Week 52 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

The Christmas Story

        Some ten years ago my wife Heather and I wrote ten monologues purporting to be the words of ten ‘witnesses’ of Jesus’ birth and its aftermath.  For this Christmas week’s blog I have chosen the account of Joseph  husband of Mary the mother of Jesus.

Heather and I

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All that we know of Joseph from the Gospels is that he was a very kindly man and that he loved Mary so much that, even when he thought that she was going to give birth to another man’s child, he didn’t want her to be punished or shamed.

 Heather and I decided that he would also have been very wise, gentle and tolerant.  Our Joseph had great love and respect for Mary’s parents but he didn’t agree with her father’s militant nationalism.  He welcomed the wise men and their caravan guide and recognised the guide as a good man despite the fact that he was a worshipper of a heathen goddess.  He made friends with the Roman frontier guards who helped Mary, himself and the baby Jesus escape into Egypt, and with the Egyptian woman who gave them shelter and who prayed for their safe return to Israel at the shrine of her goddess Isis.  He hoped that if Mary’s son really was destined to ‘change the world’ he would change it into a place where Romans, Greeks, Jews and Persians lived together in peace, and where it was recognised that those who followed the spirit within them that urged them toward love, friendship and forgiveness rather than greed, cruelty and vengeance, were serving the one true God, whatever they might call him.

    Our world would surely be a happier one if there were more people in it like ‘our’ Joseph.

We have imagined him talking to a close friend soon after returning, with Mary and Jesus, from Egypt to Palestine.

Joseph’s Story   

  ‘I have the greatest respect and admiration for my wife’s parents.  It is surely due to their upbringing that Mary has proved to be a loyal friend and a congenial companion to me, as well as a loving wife and mother.  I shall never forget either, how Joachim, Mary’s father, helped my journeyman assistant to keep the business going during the five long years that we were away, while Anne, his wife, made sure that our home would always be ready, clean and welcoming for us on our return.

   I have to say though, that I don’t share Joachim’s unthinking hatred of all things Roman or his narrow nationalism that sees all other races and traditions as being vastly inferior to our own.  After all, it wasn’t the Roman Governor but Herod – one of our own people – who killed the innocent babes of Bethlehem.

   But I’m getting ahead of myself.  You’ll have heard from Joachim about the terrible trouble that we all thought had beset us when Mary announced that she was expecting a child.  I was devastated.  No, I don’t know quite what I would have done if I hadn’t had that angelic visitation assuring me that Mary was telling the truth.  I really loved her – and I do know that I wouldn’t have let her be submitted to public shame, much less would I have let her be punished by a cruel death.

  

As you know, Mary and I were quietly married. Hardly though had we settled down in Nazareth and made our preparations for the baby’s arrival than there came this order from Rome that we all had to return to our home towns to be counted.  In my case that meant going down south to Bethlehem.

   I had hoped that it might have been possible for Mary and I to travel down there, be counted and get back to Nazareth before the baby’s arrival.  He wasn’t, when we started out – expected for several weeks.

   My hopes had been wildly over-optimistic.  Those weeks quickly passed.  Travelling through Samaria we lost our way in a blinding sandstorm and were rescued by a Samaritan woman who took us back to her home, where Mary rested till she was fit to travel again.

   That was only one of our mishaps. By the time we reached Bethlehem it was the depth of winter.  To cap it all, the only decent inn in the place was fully booked.  There wasn’t a room to be had for love nor money.  That truly was our lowest ebb.  The baby was expected any minute.  Mary was as white as a sheet and shaking with cold, fear and exhaustion.  I felt completely helpless and was blaming myself for having brought my beloved Mary into such a hopeless situation.

   I prayed – and my prayers were answered.  The innkeeper’s wife took one look at Mary and took her under her wing.  She was a great organiser.  There wasn’t a spare room but there was an empty stable that she transformed into a birth chamber with bales of hay.  She bundled me into the saloon bar with some food and a drink while she and her daughter Ruth attended to Mary.

   They called me back after about an hour.  Baby Jesus had been born.  Mary, cradling him in her arms, was radiant.  I wasn’t very pleased when, just as we were settling down to try and get some sleep, some shepherds arrived.  They had been told by an angel that the saviour of mankind had just been born and they had come to pay him homage.

   I’d have been inclined to tell them to come back in the morning but Mary, her spirits completely restored, welcomed them and showed them our lovely child. I was amazed at Mary’s self-assurance when, holding the baby in her arms, she gave the shepherds the blessing for which they asked, while they knelt humbly in the straw before her.

   We had to get used to that sort of thing.  A room became vacant in the inn and we moved into it and settled down for Mary to recover her strength.  We made our formal visit to the Temple in Jerusalem and were just preparing to return to Nazareth when a great caravan of heavily laden camels entered Bethlehem.  With it came three Magi from somewhere in the east – Persia I think – with gifts for baby Jesus, gold, frankincense and myrrh.  They claimed to be able to forecast the future by studying the stars and it was in doing so that they learned of our baby’s birth and his great destiny.

   The Magi were very awe-inspiring but I remember particularly the caravan captain who had guided them to us.  He wore round his neck an amulet that made it clear that he was a devotee of the goddess Ashtoreth, whom I had always been told was a spirit of extreme evil.  I fully expected Jesus to shrink away from it – or alternatively for it to shrivel up under his gaze.  Not a bit of it though.  He had a special smile and a gurgle for the caravan captain – and he reached out to play with the brightly coloured amulet.

