Week 4 2012

Tendring Topics..........on Line


‘When the Bon Marché was shuttered…….’

            ……..When the feet were hot and tired,

           Outside Charringtons we waited, by the STOP HERE WHEN REQUIRED’

            So wrote the late Sir John Betjeman in his poem Parliament Hill Fields, a graphic evocation of part of the London scene of days gone by.  Sadly it seems that Clacton’s Bon Marché in Pier Avenue may soon be closing its shutters for good as its parent company Peacocks is threatened by the current financial crisis and is endeavouring to sell off its long-established satellite.

            The Peacock Group, like the country as a whole and many of its inhabitants, is seriously in debt.  A spokesman for the Group is quoted as saying that the board and its advisors have been discussing possible restructuring with its creditors. No agreement has been reached but discussions with other possible investors are taking place. He added ominously, ‘To protect the business while discussions with such investors are going on, the directors of the Peacock Group have filed a notice of intention to appoint an administrator’.

            Compared with many other towns Clacton-on-Sea hasn’t done too badly during the past few years.  The gap left by the closure of Woolworths and that left by the closure of the Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road have both been filled, though in each case with less prestigious enterprises employing fewer people than their predecessors.   The much-criticised re-design of the town centre has, I think, been found attractive by visitors, though it was surely idiotic to move the Tourist Information Centre from its central position at the junction of Pier Avenue and West Avenue, to the Town Hall.

Could this now be changing?  Pierre Oxley of the Clacton Chamber of Trade says, ‘If we do lose Peacocks and Bon Marché it would hit us hard. I always think that one empty shop leads to more appearing.  It looks like it is going to get harder and harder for businesses this year’.

Other depressing local news is that the number of unemployed within the Tendring District has risen steadily for five consecutive months.  There are 170 more people unemployed today than at the same time last year.  Nationally eight percent of 18 to 24 year olds are unemployed.  In the Tendring Area the figure is almost 12 percent, well above the national average. On the plus side, there have been more vacancies at Tendring’s Job Centres – the number has risen from 500 last November to 635 today.  Cheering perhaps, but it still means that there are about six applicants for every job vacancy!

A day or two ago I listened to a young man who has never experienced employment being interviewed on BBC Radio 4.  He has qualifications in gardening and regularly goes up to the local golf course where there is a half-promise of work some time in the future.  He is, of course, the kind of young man whom local authority parks and gardens departments were once seeking.  He would have started off on menial jobs like weeding flower beds and clearing them of rubbish, and gradually learnt his trade.  Who knows? He could have been another Alan Titchmarsh in the making!

However local authorities no longer have their own Parks and Gardens Staff.  They have to employ private contractors for the work that those departments once undertook.  In any case, the kind of jobs that this young unemployed man is capable of doing in the first instance are precisely those that supporters of David Cameron’s Big Society are hoping will be done free by enthusiastic volunteers!

How much longer will it be, I wonder, before that young man is not just unemployed but unemployable?

Waste and Recycling Collections

          I don’t think that I am likely to be accused of being an uncritical admirer of the current Tendring District Council and its policies. I had thought though that its members had reason to be proud of their waste and recycling collection service.  Householders are all issued with a supply of black plastic sacks for unrecyclable waste and a green box for items that can be recycled. These, in our district, are paper and cardboard, metal cans of every kind, and plastic bottles.

            Collections of both refuse and recyclables take place regularly, both on the same day each week.  Our council has stayed with a weekly collection while many others changed to fortnightly to save money.   I have been sorry that glass jars and bottles are not included among the recyclables.  It isn’t easy for those without a car to take glass containers to the nearest bottle bank and, for those who do have a car, burning petrol by making a special car journey for that purpose is surely defeating its purpose.

            Despite this reservation I was very surprised and disappointed to learn a month or two ago, that the Tendring District’s record for collecting recyclables was the poorest in the whole of Essex!  It is presumably in an effort to remedy this situation that the Council and their contractors Veolia intend to introduce a restructured collection system within the next few months.

            Every householder will be issued with a red recycling box for paper and cardboard only and two new green boxes, one large and one small, for cooked or raw food waste, in addition to the existing green box (which will then be used only for metal cans and plastic bottles) and the black plastic sacks used for residual waste.  The small new green box for food waste is to be kept in the kitchen and is intended to be emptied into the larger one to be kept out outside. 

The black plastic bag of unrecyclable waste will be collected and the large food waste container will be emptied ever week.  The red box of paper and cardboard and the green one of cans and plastic bottles will be collected on the same day but on alternate weeks.

            I realise that, now that I do no gardening and am living alone, I have virtually no food waste!   I use mostly frozen or otherwise ready-for-cooking vegetables and prefer vegetarian dishes though I am only a somewhat half-hearted vegetarian.  I never prepare and cook more food than I can eat in one meal!  Mind you, even in my previous married life when I was a keen gardener I would have had no food or other organic waste for the Council’s bins – I had my own garden to keep productive and my own compost bins to feed for that purpose!

