Week 35 2012

Tendring Topics.........on line

A Red Cross Parcel

            It is strange how, as one gets older, a recently taken photograph can stir up memories of a distant past.  Here is a photograph, taken recently, of my German friend Ingrid in the reception office (it looks as though it doubles as someone’s breakfast room!) of a guest house near Colditz Castle, familiar to a great many film and tv viewers.  Ingrid was on a sight-seeing visit.

            What particularly stirred my memory was the cardboard box with a Red Cross on it by Ingrid’s right hand.  It is one of the Red Cross Parcels that saved the lives of thousands of British prisoners of war (including myself) during World War II.  Each parcel contained a tin of powdered milk, tins of meat or fish, butter or margarine, and jam or other sweet spread.  There were also biscuits and a packet of either tea or coffee.  Each PoW was supposed to receive one such parcel a week.  At the small working camp in Zittau in eastern Saxony where I spent the last eighteen months of World War II, we received our parcels regularly even when the Third Reich was visibly crumbling around us.  At the large POW Camp in Italy where we had spent the previous eighteen months of our captivity, delivery was much more spasmodic, probably due more to failure in the local transport system than to malice.

            I thought that there was an element of malice though in the Italian authority's practice of opening each parcel and deliberately puncturing every tin before distributing them. The excuse was that it was to prevent our storing up tins for an escape attempt.  We would watch this process taking place with both hatred and hunger in our empty bellies!   On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion we watched an Italian Officer unwittingly puncture a ‘blown can’.  It made our day when the stinking contents exploded in his face and all over his immaculate uniform! 

            Colditz is, of course, famous for its escape attempts and I have been asked – perhaps a little reproachfully – why we never attempted to escape from our working camp in Germany.  We wouldn’t have needed to construct tunnels or build gliders to get away.  While working we enjoyed a great deal of freedom, often with only an elderly civilian, wearing an official armband, nominally in charge.  We could simply have walked away – but where to?  Working all day, and living cheek by jowl with our guards, we had neither the time nor the ability to forge identity papers, obtain civilian clothing and otherwise make plans for a journey of hundreds of miles through a hostile Germany to the nearest neutral country.  Wearing British uniforms with a big red triangle on the back of the jacket, and speaking very little German, I don’t think we would have got far before being recaptured.

            And the consequences of a failed escape? The escapee would have been instantly despatched to some other, much stricter and more secure, working camp.  Our easy-going guards would have been posted away, probably to active service on the Eastern Front.   They would have been replaced by Nazi zealots and a much more rigid regime would have been instituted.  Our lives, which had been tolerable, would have become those of closely guarded slave labourers – and all for an attempted escape that would have been doomed to failure from its very first moment.   

            Attempted escapes of rank and file prisoners were likely to have been taken rather more seriously than those of officers. Captured officers were an expensive burden to their captors. We were actually needed as labourers to replace a German workforce which, thanks to the folly and wickedness of their Nazi government, was bleeding to death on the Russian steppe and in the fields of France.

‘Load sixteen tons and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt’

            Those two lines, that I quote from memory from a protest-song of the 1960s, came to my mind when I learned that despite all the austerity, all the increased taxes like VAT disproportionately penalising the less wealthy, all the cutting of public services, our country has had to increase its debt this month and we remain obstinately in the grip of a double-dip recession.

            A few weeks ago I quoted an email from a blog reader who pointed out that George Osborn’s policies increased the number of people needing financial support and reduced the income from taxation. It reduced the chances of economic recovery, since a population impoverished by government policy and above-inflation price rises lacked the spending-power that was needed to get those wheels of commerce and industry turning again.  The email pointed out that the Chancellor’s  uncompromising fundamentalist attitudes meant that his only answer to the economic crisis  exacerbated by his imposed austerity and savage cuts in public expenditure, is to impose yet more austerity and cut even more deeply.  He is deepening the economic hole in which he is proudly standing!

            The Prime Minister, Chancellor and their colleagues seem blissfully unaware of the effects on taxpayers and voters of cuts in services and allowances coupled with increasing prices. Last year, as an over-eighty year old householder I had a 25 percent cut in my winter fuel allowance; from £400 to £300. At about the same time there were over-the-top increases in fuel prices. My supplementary solar water heating and the increased insulation I had installed helped me weather both these economic blows.   One large fuel supplier now warns of price increases three times above inflation that will be imposed this autumn.  Where one supplier leads it is likely that others will follow.   I can only hope that the new condensing gas-fired boiler that has replaced my old Baxi Bermuda back boiler, will limit the effect of that increase too.  Many elderly householders, because they do not own the property in which they live, or simply haven’t the financial resources needed, are in a much more serious position than I am.  They may well be faced with the stark choice; eat or heat!