   The captain was a good man – though he worshipped a cruel, heathen goddess.  He had realized that we were in deadly peril from Herod, who feared that Jesus would one day seize his throne.   He tried to warn us – a warning that was confirmed during the night when our angel again appeared to tell us to pack up and head for safety in Egypt without delay.

   Egypt was in the opposite direction from that in which we wished to go but we knew better than to ignore the angel’s message.   We set out at once and noted as we did so that the Magi’s caravan was also urgently on the move.  They too had been warned.

   We avoided the main routes into Egypt for fear of Herod’s spies.  As a result we became hopelessly lost in the wilderness of Sinai.  This time we were rescued by a Roman frontier patrol.  We were terrified as they approached us but they directed us on our way and – when they saw the baby Jesus – shared their rations with us and tried to tell us of their own wives and babies far away.

   Eventually we reached Egypt and safety.  A Greek lady, living in a villa near Heliopolis, made us welcome and gave us shelter which we thought would be just for a day or two but turned out to be nearly five years!  All of us prospered there.  There was plenty of work for a skilled carpenter.  Mary fully recovered her strength and Jesus grew from a baby into a strong, healthy little boy.

   When we heard that that wicked King Herod had died, Cleopatra, the Greek lady, urged us to stay with her and the good friends that we had made in Egypt.  We knew though that our destiny drew us back to the land of Israel.  Cleopatra wept, and the night before we departed I saw her kneeling before her shrine to the goddess Isis, burning incense and making sacrifice for our safe journey home.

   If Mary’s son is destined to change the whole world, I’d like to see him change it to a world in which Jews, Samaritans, Romans, Greeks and Persians can live together in peace.  A world in which we Israelites and those who worship the many gods of the heathen will realize that we are all serving the one true God (whatever we may call him) when we follow that instinct within ourselves that leads us away from violence, cruelty and desire for revenge and towards love, kindliness and forgiveness.

………………………………………

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Week 51 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

Pots and Kettles!

            Rarely before can such a relatively trivial thoughtless action have caused so great a tragedy as that of the two Australian disc jockeys who successfully phoned through to the hospital ward where the Duchess of Cornwall was being treated for severe morning sickness.  They clearly did it ‘just for a laugh’ and with no malicious intent whatsoever.  It should have done no more than cause embarrassment to the hospital (who should have had a professional phone operator on duty at all times), to the nurse who had actually discussed her royal patient’s condition to a caller pretending to be the Queen, and – just possibly – to the Duchess of Cornwall herself.

            In fact it resulted in the death of a well-loved and devoted nurse who was also a wife and mother. She had done nothing wrong but had tried to help by answering and passing on a phone call.  She died, so we are told, because she couldn’t endure the ‘shame’ of having received a hoax call and believing the caller was whom she claimed to be.

            My word!   During the past year we have seen government incompetence permit hundreds of illegal immigrants enter the country; appoint a private security enterprise to ‘police’ the Olympics that was clearly incapable of fulfilling its obligations; and make a complete botch of handling the West Coast Line rail franchise – costing tax payers millions of pounds!  We have also seen top politicians of both main parties involved in close personal friendships with the principals of a news organisation that has been exposed as involved in widespread criminal activities seriously damaging scores of lives.  Those are just the disasters that have come to my attention!

            None of the top politicians concerned have felt sufficient shame even to resign their office, never mind take their own lives!  As I have said before in this blog, they simply blame it all on the civil servants, tell us that ‘lessons have been learned’, shrug their shoulders and carry on as before. Nurses, whose duties are certainly as full of responsibility (and some may say are at least as valuable) as those of politicians, clearly have thinner skins.

            I have also found nauseating the alacrity of the British Press in condemning the Australian radio station and the two disc jockeys involved in the hoax phone call that had such tragic consequences. All of this was just a week after the publication of the report of Lord Leveson into the nefarious activities of the press in this country.  If ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, that was it.

              And could the David Cameron who said that he couldn’t imagine why the two Australian disc jockeys had been ‘allowed’ to make that phone call, possibly be the same David Cameron who last week was denouncing the idea of ‘freedom of speech’ being stifled by any kind of statutory control on the activities of the news media?

 A New Layer of Bureaucracy?

          Countrywide, not very many people bothered to vote at that election in October for a Police and Crime Commissioner to appoint (and dismiss!) the Chief Constable, set the police budget and generally point the police in the direction that  they should be going.   I wonder how many of us who did vote (yes. I was among them) realized that we weren’t just electing one man or woman on an inflated salary to rule the constabulary roost but establishing the base of a new bureaucracy.

            It should have been obvious that it wouldn’t be only Chief Constables that the new Commissioners would appoint.  They would need their own office and their own staff.  They would need an accountant with some knowledge of public finances to help with the budgetary demands of the office.  They would need a deputy and at least one or two assistants to visit far flung parts of the police area.   Essex is a big area – as large and as populous as some European states, as Lord Hanningfield used to remind us.   They would need a secretary and probably a dogsbody to receive visitors, answer the phone, do the filing, and make an occasional cup of tea.  Oh – come to think of it, it might be a good idea to recruit someone with at least some experience of police work.

            A report in the local daily Gazette suggests that some of the newly elected Commissioners are already throwing their weight about.  Some have compelled the existing Chief Constable in their areas to apply again for his own job!  Sixteen of them have already appointed deputies on salaries of up to £65,000 a year!   Adam Simmonds, Northamptonshire’s Conservative new Commissioner has published plans to hire seventeen people, including four Assistant Commissioners to help him.  There should be several nice ‘jobs for the boys’ there!