            The Council’s new scheme seems a bit complicated but I hope that we’ll get used to it and that it will be a success.  As I ride round Clacton on my ‘iron horse’ I notice that on ‘collection days’ there are a substantial number of homes with several black plastic bags bursting with rubbish on display and not a green recyclables box in sight.  If Tendring is to move up the recycling ‘League Table’, dealing with these non-co-operating householders must be a top priority!

Just how ‘free’ is our ‘free’ Press?

If here is one thing about which all the witnesses at the Leveson enquiry into the behaviour of the press agree, it is that no-one wants a government controlled press.  We have seen the results of that in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union.   Our press must remain free and uncontrolled by politicians.  Although the excesses of which a ‘free press’ is capable have been made clear for all to see, there remains strong opposition to any kind of statutory control.

But just how ‘free’ are our newspapers?  Privately owned, they are subject to market forces like everything else in a market economy.  For their survival they depend heavily on their revenue from advertising.   The wise editor makes certain that he (or she) doesn’t upset too many advertisers too often.

This operates at even the very lowest level.  As many blog readers know, this blog is a direct descendant of the Tendring Topics comment column that I wrote every week in the Coastal Express (it actually changed its name several times but that is how I always thought of it!) for twenty-three years.   The Coastal Express relied heavily on advertising revenue from Estate Agents and from the sellers of new and used cars.  Nobody warned me, but my reason told me that it would be foolish to be too critical of either estate agents or used car salesmen!  So I wasn’t.  Searching back through my memory I don’t recall a single occasion on which this thought affected anything that I wrote – but it could have done.

Similarly, one of the witnesses at the Leveson Enquiry commented that if a reporter saw that his employer was enjoying cosy tea parties with the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers, and that a former senior colleague had been appointed as the Prime Minister’s personal spin doctor, his reports were likely to be slanted accordingly.

Rupert Murdoch made no bones about the fact that he controlled the Sun for political purposes (‘It was us wot done it’, boasted the Sun after a Tory victory) but is proud of the fact that he gives the editor of The Times free rein.  Very creditable – but surely the editor of The Times is well aware of Mr Murdoch’s general political philosophy and is unlikely to promote a point of view strongly opposed to it.  He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if he doesn’t actually call it – well, the piper knows his general musical taste. As a modern proverb that I heard recently put it, ’If you must hide your light under a bushel, make sure everyone knows under which bushel it is hidden!’

By the promotion or rejection of news stories as much as by direct persuasion, the news media does sway public opinion and thereby influence the results of local and general elections.  The BBC and the ITV set admirable examples of objectivity.  Perhaps newspapers should be run by independent editorial boards on similar lines.

I would not like to see government controlled newspapers, but the government does at least comprise politicians whom we can influence and ultimately accept or reject.   On balance I would prefer to read a newspaper run by people who are answerable to the electorate than by immensely wealthy individuals, answerable to no-one, who may not be British citizens and therefore owe no loyalty to our country; or Brits who have their fortunes stashed away in an overseas tax haven and who therefore escape our burden of taxation.  It is one thing for the very wealthy, whether they be Russian oil oligarchs or British or Trans-Atlantic multimillionaires, to own football teams, luxury yachts and half a dozen palatial homes – but quite another for them to control the means of influencing our thoughts and our choices.  They will inevitably serve their own best interests, which are very unlikely to be the same as ours!

An Early Learning Aid

            A modern silent movie’s nomination for this year’s film awards  took me back to my childhood when all films were silent!   Poole’s Cinema in Ipswich’s Tower Street, favoured by my parents because I was a member of a national daily’s ‘birthday club’ that gave me free admission, ‘when accompanied by a paying adult’, continued to project silent films long after all other local cinemas had gone over to ‘talkies’.   I well remember my first talkie – it was a ‘who-done-it’ called ‘The Argyle Case’ and I saw it at the Ipswich Regent Cinema (it’s still there I believe) in the late 1920s or early '30s.

            It has been only fairly recently when failing hearing has made me glad to make use of the subtitles nowadays available on tv programmes, that I have realized what a valuable learning aid those silent films must have been.  To really enjoy them you had to be able to read – and to read fast – before each caption disappeared and its successor appeared on the screen.

            Kids who might have scorned to read a ‘boring old book’ were desperately eager to know what ‘Buck Jones’ or ‘Tom Mix’ had said to the crooked Sheriff before leaping onto his trusty steed and galloping off to save the heroine from ‘a fate worse than death’*.   There was just one way to find out – learn to read!

            That accounts for the fact that, while I understand there are plenty of illiterates and semi-literates around today, during the seven years I spent in the Army from 1939 till 1946, I met only one chap who couldn’t read battery orders and couldn’t communicate with his mum and dad, and his girlfriend.  We had all spent our early childhoods speed-reading the subtitles of those silent movies!

