite a few lay clerical and administrative staff to help him with this task. Could it be just another bureaucratic organisation in the making

A Question of Extradition

Wikileaks revelations have brought the sad case of Gary McKinnon back into the public eye. I have to confess that I had completely forgotten this young IT genius who – clearly with no evil intent – had hacked his way into the defence secrets of the USA’s Pentagon! The sensible course of action of the US government would have been to ask him how he had done it, and ask him to co-operate in helping them to design a truly hack-proof system.

But no, for this dire offence ‘that threatened US security’ the USA wanted him to be extradited, in accordance with an extradition treaty accepted by Tony Blair, and to face trial in the USA. My opinion of Gordon Brown and David Cameron went up a notch or two when I learned that they had both intervened on Gary McKinnon’s behalf – and my opinion of Hilary Clinton dropped like a stone on learning that she had rejected their pleas.

I remember all too well how American Courts repeatedly refused to extradite convicted IRA murderers to England during the still-recent ‘troubles’. I remember too how a British Government had refused to extradite to Spain, General Pinochet, who had presided over the murders of hundreds of his fellow countrymen and others, and the torture of hundreds more, including Sheila Cassidy, a British doctor*. What a British government could do for Pinochet, its successors can do for Gary McKinnon.

But then, of course, General Pinochet had been a personal friend of Mrs Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) and of Norman Lamont (now Lord Lamont) her less-than-successful Chancellor.

*See ‘Audacity to Believe’ by Sheila Cassidy, published 1977 by Collins of London, Publishers.

Not all Surprises!

I was certainly surprised by some of the revelations from Wikileaks, which – as I write – are being fed to us daily. I was, for instance, quite astonished to discover that the Governor of the Bank of England’s assessment of the qualities of our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer was much the same as my own – though his judgement is of course, much more firmly grounded in knowledge and experience than mine is.

I was not however in the least surprised that the British and American governments were both seriously concerned about the possibility of Pakistan’s Nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists, who might use those weapons against us and/or India. In fact, I’d have been very anxious had I thought that that they were not worried about this possibility.

I reckon that the fact that Pakistan, India and Israel actually have nuclear weapons should cause us a lot more anxiety than the thought that Iran may possibly one day acquire them.