            Nick Alston. Essex’s new Commissioner is taking a more cautious approach.  He is first of all recruiting an adviser to help him draft a job description for the post of Deputy.  He hopes to have the deputy in office by April.   A rather more urgent task will be finding a replacement for the existing Chief Constable, Jim Barker-McCardle who has announced that he will be leaving ‘for personal reasons’.   There are said to be fourteen forces currently looking for new Chief Constables (I suppose it couldn’t be the thought of having a political ‘commissar’ breathing down their necks that has prompted a mass exodus?) so he’ll face strong competition for the best.

           The Government could have avoided all this extra expense and further tier of bureaucracy by simply passing the responsibility for overseeing the police to the democratically elected local authority for the area.  Those authorities would then have had to make fewer of their existing staff redundant, would have ensured closer co-operation between the police and other closely related local services such as education and social service – and would have saved the expense of that stupid, unrepresentative and expensive election.  If only they could get it into their heads that what may be right for Boston Mass. isn’t necessarily the best thing for Boston Eng. And that Littlehampton’s needs aren’t necessarily exactly the same as those of Little Rock!  You’d never dream that this was a government cutting services and benefits to the unemployed, the old and the disabled in a frantic effort to reduce the national debt. 

            Will the new Commissioners breathe fresh life into our police forces and thus justify their existence and their very nice salaries?  Perhaps…….but  I’m not holding my breath!

Local Statistics

          I don’t suppose that anyone was surprised to learn that last year’s census revealed that the Tendring District was among the top ten with the oldest populations.    I was only surprised that as many as eight of the 363 local authorities in England and Wales have populations older than ours.  Over 35 percent of Tendring’s population are over the age of 60 and 1.4 percent (more than 2,000 altogether) are – like me - over ninety. I am personally acquainted with only three of them beside myself and I suppose that the reason we are not very conspicuous is that old age tends to limit our mobility. Certainly it is only my mobility scooter (my iron horse!) that prevents my being housebound – and a miserable old so-and-so I’d be if I were!

            I was pleased to see that 88,000 of us describe ourselves as being Christian.  That’s 64 percent of Tendring’s population, five percentage points higher than the population of England and Wales as a whole.  I think that the relatively low figure may be at least a little misleading.  I know personally several people whom I would describe as Christian but who don’t themselves do so because they feel that it associates them with the crusades, the religious wars and persecutions of the Middle Ages, the witch trials and the inquisition.

            I prefer to think that it associates us with such great Christian characters as Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, William Penn, Elizabeth Fry and thousands of other unknown-by-name men and women who, over the past two millennia, have opposed the evils of their world.  Many have suffered as a result.  Tens of thousands of others have quietly tried to live their lives in accordance with the example and teaching of Jesus Christ.  Without them the world today would be an even sadder place than it is. 

Some Good News

          As 2012 draws towards its close it is good to have news of the progress  of an international enterprise whose activities will affect us all and whose efforts are proceeding on time and in accordance with promises made months ago, despite a year of extreme weather conditions that did their best to hinder progress.

            Earlier this year I commented on a ground-breaking addition to the Gunfleet Sands Windfarm visible from Clacton’s beaches and promenades.  Two giant turbines – beside which the existing turbines will appear as midgets! – with vastly increased energy producing capacity, are to be added to that wind-farm.  If  successful they will be the prototypes of future wind turbines round the British coastline.

    Dong Energy’s recently published Community Newsletter tells us that they are well beyond the half-way point in the offshore construction of these two giant turbines.  Onshore and offshore cable installation has been completed as has the foundation structures for the turbines.  It is hoped that the turbines themselves will be installed in January (this does depend to some extent on the weather) and that they will begin to generate power by March of next year – in less than three months time          !

            I look forward to the appearance of these two new ‘one-legged giants’ on our skyline.  Wind turbines can’t supply all Britain’s energy needs but we do need urgently to end our reliance on fossil carbon-producing energy sources.  Even our climate-change sceptical MP, and the one or two misinformed correspondents of the Clacton Gazette who oppose both wind and solar farms, must surely see that the sources of fossil fuels are finite and even if they did not hasten climatic change (which I am sure they do!) we would need to replace them with clean and infinitely renewable means of energy supply.

            Wind-power, solar power, tidal and wave power can, I believe, ultimately supply that need.  We should welcome any and all progress toward that end.    

           Christmas is coming!

            In fact, when I publish this blog on the internet next Wednesday morning 19^th December, it will be less than a week away.  Christmas Day is on the Tuesday of the following week so I shall publish my blog for that week on Christmas Eve, Monday 24^th December, instead of on Wednesday 26th.  I really don’t yet know when the blog after that will be published – possibly on Wednesday 2^nd January.

            I know from the statistics given by my website provider that I have many greatly valued readers in India and in the Middle East.  Christmas is a Christian Festival and my blog next week will relate to the Christian story of the birth of Jesus.  May I assure Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist readers (and readers who have no religious faith at all!) that you will read nothing in that blog that will offend you or your religious faith in any way.  I hope that you will find the blog interesting and entertaining and that it will encourage friendship and understanding between people of every religious tradition.

            Whatever your faith may be I wish all blog readers a very happy day on 25^th December – and a New Year of Peace and Hope. May God Bless us All.