*Yes, some of us were quite eager to find out what that was too!

         

            

Week 3 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line


War Horse

            One of the saddest things about being very old and living alone is the loss of shared pleasures that were once enjoyed; the many tv programmes that my wife Heather and I used to watch together for instance; the performance of Nutcracker at the O2 arena that she would have so much enjoyed, and my 90^th birthday celebration in Zittau. I can hardly believe that she never met the German friends who have been so much a part of my life during the past few years.  Less often something happens that I wish my mum and dad could be with me to share.   My dad, who died in November 1939, never saw a television.  He would have loved those old Westerns that keep cropping up in daytime tv.  I realize too, how much he would have enjoyed War Horse a film that I haven’t yet seen, about a horse and a young lad in World War I.  He had been there, working with horses, throughout that war!

Trooper Hall F.C. aged 18  1900

            

            My dad was born in 1882 in a little Hampshire village near Highclere Castle (better known to thousands today as Downton Abbey!)   Orphaned at an early age he appeared to be destined to be a farm labourer but – he was ‘good with horses!’  He escaped the drudgery and poverty of a life on the soil in Lark Rise to Candleford  England, by enlisting at the age of 18 into the 17^th Lancers, a very fashionable cavalry regiment with the motto Death or Glory. Less than half a century earlier it had taken part in the heroic (but idiotic!) ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at Balaclava in the Crimea.  It is only recently that I have realized why he chose that particular regiment. It had been a Lord Carnarvon of Highclere Castle who had led that famous charge! In the 17^th Lancers he served in South Africa in the aftermath of the South African War.  I have to this day picture postcards that he sent to my Mum (they were then ‘courting’) from South Africa during that time.

Regimental Sergeant-Major Hall and family 1921

Once again the fact that he was ‘good with horses’ affected his career. He was transferred to the Royal Army Veterinary Corps where he rose steadily through the ranks.   By the time World War I broke out he had become a Sergeant and was sent almost immediately with the British Expeditionary Force to France.  In 1916 he was granted leave from ‘the Front’ to marry his fiancée Emily Clark (my Mum).                                          

          

         It took the Allied High Command a year or two to realize that World War I on the Western Front, wasn’t going to be a conflict of heroic cavalry charges but of a long and bloody struggle, with foot soldiers and artillery playing the major roles. My dad was posted to Egypt, on to Palestine and finally to Salonica in northern Greece, where British troops had originally been sent in 1915 to support the Serbs. I learn from Google that there was ferocious fighting there in the final months of the war, against Austrians and Bulgarians, with carnage comparable with that on the Western Front.  Somewhere along the line he was promoted to Warrant Officer Class 1 (Regimental Sergeant Major).  That was the rank that he held when the war ended and the rank he held when I was born in May 1921.  

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Staff-Sergeant Hall, Staff Instructor in the Territorial Army

Circa 1928

My dad completed his twenty-one years service and was discharged from the army shortly after my birth.  He made a brief return to military life in 1926 when he was appointed Permanent Staff Instructor to a veterinary unit of the Territorial Army in Ipswich – which was to become my ‘home town’. He was happy and fulfilled in this job and I was proud when as an eight or nine year old, playing with my mates near Ipswich’s  Broomhill Park, I would sometimes see him in uniform, on horseback and leading a group  of ‘weekend troopers’, as they exercised their horses and learned the correct, military way to ride. It didn’t last.  In 1931 the TA was downsized.  My dad lost his job.  He spent the final years of his life (he died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of 57) as a clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody to a local vet who had been his commanding officer in the TA.  His meagre pay for this job, plus the small pension he had earned by his 21 years of army service, kept us just above the poverty line.

            He had six campaign medals and was particularly proud of two of them.  One was the ‘Mons Medal’ (on the left) that marked him as a member of the original Expeditionary Force sent to France in 1914 and derided by the Kaiser as ‘General French’s contemptible little army’ (its members made ‘The Old Contemptibles’ a title of pride!).  The other medal (on the right) of which he was proud was a French Medaille d’Honneur with crossed swords.  It had been accompanied by a certificate signed by the French President.  I was told, after my father’s death, that he had been presented with it by a French General ‘on the field of battle’.  One of my deepest regrets is that I never, while I had the chance, asked my father how he had earned this award.

I couldn’t have had a more loving and supportive dad. I was – and still am – very proud of him though my own life has followed a very different path from his.

MEANS TESTING

            How shaming that it should not be our elected representatives in the House of Commons, but members of the unelected and anachronistic House of Lords, who have delayed the passing of government legislation that would have cut the  benefits of thousands of disabled people!  Once again the government has chosen to select the poor and the vulnerable for sacrifice while leaving the conspicuously wealthy to enjoy their riches undisturbed.

            Means testing individual benefits is a bureaucratic, time and money-wasting exercise.  It often means that some people who need the benefit miss it because they have failed to apply or have filled in a form wrongly. Meanwhile while those determined to cheat the system can usually find a way of doing so.  It would be far better to pay out the benefit to all those eligible for it – and then claim part of it back from those who don’t need it all, through one national ‘means test’ to which every one of us is – or should be – subjected; the Income Tax system.

            This system works quite unfairly at the present time, claiming a far larger proportion of the income of the poorly paid than of the wealthy.  In fact, the larger your income the smaller proportion you are asked to pay.  Many more tax bands are needed, going well above the present upper limit of 50 percent for the highest earners. In the immediate post-war years there was, I believe, an upper limit of 90 percent – and civilisation as we know it didn’t come to an end!  It would, of course, be essential for the government to reframe existing legislation and employ its own legal and financial experts to eliminate the tax evasion and tax avoidance that currently takes from the revenue far more than ‘benefit cheats’ could ever hope to achieve.

            Think of the advantages. Currently graduate students are saddled with overwhelming debt – ‘because of the advantage that their degree gives them in the world of business’.  Believe me, the advantage of having even a first-class honours degree in astrophysics  is as nothing compared with that of having no degree at all, but a father who is head of a major business corporation!  It may be argued that their circumstances are  quite different. The advantage that the Astrophysicist obtains comes from us - as taxpayers. That of the multi-millionaire's son doesn't.  Rubbish!  The fortunes made in the private sector come from us too - not as tax-payers but as consumers..  We add to those fortunes every time we buy a packet of washing powder, a new car, a new laptop or a new push-bike.  We add to it every time we turn on a tap, switch on the gas or electricity, or begin to pay back a loan from a bank or building society.  Private fortunes grow every time the government, in our name, buys a bombing plane, a tank or a nuclear missile – or builds a new school or hospital.  A properly graded income tax would level off every kind of unfair advantage.   It would also narrow the gap between the poorest and the wealthiest in our society

            I think we should abolish every means test, and every ‘special incentive’ to help the disadvantaged, and make sure that no-one is disadvantaged, by applying that single, simple means test of a fair Income Tax Assessment, to us all.  Then, whatever crisis might arise, we really would be ‘all in it together’.

Safety in the Bathroom!

            A fortnight ago I recounted in this blog a mishap that I had while staying in an hotel over Christmas.   I slipped and fell in the bath and had to summon help by means of the alarm system in my en suite bathroom.

            The layout and facilities in that bathroom were remarkably similar to those in my own home.   I too, have an over-bath shower operated from a hot-and-cold water mixing valve within the bath.  Slipping and falling at home could potentially be much more dangerous than in a hotel.  There could be no alarm system for me to summon help and it might be many hours, perhaps days, before anyone was aware of my plight!

            In fact, although I would claim no great credit for this, I have taken steps to make it far less likely that a similar accident will occur, and have also made it possible for me to summon help if it did.   Here is a photo of a corner of my bathroom.  A kind and very competent neighbour has made me a small portable wooden step, about 4in high, that can be pulled out and positioned immediately beside the bath as shown in the picture.  There is a vertical hand-hold on the wall immediately above the bath and another hand-hold, that I bought at Argos and fitted myself, connected to the bath rim.  I find that by standing on the wooden step and using the rim hand-hold and the vertical one in turn, I can step safely into and out of the bath.   I also have a synthetic rubber mat on the base of the bath to prevent my slipping and falling.  While under the shower I am always ready to grab that vertical hand-hold..

            Summoning help if I should collapse or fall?   If you look at the extreme left of the picture you will see part of a low shelf on which I place my Tendring Careline alarm pendant and my mobile phone while taking a shower.  Help would be unlikely to arrive as promptly as it did in that hotel – but arrive it surely would!

            No-one can foresee every possible future accident and take steps to prevent it. I think though that I have made my bathroom, potentially one of the most dangerous room in the house, as safe as is humanly possible.   If you, dear blog reader, are similarly old and frail (or you have a friend or relative who is) you may wish to do the same.

Week 2 2012 12.01.2012

TENDRING TOPICS………..ON LINE

A Nation of Debtors!

            It was only a few weeks ago that I commented in this blog on the dangerous lure of ‘Pay Day Loans’; the offer – by a bank or other financial institution – to lend a relatively small sum of money ‘just till payday’ to deal with some sudden crisis (a burst pipe, a forgotten family birthday, an unexpected visitor) that may have arisen just at a time when you have nothing in reserve and only just enough money to see you through till payday!

            It all sounds so very sensible and straightforward.  It is a short term-loan ‘only till payday’ perhaps just a fortnight away.  It is of a relatively small sum, possibly £300, possibly £500 and, before you accept it, you know perfectly well how much interest there will be when you pay it back.  That too, will seem a very small sum and well worth the convenience of having the money when you needed it.