            

Week 50 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘In the bleak midwinter……….’

          So begins a well-loved Christmas carol, describing weather rather more Dickensian than Palestinian!  Will Christina Rosetti’s words written in 1872 describe our winter of 2012/’13 with its, ‘Frosty wind made moan.  Earth was hard as iron, Water like a stone. Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow – in that bleak midwinter, long ago’?

            It was still dark when I published my weekly blog on the internet at about 7.00 am last Wednesday, 4^th December.  In it I expressed a fear that, after a summer and autumn of heavy rain and floods, winter would bring freezing weather, icy roads and footpaths, and heavy snow.  I pulled aside the curtains from my window and looked outside – my garden was covered with a thin layer of snow and snow was falling from the heavens!   The snowstorm didn’t last long but, as I write these words three hours later, the snow is still lying and it is bitterly cold outside.  I fear it is a presage of things to come!

            The previous evening I had watched a BBC tv news bulletin including the concern of Shelter, the charity serving the homeless, that the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of our big cities (in particular London and Glasgow), after having fallen at the beginning of the new century, was now steadily rising and expected to rise still further as a result of government policies and proposed policies

It is very difficult to get an accurate estimate of the number of ‘rough sleepers’ as they tend to seek out remote alleyways, passages and derelict buildings to get what shelter they can from the elements.  Estimates are likely to be lower than actuality.  However it is reckoned that during the winter of 2011/2012 there were no less than 5,678 rough sleepers in London – an increase of 43 percent on the previous year’s total of 3,975.  In the future the total is likely to be higher still, particularly if the government goes ahead with its cap on Housing Benefit, its exclusion of single under-25s from Housing Benefit, and its ‘bedroom tax’ on Council house tenants and those in receipt of Housing Benefit.

Every night I sleep warmly and comfortably under my duvet.  At 4.30 am my gas central heating and water heating come on for two hours, ensuring that when I rise just before 6.00 am (yes, I am an early riser) my bungalow is comfortably warm and there is plenty of hot water for my morning wash, shave and shower.  I prepare and eat my ample breakfast at my leisure in a warm kitchen.  During the two hours the boiler was in action it will have produced sufficient hot water for twenty-four hours.  After I have dressed and breakfasted I decide whether or not I need to switch it back on for space heating only.

  How very different every night is the plight of thousands of my fellow men and women!   In London alone at the most conservative estimate, at least 5,000 of them try to find some protection from wind and rain in shop doorways or alleyways and settle down on cold, hard paving stones to snatch a few hours’ sleep, threatened not only by the vagaries of the weather but the criminal violence of fellow humans in an even more desperate plight than themselves.   They wake shivering and with aching limbs, cold, hungry and miserable, to face another day of seeking shelter and begging or stealing to stay alive.   Why don’t they seek work?  For those who have a fixed address it's difficult enough to find a job.. For those who haven’t, it’s impossible. There’s a more-than-usually vicious circle.  Lose your job and you’re likely to be made homeless.  Once you’re homeless and have ‘no fixed abode’ you can never hope to find employment!  

Clacton’s Wellesley Road on New Year’s Day 1979.  Tough luck for ‘rough sleepers’!

Yes, some of them are alcoholics or drug abusers.  Give them the few coins for which they beg and they’ll go straight and spend them on something guaranteed to make their situation even more hopeless. They may be well aware of that – but they also know that the substance that will ultimately destroy them will give them, if only briefly, a release from misery and despair. ‘Judge not, that thou be not judged!’ According to Dante there is a notice at the entrance to Hell; ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’.  No wonder rough sleepers are 35 times more likely to take their own lives than the rest of us. 

I have endured hunger, cold and privation as a common soldier and as a prisoner of war during World War II, but have never experienced squalid discomfort, cold and hunger comparable with that of these ‘free’ fellow-countrymen and women of mine who have the misfortune to be penniless and homeless. Nor, unlike them, was I ever entirely without hope of a better future.

We Christians should remember that every time we say ‘Our Father’ we are acknowledging that the homeless and the destitute, the undeserving as well as the deserving, are our brothers and sisters, our fellow humans.  I am glad that Christian Churches are well to the fore in seeking to alleviate the plight of the rough sleepers and trying to lift them out of the abyss of hopelessness, loneliness and despair in which they find themselves.

 But charities, however committed and hard-working, can never hope to do more than ease the problem.  It is up to the politicians to reduce and ultimately solve it.  I have almost given up hope of them ever doing that – but surely they could try to refrain from making a bad situation even worse!

 Correcting Karl Marx!

            There has been a great deal of outrage in the news media in recent weeks  about the overseas corporations that trade very successfully in this country but, usually by having their HQ or financial base in a country with a lower corporation tax than the UK, succeed in paying little or no taxation here.  Three highly successful international corporations have been ‘named and shamed’ – Starbucks, Amazon and Google.

            This negative publicity seems to have had a salutary effect on Starbucks who, no doubt because their customers were deserting them and patronising other coffee-house chains, have announced that they will be changing their financial arrangements so that our Inland Revenue receive some benefit from their highly profitable activities.  That is very nice of them – but it really shouldn’t be the prerogative of a commercial enterprise to decide whether or not to pay its proper dues.  Operating a business in this country is a privilege and, in market-driven Britain today privileges, like everything else, have their price.