            And it would be fine, except for the fact that having paid it back with its small amount of interest, you won’t have sufficient money left in your pay packet to see you through the expenses of the next month!   The only answer may be to seek another payday loan, and another, and another, with that ‘small amount’ of interest becoming very large indeed.  Because of all this I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn of the government’s concern about the very large number of 25 to 35 year olds were seriously in debt, many of them as a result of reliance on ‘payday’ or similar loans to get them through a crisis.

             Nowadays being in debt has become regarded as the natural, the normal, even the expected human condition.  In my childhood and youth things were very different.  My parents had a horror of debt.  They believed that if there was something that you wanted you should save up until you were able to afford it.  Then, and only then, you could buy it.  ‘Hire purchase’ was only just coming into common use.  It was regarded with suspicion.  My Dad worked out that buying ‘in  instalments’ meant that in the end you were paying anything up to twice as much as those who bought it outright.  He called it the Kathleen Mavourneen system (there was a song of that name containing the line ‘It may be for years, and it may be for ever’!)  I do remember my parents, after hours of discussion, buying just one object on hire purchase – it was a rather good (for its time) Murphy wireless set!

            I inherited their fear of indebtedness. I needed a car for my job.  I bought a second-hand one for cash – out of my savings.  Later I was able to buy a motor-caravan.

New Year, 1979 - My bungalow home and the Toyota Motor-caravan in which Heather and I spent many happy holidays.

Later too, my wife Heather and I took out a mortgage to buy the home I now live in.  I was worried about the burden of debt involved, but at least I had a secure job (that was in the late 1950s – how many jobs are really secure nowadays). About that time I increased the spare-time freelance writing that I had started several years earlier. As well as freelance journalism I wrote several commercially successful books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage.  To reduce our debt I paid every penny I earned from this source to the Building Society until my mortgage had been paid off – ten years earlier than the agreed completion date!   Heather and I were debt-free!

What helped to pay for that bungalow and motor caravan!

            It was during those years that debt became a normal and accepted thing.  Do you remember when credit cards (Barclaycards were the first I think) were introduced.   They encouraged us to get into debt.  No more of that tedious ‘saving up’ before you could buy that new vacuum cleaner, that fridge, or that new lawn mower.  Barclaycard, I remember, ‘Took the waiting out of wanting’.  Wise credit card users paid off the debt quickly to minimise the interest payments.  Unwise ones paid a little off and then bought something else that they ‘just couldn’t manage without’. They stayed permanently in debt, month by month helping to enrich the bankers with their interest payments.

            Then came the Thatcher years - and government policies that I believe future historians will see as having done incalculable harm to the British way of life.  There was the unrealisable dream of Home Ownership for All.   It continues to this day.  Quite recently David Cameron spoke of the pride and joy felt by those who held the key ‘of their own home’ in their hands for the first time.   He didn’t mention the anguish and despair felt by those same home buyers when (possibly thanks to Government policy) they lose their jobs - and their homes - and have had to hand those keys back to the real owners, the money-lenders who provided the mortgage.

            No doubt remembering what a successful vote-buyer the ‘right to buy’ legislation (compelling local councils to sell their housing stock to sitting tenants at knock-down prices) had proved to be in the Thatcher era, David Cameron is trying it again – this time demanding that councils offer up to 50 percent discounts (well, it isn’t his money that he is generously giving away!)  I doubt if the idea will work a second time round but, if it does, yet more folk will find themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds – and the reserve of affordable homes for letting will take yet another tumble!

            Then there are student loans. Every single graduate Member of Parliament received free tuition and, if he or she needed it, generous living allowances for their time in University.   Since the Thatcher/Blair era though, Parliament has decreed that the most promising members of the younger generation leave university and enter the world of work (when they can find any!) with a burden of debt of between £20,000 and £40,000!  What hope have they of ever getting their feet on the home ownership ladder?   They are assured that they don’t even have to begin paying off that debt until they have a substantial income.  Many of them will never pay it off completely though they will have the knowledge of that debt hanging over them throughout their lives. 

Oliver Goldsmith wrote in The Deserted Village that ‘Ill fares the land to hastening woes a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay’.   In Britain today men and women decay in enforced unemployment while nationwide, it is personal debt that accumulates!

A tv ‘Soap’ – and Real Life

          Aficionados of the tv hospital ‘soap’ Holby City (yes, I am one of them) will remember that a month or so ago there was a strong story line about the development of a plastic surgery department that would augment the hospital’s finances by serving a number of private patients.  A distinctly dodgy surgeon and his colleague carried out a number of breast enhancements using poor quality implants from a source in which the dodgy surgeon was discovered to have a strong financial interest.

            Patients complained, the story broke in the press and (as happens rather more often in ‘soaps’ than in real life) the guilty surgeon was killed in a car accident leaving his innocent (well, comparatively innocent) colleague and the hospital to clear up the mess and suffer the consequences.  The surgeon’s career seemed to be over and Holby City hospital threatened with closure.  Just now though, as does happen in ‘soaps’, it looks as though both may be saved!          

             We Holby City fans are now seeing the same drama, but on a much bigger scale, being enacted in real life.  A considerable number of women, in the UK, in France, in Germany and elsewhere have had surgery in which substandard implants from a now bankrupt French manufacturer have been used.  Some of those implants have already ruptured and though their contents have not been proved to be harmful to health I doubt if all the victims are quite convinced of this.

            The German government, typically incisive, has decided that the substandard implants will be removed and replaced and that the government will meet the cost of this.  Our government, equally typically indecisive, has maintained that the substandard implants do no harm whatsoever – but now agrees that all implants carried out by the NHS will be removed and replaced at public expense.  They hope that all the private enterprises that have carried out implant surgery will do the same.

             Some, no doubt, will.  Some can’t, because they are in administration.  Others will remember their first duty is not to their patients but to their shareholders.  They are in business to make money, not give it away.   The NHS will ‘take up the slack’ and accept the responsibility of any private enterprise that cannot or will not fulfil its obligations.   Their first duty, as a publicly owned body, is to the patients.

            So, once again – as with the failing banks – the public sector (that means us taxpayers) will be helping out a greedy and incompetent private sector.  We should beware of private contractors being invited to fulfil functions previously in the public sphere.

            In ‘the market place’ the buyer is trying to get ‘the best at the lowest price’.  The seller, on the other hand, is intent on getting ‘as much as he possibly can for as little as he can get away with’.  In this instance the fact that those French suppliers were trying to ‘get away with’ substandard implants was discovered before any serious harm was done.  Who knows what may happen next time?

‘Constant dripping wears away the stone!’

          I am reminded of that proverb when I think of the way in which an increasing number of us have year after year protested, apparently in vain, about the enormous – and constantly widening – gap between the incomes of the wealthiest members of our society and those of the poorest.  I originally drew attention to it for no other reason than that it seemed wrong that some of our fellow countrymen had no roof over their heads and didn’t know from where the next meal was coming, while others owned luxury yachts, national newspapers, football teams, and half a dozen palatial residences world-wide!

            More recently a carefully researched publication (The Spirit Level’) revealed that levelling of incomes benefited everyone in society – not just its poorest members..  Investigation showed that those countries with the narrowest gap between the incomes of the rich and poor had less crime and violence, more stable relationships, fewer divorces, better health and better standards of education than those – like Britain and the USA – that had a wide and ever-widening gap.

            For years the victims of this injustice suffered in silence but during recent months the constant dripping has produced world-wide peaceful protests (the Occupy Movement) particularly by young people.  In the UK the ‘squatters’ at St, Paul’s Cathedral are the most evident, but by no means the only manifestation of a movement that has produced protests throughout Europe, in the USA (both in Wall Street and widely across the Union) and in Russia.

            Could it be that David Cameron, our Prime Minister, is the latest convert to the ‘New Levellers’?  Disturbed by huge rises in executive pay and bonuses in the private sector in the midst of government induced austerity, he is urging that shareholders should have more power to regulate executive pay, and that there should be no rewards for failure.

Predictably perhaps, these modest suggestions have produced outrage in the ‘business community’.  It is quite all right (a good idea in fact) to complain that the Chief Executive of a local authority or a hospital board is earning more than the Prime Minister, but to criticise the fact that the annual income of  the Chief Executive of an international corporation would be enough to hire six prime ministers smacks of Bolshevism!

            I believe that compliance with the Prime Minister’s suggestions would have only a tiny effect on the income gap.  Much more radical action than that is needed. However our cause is now being noticed at high level. I can only suggest that we ‘carry on dripping’.  

             

            

Week 1 2012 5.01.2012

Tendring Topics..........on Line

A Religious Revival?

            I published my pre-Christmas blog with some misgivings.  It was concerned with Christ’s Nativity.  I knew that the majority of my blog viewers were unlikely to be Christian.  Of those who were, there would undoubtedly be some who considered it to be blasphemous to question the historical accuracy of any part of the accounts of this event as recorded in St Matthew’s and St. Luke’s Gospels.   It was possible that I had succeeded in offending everybody!  On the 21^st December, after the first full day of publication, I checked on the statistics rather nervously.  It would not have been surprise to find that viewer figures had fallen like a stone!

            On the contrary, there were over 150 views – the highest daily number I had ever recorded!   Each day until 25^th December, there were over 100 views, by previous standards an exceptionally high number.   I concluded that the Nativity story had a cross-cultural appeal.  Non-Christians, whether adherents of other faiths or having no faith at all, could relate to the story of a child destined for greatness, whose coming was heralded by angels yet was born of humble, temporarily homeless, parents in a cattle shed, with a cattle feeding-trough as a cradle.  That lowly shepherds, despised by both the wealthy and by the country’s spiritual leaders, were the first to visit and pay homage to the baby Jesus, followed by wealthy Magi with magnificent gifts from a distant land, and that the Holy Family had then to flee for their lives, seeking asylum in the land of Egypt, added to the story’s appeal.