            The only one of those three corporations that is of regular service to me is Google – and very valuable I have found it.  Providing me and the rest of us Brits with a first-class service isn’t however the primary objective of Google.  That is maximising the profits made for its international shareholders. Paying for the privilege of trading profitably in this country is just one of the, no doubt tiresome, overheads that need to be subtracted from those profits before they are distributed.  It is up to our government to see that that this is done.

            Nor, of course, is it only foreign enterprises that seek to maximise their profits at the expense of other British taxpayers.  I pointed out a few months ago that Boots the Chemists (as British as the Union Jack!) has its HQ in a small village in Switzerland for no other purpose than to reduce its tax liability.  I don’t for one moment imagine that Boots is the only British culprit.

When Karl Marx declared that Der Arbeiter hat kein Vaterland (working people have no Fatherland) he could hardly have been more wrong.  Hundreds of thousands of European working men and women (British, German, French and Russian) demonstrated their loyalty to their fatherlands (and paid for that loyalty with their lives) in two World Wars.   It is their employers, the giant corporations whom Marx would have described as the Bourgeoisie, who place profit before both fatherland and fellow-countrymen.

'Patriotism is all very well - but Business is Business!'

 ‘All in this together?’

            Now we truly are ‘all in this together’ announced  the ecstatic front page headline of the Daily Mail the day after George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered his autumn statement last Tuesday (5^th December).   The really wealthy and those in benefit are both to be targeted by the Government.   Both ends of the social spectrum are to suffer financially. What could be fairer and more egalitarian?

            That assessment overlooks the fact that the sums to be extracted from the bank accounts of the wealthy will cause them, at the most, only minor irritation and inconvenience.   The cuts imposed on the poor will force thousands of poor families to face the question, ‘Do we eat or heat?’  Thousands will be a little closer to losing their homes.    In the Biblical parable the poor widow who handed over her last ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury was left totally penniless. The Treasury’s wealthy contributors poured in their gold and silver coins – but those coins amounted to only a fraction of their total wealth.  ‘Which of them’. asked Jesus, ‘was the more generous giver?’            

         

            As a pensioner I am one of those who will not suffer directly from the Chancellor’s Budget proposals.  However, the postponement of a return to normality for yet another year (and who is to say there won’t be a further postponement in a year’s time?) makes it increasingly unlikely that I shall live to see an end to austerity.  I do wish that the Chancellor hadn’t had quite such a self-satisfied smile on his face as he announced the failure of his policies and his economic predictions.

           

Once again he is taking pride in having brought a large group of low earners outside the income tax system altogether and ‘freed them from the burden of income tax’.  I remain convinced that we will not have a fair taxation system until the annual first demand on every single adult resident in this country, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest, is a percentage (to be calculated every year in accordance with the nation’s needs) of his or her gross income; the annual payment for the privilege of living and working in the UK.  The percentage would be exactly the same for everyone but, of course, the actual amount demanded would vary widely according to the wealth or poverty of each individual. What each individual did with the rest of his or her income – spend it, save it, give it to charity or put it in an off-shore account - would be no concern of the state.

            We then really would be all in it together in a true ‘common-wealth’ of which we could be proud to be citizens!

Songs of Praise

          My wife and I always watched BBCtv's Songs of Praise together early on Sunday evenings and I have continued to do so since her death.  Last Sunday, the first in the Church’s season of Advent, circumstances  prevented my doing so – but I did record it and have just watched the recording.

            

         I am glad that I didn’t miss it because I felt it was one of the best ever.  It included the Military Wives' Choir giving us one of the finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she said, to patronise children by assuming that they can't learn to appreciate the magic of Shakespeare's words and to try to 'simplify' them

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’ which summarise what Christmas is really all about:

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible for me to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

Week 49 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

Be careful what you wish for!

          Do you remember how recently it was that we were all worried about Britain’s devastating drought?   Not much more than six months ago we were warned about the dreadful effects of a drier than usual autumn and winter.   It would, we were told, take weeks of steady rain to replenish reservoirs, fill rivers and bring underground water supplies to their normal levels. Quite early in the spring the use of hose-pipes for watering domestic gardens or washing the family car was banned in a great many areas.   We all yearned for soft refreshing rain.  In churches and places of worship throughout the UK rain was the object of many a heartfelt prayer.

            Oh dear!  What happened was like one of those fairy stories in which a wish is granted by an apparently benevolent witch.   The wish is fulfilled but with consequences that had not been foreseen.

            We had our rain, buckets of it, throughout a thoroughly wet summer.  Rivers filled and overflowed. Homes were flooded. For a brief period in some areas there were simultaneously hose pipe bans and floods!  Soon though the Water Authorities realized that they had, in a few weeks, received several normal months’ worth of rain.  Hose pipe bans were lifted and the faithful began to pray for a dry and sunny late-summer and autumn so that, at Harvest Thanksgiving services they could sing confidently, ‘All is safely gathered in, ‘ere the winter storms begin!’

But in many parts of the UK all was not safely gathered in, or at least harvest time had not brought the abundant crops for which farmers and gardeners had hoped. Autumn brought more heavy rain and now – at the beginning of winter – we have been having yet more.  Once again there have been flooded homes in the West Country, in Yorkshire and in the North-East. Some unfortunates have had their homes flooded three times in as many months.  This south-eastern corner of East Anglia, although having much more rain than usual, has escaped the floods.  Our Essex Sunshine Coast really is a good place to live!

New Year’s Day 1979. My motor caravan outside my bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton. I hope that we don’t get a repeat of the weather!

What next?  As I type these words the sky has cleared but the temperature has dropped several degrees and the immediate weather forecast is ‘dry - but much colder!’   Oh dear, I do hope we don’t get standing snow.  It is the one circumstance guaranteed to keep my mobility scooter in its shed (or, as I prefer to put it, my ‘iron horse in its stable’!) and leave me house-bound!

I have distrusted forecasts of any kind on the front page of the Daily Express ever since in 1938 and early 1939 when their headline assured us that ‘There will be no war this year, nor next year either!’  In 2011 they kept up the tradition by forecasting icy weather just before that Indian Summer in October.  I have an uncomfortable feeling though that this year, as they forecast a bitterly cold and ice-bound winter – they may be right!

The Government - and the Press

I sometimes think that politicians must be made of sterner stuff than the rest of us.  During the past year we have seen disastrous failures in Government functions that, had I been the senior politician responsible for the department concerned, I would have felt demanded my immediate resignation.  However, the politicians concerned have simply shrugged their shoulders, blamed the disaster on the civil servants involved, assured the public that ‘lessons have been learned’ and carried on as though nothing had happened.

Reaction to the phone hacking and corruption scandal that has engulfed the press, the police and the politicians during the past year has been somewhat similar. All the press have been tainted but at the centre of the scandal was News International, a news media empire ruled by Rupert Murdoch, Australian by birth and a citizen of the USA by adoption.   Successive British Prime Ministers have courted his favour and that of his lieutenants in the hope of ensuring favourable headlines in the Sun, the News of the World and other publications under his control.   This hope was not unjustified.  ‘It was us wot done it!’ boasted the Sun after one of Mrs Thatcher’s electoral victories.

I have long believed that New Labour with its rejection of democratic socialism and traditional Labour Values and, in government, its willing acceptance of the leadership of the most right-wing American President of the last century, was created for no other reason than to persuade Rupert Murdoch to switch his media Empire’s political allegiance from the Conservative to the Labour Party and thus  make Tony Blair’s emasculated party ‘electable’.

David Cameron followed in Tony Blair’s footsteps, appointing Andy Coulson, one of Rupert Murdoch’s former lieutenants as his personal spin-doctor and becoming a close friend of News International’s Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks. Both these former employees of News International now face criminal charges in connection with alleged phone hacking and other scandals related to press abuse of its powers.

The Leveson enquiry investigated objectively and comprehensively the whole range of Press Activities, interviewing Rupert Murdoch and his senior lieutenants and former lieutenants,  Prime Minister David Cameron, Tony Blair and a great many others. David Cameron told victims of the phone hacking and other abuses of press freedom, that he would accept the verdict of the Leveson Enquiry in full, ‘unless it was completely bonkers’. As part of the verdict would inevitably criticise the Prime Minister himself for the closeness of his relationship with members of the News International organisation, I would have thought that his best course of action would have been to accept Lord Leveson’s verdict and recommendations in full, hurry through any legislation that might be necessary to implement those recommendations, and hope that the electorate would soon forget the whole sorry affair.

But that isn’t going to happen.  David Cameron has evidently forgotten his pledge to News International’s victims. While accepting Lord Leveson’s insistence on the need to have a strong and wholly independent (both of politicians and of those involved in the press) body to regulate press behaviour, he is strongly opposed to that body having the statutory underpinning needed to enforce its decisions.

The reason for this, so it is said, is to protect the freedom of the press – a future government might use any such legislation as a springboard to curb press freedom.  What total rubbish!   Does Mr Cameron really imagine that a government of the future determined to muzzle the press would give two hoots about decisions that might have been made a decade or so earlier?  Can you imagine Hitler, in 1936, having the least interest in whatever a democratic German government had decided in the 1920s?    In any case, how ‘free’ is a press where editorial policy and political direction of a large part of it are dictated by a cosmopolitan multi-millionaire with no roots here and owing no loyalty to this country, its culture and its institutions?

Until we give more thought to the ownership of the press we should worry less about having a government-controlled press and worry rather more about having a press-controlled government constantly ‘adjusting’ its policies in the hope of gaining a few more votes at by-elections as a result of positive headlines in the tabloids and the support of the press moguls!

Robin Hoods – in reverse

There is no field in which the members of the government have revealed what are, I fear, their true colours than that of housing.  It is there that their Robin Hood in Reverse policy of robbing the poor to benefit the rich is most clearly exposed.

In order to level off to some extent the difference between the proportion of their incomes that poor and very wealthy people pay in taxation, it has been suggested that there should be extra higher bands of Council Tax liability and/or an extra ‘mansion tax’ paid by those whose homes are valued at over £2 million.

Both ideas have been vetoed by David Cameron.  He really doesn’t think that those who have worked hard and saved all their lives for their homes, should be penalised for doing so. How many people who live in homes worth over £2 million acquired them by working and saving hard all through their lives?   You’d need to enjoy a salary of £50,000 every year for 40 years to earn £2 million, never mind save it!

When considering housing at the other end of the social scale, government attitudes are very different.  Council tenants, and tenants in receipt of Housing Benefit, are to be charged a ‘bedroom tax’ for every empty bedroom. No, they are not allowed to have a spare bedroom for occasional visitors. Those financially squeezed Daily Mail readers can’t be expected to subsidise the hospitality of ‘benefit scroungers’.