            My blog has a scattered readership, world-wide.  In the United Kingdom, where an aggressive secularism has been growing in strength in recent years, there was a reversal of that trend over the Christmas period.  In Exeter people queued across the Cathedral Green to attend the Carol Service on Christmas Eve and several hundred had to be turned away.  There were similar reports from Wakefield, York, St. Albans and from scores of other Cathedrals and humbler churches all over England.  In Scotland the Episcopal Church (the equivalent of the Church of England) is not the principal Christian tradition yet for the midnight mass on Christmas Eve at St Mary’s Cathedral there was an unexpectedly high turn-out and extra chairs had to be brought in.  The Provost, Very Rev. Kelvin Holdsworth said that, ‘the singing was so strong and powerful that it felt that we were going to raise the roof!’  I attended a Eucharist-with-carols at St Mark’s (‘high church’) Anglican Church in Enfield where I found a warm welcome and an enjoyable and rewarding service.  I didn’t count heads but I am quite sure that there were at least twice as many worshippers as there had been at the same service in 2010.

            Could it be that we are going to see a revival of the Christian Values for which Prime Minister David Cameron recently appealed?   I hope so – but I also hope that they are the true Christian values declared by the founder of the Christian faith, not a hotchpotch of ‘thou shalt nots’ designed to keep the poor in their place so that the more materially fortunate can live in peace and comfort; ‘God bless the Squire and his relations.  They keep us in our proper stations’.  Such attitudes led to the Church of England being described as The Conservative Party at Prayer and inspired nineteenth century Anglican Priest Charles Kingsley, author of ‘Hereward the Wake’, ‘Westward Ho!’ and ‘The Water Babies’, to declare that, ‘We have made of religion an opium for the people’  (yes, I do know that Karl Marx said something similar. He and Kingsley were contemporaries and I believe that Kingsley said it first!)

            If David Cameron really wants us all to adopt Christian values he could (as well as reminding us that we shouldn’t covet, steal, murder or commit adultery) recall that it is as hard for a wealthy man to get into Heaven as it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle!  He could perhaps urge the 17 millionaire members of his government to shed their wealth in their own long-term interest as well as ours, and perhaps make it easier for his friends among the bankers, newspaper proprietors and other super wealthy to attain heavenly bliss, by changing the income tax system to ensure that they pay at least as high a proportion of their income in taxes as the poor have to.

A Memorable Christmas

It was with younger son Andy, daughter-in-law Marilyn, granddaughter Jo and her partner Siobhan that I enjoyed my Christmas dinner.

            I am more than blessed in my two sons (at times I can see something of their mother in both of them!), in my daughters-in-law and in my grandchildren.  They all conspired very successfully to make sure that Christmas 2011 would be filled with happy memories for me to cherish throughout the year to come..

Elder son Pete and I in the 'Sword Inn Hand' in Westmill.

  My very action-packed and enjoyable Christmas break included a traditional family Christmas dinner with all the trimmings (including a flaming Christmas pudding), several family get-togethers, a visit to a cinema to see the latest Sherlock Holmes release, a trip into the countryside to visit Westmill, a delightful Hertfordshire village that had been the scene of at least one episode of 'Foyles War', a visit to Kew Gardens where I was able to borrow an electric mobility scooter with which I could explore the enormous glass houses and - finally - a performance of The Nutcracker at what was the Millennium Dome but is now the O2 Arena.  And, of course, there was the Christmas Eucharist mentioned earlier in this blog.

I enjoyed every minute of it but I have to say that
My most vivid memory (and the one that I can see giving me occasional future nightmares!) was of a  near-disaster that occurred on Boxing Day.  I stayed at the Marriott Hotel, Waltham Abbey.  Just off the M25 it was relatively convenient for the homes of both my sons (I find the stairs in both their homes rather difficult and appreciate the fact that in a hotel my early rising habit doesn’t inconvenience anyone else)                 


 Pete, Nick's girlfriend Romy, and I in the Tropical Glass House at Kew 


However my early rising was one of the factors that led to near-disaster!  On Boxing Day, despite having not gone to bed till after midnight, I was wide awake at 6.00 am and decided to go to the en suite bathroom for my usual wash, shave and shower.  The hotel breakfast wouldn’t be available till 8.00 am so I had plenty of time.


 I completed my wash and shave and prepared for my shower. It was an ‘over-bath’ one in which the user had to stand in the bath.  I had used it the morning before without incident.   This time I managed to get one foot over the rim and into the bath.  As I was getting the other foot over, the foot in the bath slipped. I fell unceremoniously into it!.