Never mind the fact that some of those tenants will be old people who have paid taxes all their working lives and are struggling to live on the state pension plus any benefits to which they may be entitled.   Others will be employed, but on or near the minimum wage.  They need the housing benefit, not for themselves, but to add to the wealth of rapacious landlords.  Nobody, says the government, will have to pay the bedroom tax.  There is the choice of moving into smaller accommodation (if they can find any) or taking in a lodger.

            A listener to the BBC’s Breakfast Programme, when hearing about the proposed ‘Bedroom Tax’, enquired how many spare bedrooms there might be at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country home, which is also publicly owned.

Week 48 2012

Tendring Topics.......on line

Essex leads again?

            A low turn-out for he recent elections of Crime and Police Commissioners to oversee the work of Britain’s Police Forces had been expected.   Few people though imagined that it would break all records as the lowest turn-out in any British election ever!  And this was despite the fact that a great many electors didn’t have to actually ‘turn out’ in order to vote!  I didn’t have to.  I vote by post and my voting paper and voting instructions were sent to me a week before the poll, for me to complete and post back at my leisure. 

            The average turn-out nationally was a miserable 14 percent but Essex ‘led’ (or should it be ‘dragged along behind’?) all the rest with the nation’s lowest turn-out of 12.81 percent.  Was it the result of apathy and lack-of-interest or of a conviction that it was an expensive and unnecessary poll, a negation of democracy and localism, and a means of giving one individual in each police authority unprecedented power – and a high salary to match it!   The Home Secretary claimed after the election that November’s short, dark and rainy days were a major cause of the low turn-out.  This hardly affected postal voters and, in any case, the date of the election was chosen by her government, not by us electors.   I reckon that if the ballot paper had included one further question; Do we need an elected Police and Crime Commissioner to oversee the County Police Force? folk would have been queuing up at the polling stations!

            I voted for Independent Linda Belgrove who lives within the Tendring District and who had been a member of the Police Authority that is being replaced by the new post of Commissioner.  She came fourth out of six candidates, but I notice that she was a runner-up in Tendring, Colchester, Chelmsford, Brentwood and Uttlesford which suggests to me that the locality in which each candidate lives had, as one would expect, some effect on the result.  However an even greater effect was that of having the support of a political party machine and it was Conservative Candidate Nick Alston who was successful, though only after electors’ second preferences had been taken into consideration.  He topped the poll in ten of Essex’s fourteen districts and came first with 51,235 votes.  Second came Mick Thwaites, Independent, a former police officer, with 40,132 votes.  The other candidates trailed well behind.

            A bold headline on the front page of the local Daily Gazette, in the same issue that reported the result of the election, highlighted a major problem to which the new Crime and Police Commissioner will need to give his attention; HALF OF CRIMES ARE NOT SOLVED.  The headline relates to Colchester where 449 crimes were reported in the town during September but 208 of them were marked for no further action by the end of the month. There were similar figures for August and those for October were not yet available.

            Discussion about crime deterrence usually focuses on the severity of the punishment for offenders, but I believe that the likelihood or otherwise of being detected is far more important.  Career criminals don’t worry about the punishment when they are confident that they will get away with the crime! The novels of Dickens and his contemporaries suggest that in the days when you could be hanged for stealing a sheep and transported to Australia for petty crime, more sheep were stolen and there was more petty crime per capita than there is today.  When hanging, drawing and quartering was the accepted penalty for treason (a fate comparable in horror only with burning alive for heresy!) there were certainly more plots aiming at the violent overthrow of the monarchy and the government, than there have been in these more humane and enlightened times.

            Get the crime detection rate up to 75 percent or higher and I have no doubt that, whatever penalty is suffered by those convicted, the crime rate will drop like a stone.  No – I have no idea how that can be achieved, but then I wasn’t among those aspiring to be Crime and Police Commissioner.

Economic Family Planning

          I sometimes wonder if the members of David Cameron’s coalition government (with its heavy concentration of millionaires) live in the same world as the rest of us.  Do they ever actually meet ordinary people except, of course, when they want their votes?

Take, for example, Iain Duncan-Smith, the work and pensions secretary.  He has decided that the United Kingdom can no longer afford to pay all the children’s benefits to which large families become entitled.  He has suggested therefore that child allowances should be paid for the first two children of every family but nothing at all for subsequent offspring. He is, I believe, a Roman Catholic. Can he possibly have never met and mixed with the parents of eight, nine or ten children?

He would find that they come in two, quite separate, categories though it is possible for a family to belong to both of them.  One category consists of a single parent or of parents who are feckless and irresponsible. They may have learning difficulties.  One or other, or both, of them may have a drink or a drugs problem (though they probably won’t admit to it).  Their home is likely to be squalid, smelly and poverty-stricken and their children neglected.  It may be that with patient one-to-one education from a dedicated Social Worker or Health Visitor they could, in time, adopt a more responsible life-style – but they certainly won’t think far enough ahead to ask themselves how they are going to feed a third, fourth, fifth or sixth child with no children’s benefit.

The other category consists of those who believe that to limit the family by ‘artificial’ means is in defiance of the will of God.   They may be devout Roman Catholics or describe themselves as fundamentalist Evangelical ‘Bible Christians’.  They may be ultra-orthodox Jews or fundamentalist Muslims.   They are most unlikely to yield to threats to limit child benefit to the first two children.  To do so, they believe, would bring them eternal punishment.

Paying children’s allowance only to the first two children of such families would do little or nothing to limit or reduce their size. It would increase child poverty and child neglect – and would probably increase the number of abortions.  I can’t believe that that is really what Iain Duncan-Smith wants?

An Honour Denied!

          It seems almost incredible that our government should refuse to allow surviving Royal Navy personnel who, in World War II, protected the Arctic convoys conveying vital war materials to our Soviet allies, to accept a medal from the Russian government in appreciation of their services.  To sail round the northern tip of Norway to the Russian port of Archangel  under constant threat of air attack from the Luftwaffe bases along the Norwegian coast and from German U-boats patrolling the North Atlantic, was one of the most perilous and physically demanding tasks undertaken in World War II.  Hundreds of vessels and some 3,000 men were lost in those Arctic waters.  In refusing to permit Clacton octogenarian Fred Henley and some 200 other Naval survivors of the Arctic Convoys accept this thank-you from the Russian government, our government has displayed a meanness of spirit unique among the World War II allies. American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand veterans of those convoys have already received their Russian medals.  A typically smooth explanation of Britain’s refusal comes from a spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office:  

‘We very much appreciate the Russian Government’s wish to recognise the brave and valuable service given by veterans of the Arctic Convoys. However the rules on the acceptance of foreign awards clearly state that in order for permission to be given for an award to be accepted, there has to have been specific service to the country concerned and that that service should have taken place within the previous five years.

            The spokesman goes on to say that the award is also ruled out because the veterans concerned had been eligible for a British award for the same service; the World War II ‘Atlantic Star’.  In 2006 an official lapel badge, the ‘Arctic Emblem’ had also been introduced and some 10,000 had been issued   That settles it then.  ‘The rules’ make it quite impossible for these old men, all in their late eighties or nineties, to receive an official thank-you from a grateful Russian government for their part in one of the most arduous and dangerous exercises in World War II.    I hope that I am not being unduly cynical in suggesting that had the USA (or Saudi Arabia for that matter) wished to make a similar gesture for a similar reason, the government would have either changed those ‘rules’ or found some way of getting round them.

            I suspect that the real reason is that our top politicians are old enough to remember the cold war but not the real war of 1939 to 1945. They are reluctant to admit the enormous contribution that the then USSR made to the downfall of the Nazis (80 percent of all German army casualties in World War II were on the Eastern Front!) or the appalling suffering of the Soviet people during the Nazi occupation of much of their country.  Perhaps, of course, some of them don’t even realize that the Russians were our valued allies during those dark years. Old Etonians seem to have gaps in their knowledge of recent history. It’s not so long ago that our Prime Minister imagined that in 1940 we were junior partners of the USA in the struggle against Hitler!   It is no exaggeration to suggest that the outcome of the war against Nazi Germany was finally decided in a great tank battle that raged on the Russian steppe near Kursk in July and August 1943.  It ended in a defeat from which the Nazis never recovered.  The men of the Arctic Convoys ensured that the Soviet Army had the equipment needed to achieve that decisive victory – and to press on to Berlin!

A Church Divided

A somewhat time-worn certificate in my possession declares that Ernest George Hall born on 18^th May 1921, the son of Regimental Sergeant-Major Frederick Charles Hall, was baptised at St. Michael’s Garrison Church, Tidworth on 26^th May 1921. Thus, I have been a member of the Church of England for over 91 years! I certainly can’t claim to have been an active church member for the whole, or even for the greater part, of that time. However I have never formally rejected the Church and, even in the days when I would have described myself as an agnostic, I regarded the Church of England with affection and respect, recalling nostalgically the days when first as a choirboy and later as a server, I had used and loved the liturgies of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

For well over a decade I have been an occasional attender and communicant at my local Church of England Church, and six years ago I renewed and revived my active membership (well, as active as is possible in my late eighties and early nineties!).  I had never, of course, actually ceased to be a member.

            All of that probably accounts for the deep sadness that I feel about the way in which, in recent years, the Church of England has been torn by controversy, first about the ordination of women priests and, only last week, about the creation of women bishops.  How strange that at that latest Synod, the Bishops, who might have been expected to take a conservative stance, overwhelmingly welcomed the idea of committed women joining their ranks, the clergy accepted it and it was the laity who opposed and – by a majority of just a handful of votes vetoed it!

             Since 1948 I have also been a Quaker. I would certainly never abandon the Christian tradition that, in the silence of its expectant and prayerful Meetings for Worship, brought me back from my sterile agnosticism (I suppose that today it would have been called non-theism) to George Fox’s affirmation, on which the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is founded, that there is one even Christ Jesus who can speak to thy condition. Consequently I am in dual membership; an unusual but not unique position. Canon Oestreicher of Coventry Cathedral and Terry Waite, Archbishop Runcie’s envoy to the Middle East, who spent several years in captivity as a hostage, are two other – much more distinguished – dual members.

            Quakers do not have a separated professional priesthood and the idea of settling controversial issues by means of a majority vote is alien to the Quaker tradition. We have no fixed liturgy, prayer book or hymn book. We do though have a published booklet of Advices and Queries, revised from time to time, that provides us with a guide, but not a fixed rule, to advise and support us both in worship and in our daily lives.

One of these advices is, I think, particularly relevant to those who hold strong views on either side in the current controversy within the Church of England.

Consider the possibility that you may be mistaken.

I would add that this should be done prayerfully and in the light of the teaching and example of Jesus Christ, rather than that of any other authority.