 I hadn’t hurt myself in the fall and all I had to do was to. get up and turn on the shower mixer.   But that I couldn’t do.  My 90 year old muscles were simply incapable of lifting me from a horizontal to a vertical position and allowing me either to get on with the shower or step out of the bath.  Had I been able to get onto my knees I might have made it but the bath wasn’t wide enough to allow me to turn round to do this!

            I was reluctant to pull the alarm cord, not because I am easily embarrassed – I am not.  I do though have a firmly rooted dislike of looking ridiculous. I was well aware that lying naked on my back on the bottom of an empty bath, ‘ridiculous’ is exactly how I would look!

            However, as I realized that my struggles to escape were getting feebler; I overcame my inhibitions and tugged on the cord.  A light came on indicating that my cry for help had registered.  With commendable promptness a young man from ‘Reception’ appeared at the door of the bathroom.  He grasped the situation at once and tried to help me raise myself – to no avail! He summoned ‘back-up’!

            Another young man appeared.  This one promptly removed his shoes and  climbed onto and astride the bath.  He took my hands and pulled while his colleague pushed from behind.  Together and with whatever strength I could still muster I slowly regained the vertical position. Shakily and with the help of my two saviours, I stepped out of the bath.  No, I assured them, I didn’t want them to call an ambulance. I wasn’t even bruised.  I had pulled a few muscles in my struggles but otherwise I was fine.

            It was a happy ending – but it might not have been!  When my younger son Andy had brought me back to the hotel the previous night, he had glanced into the bathroom.   There he had noticed that the alarm cord above the bath had been wound round a high-level bathroom fitting, effectively putting it out of reach of anyone sitting or lying in the bath.  He had methodically unwound it and brought it back into use.

            I had thought that he was just being unnecessarily ‘fussy’ but by his action he may well have saved my life.  Had the alarm not been available my predicament would not have been discovered until my other son had arrived to pick me up at about 10.00 am, or the cleaning lady had put in an appearance at about the same time – I would have been trapped there for at least three hours!

Progress?

            Just before Christmas I received from a blog reader in his late fifties, a very gloomy assessment of the development of British society during his lifetime.

            It’s the end of the year; one of the times when one looks back on what has changed. Perhaps it is just because I am getting older but I can see very few things to be pleased about, not just in the last 12 months, but in the last 30 years! I feel that in so many ways, society is poorer – even if we are better off financially.

  Of all the changes I have seen, I would rate Central Heating, reliable motor cars and the reduction in smoking as the most positive ones since my childhood.  Against that though there is the rise of gang culture, drug and alcohol abuse and anti-social behaviour – an unknown expression in my childhood.  Internet and Out-Of-Town shopping are replacing local shops and high streets. A great many school leavers who are barely able to read, write or add up, spend a ridiculous amount of time watching hundreds of TV stations and playing Computer Games. No wonder they become overweight!  Young girls are being prematurely sexualised by the new celebrity culture, overtly sexual advertising and semi-naked pop stars. There is a general move of the centre ground of politics away from the principle of welfare and public services available to all,  to the principle of each for him or her self tempered with Victorian philanthropy.

When I think about the technological changes, I can’t help thinking that in the 60s no one was terribly dissatisfied with the fact that phones lived in phone boxes, or were bulky and expensive things in the house or office. I don’t think anyone had a big problem with music being stored on a disk the size of a dinner plate, and yearned for a time when the entire collection – and the player - would be the size of a match box.  Maybe it’s just me!

Perhaps it is.  I find that I do agree with every word written above (despite having been a car owner/driver in the 1950s and ‘60s, I had forgotten, until I read that email, how thoroughly unreliable most cars were in those days!)

            However I am over thirty years older than my correspondent and my memory goes back to the late 1920s and the 1930s. My home was a happy one but my memories also include unremitting discomfort.  Winters were cold and dark with unheated bedrooms lino-covered floors and smoky, and draught-inducing open fires.  I don’t suppose that anyone today under about 80 has ever experienced chapped hands and chilblains!  Summers, without fridges and with lots of still-horsedrawn traffic, were marred by continuous fly infestation.  A sticky fly-paper, festooned with trapped and dying flies hung, usually from the light fitting, in every working class sitting room and kitchen. Storing perishable food and milk could be a nightmare!

            Today, without my trusty iron horse (mobility scooter) I would be completely housebound. Without my mobile phone, my laptop and the internet, I’d be cut off from my scattered friends and family, and without a tv and reliable radio (in the 1930s ‘wireless sets’ were anything but reliable!) I’d be bored out of my mind.  There’s a great deal that I don’t like about the 21^st Century but, especially for the old and disabled, it has its compensations.  My correspondent may well remember nostalgically the days of his childhood and youth.  I had loving and caring parents and I too have happy memories of my childhood years.  In my old age though, I really wouldn't want to return to those days!