            Nor, of course, is the price of heating our homes the only extra expense that many taxpayers are facing now, or will have to face in the coming months.  Transport costs (since virtually everything that we buy has to be transported, the effect of these goes far beyond private motorists) are much higher than they were last year and are destined to rise further.    Those who think it both economically wise and socially responsible to use public transport rather than a private car have also had a shock. Rail travel costs are to rise well above the level of general inflation.  The Gazette reports that the cost of a season ticket from Colchester to London will rise by over £300.

            Despite recent reports of a slowing down, even reversal, of house price inflation the fact remains that since the dawn of the new millennium twelve years ago, house prices in the Tendring District have risen by 82 percent.   A home which in 2001 cost £93,412, today has a price of £170,285.  Meanwhile average wages in our area increased by only 31 percent, rising from £12,376 to £16,571 a year.  The dream of our becoming a nation of home owners encouraged during the Thatcher years is becoming an ever more distant mirage.

            At the same time as the gap between incomes and house prices is widening, Banks and Building Societies, having been stung as a result of having given 95 percent and even 100 percent mortgages to very dubious borrowers, are tightening their rules and demanding ever-larger deposits.  The Gazette reports that a decade ago, banks were willing to take deposits of 10 percent of the value of the property.  Now, many require up to 25 percent.  As a result, although monthly repayments on mortgages are at a record low level, the average deposit required for the purchase of a house in Colchester has leapt from £11,496 to £50,703!

            Way back in 1956 when my wife and I obtained a mortgage to buy the bungalow in which I am writing these words, the normal 10 percent deposit required was reduced to 5 percent because of a guarantee from Clacton Council, then my employer.  I hesitate to reveal what a tiny sum by today’s reckoning that was.  We still had to sell my wife’s engagement ring to raise it though!  In those days, for £50,000 you could have bought several  very nice homes outright!

            Then though, every local authority had a stock of council house, bungalows and flats available, and an annual building programme to meet local future need.  These Council homes were not just to accommodate the penniless homeless, but were intended for any local family that needed a home and lacked the capital to pay a mortgage deposit, or an income large enough to pay the regular mortgage repayments, plus the other expenses that house purchase brings. That situation ended with the passing of the Right to Buy legislation in the 1980s which required local authorities (but not private landlords) to sell off to existing tenants at bargain-basement prices. the properties they had inherited from their thrifty forebears, We are still suffering from the effects of that legislation (which has been described as buying votes with other people’s money) today.  

            No, I don’t know how our country can reduce its deficit and drag itself out of recession, though I have no doubt that, in the long run, narrowing that yawning gulf between the super rich and the poor would help.  The fact that I don’t know the answer doesn’t matter in the least.  What is of concern is that I don’t think that George Osborn and David Cameron know the answer either.  Nor, I think, does Ed Miliband (who actually apologised for the fact that New Labour had opposed the Right to Buy legislation!)

            Oh – for anyone who is interested I think that the next two lines of the protest-song from which I quoted at the beginning of this comment are:

St Peter don’t you call me, ‘cos I can’t go,

I owe my soul to the Company Store!

Rupert’s Revenge?

          Of course, Rupert Murdoch may have had nothing directly to do with the publication in his flagship newspaper the Sun, alone among British Newspapers, of the pictures featuring Prince Harry that have been the subject of so much publicity and controversy, and that ‘the Palace’ had particularly asked should not be published in the British press.   It is difficult though to believe that the editor of a newspaper in which Mr Murdoch has always had a special interest would go ahead and publish them without first consulting and obtaining the approval of his boss. Mr Murdoch may well have welcomed an opportunity to cause further embarrassment to the British ‘Establishment’ which, having sought his favour for years, had now seen fit to repudiate him.

            The circumstances under which the pictures were taken suggest that Prince Harry may have been carefully chosen as the victim of a ‘honey trap’. The fact that the photographer managed surreptitiously to take such photos at crucial moments does suggest careful preparation – and, I am quite sure, will have earned him (or her) a great deal of money.  As for the Prince himself, I really have no comment to make.  A personable and wealthy young man who is also third in line for the throne is faced with opportunities for self indulgence (old fogies like me think of them as being 'temptations') far beyond the experience of the overwhelming majority of us. Who knows how we might have responded to such opportunities at his age and in similar circumstances.   I think that there may be a greater risk of  the Prince becoming an object of ridicule rather than of either envy or disgust.

            Meanwhile the readership of the Sun, the only British newspaper to ignore the royal request, has probably reached fresh heights today The editor claims that, by publishing the photos, he has struck a blow for Free Speech!  He will certainly have struck a blow for Richard Murdoch’s claim last year (flatly contradicted by his sister this week!) that profitability is the sole criterion by which a newspaper should be judged.

            If freedom of the press means no more that freedom to publish the salacious details of the private lives of celebrities, then it really isn't a freedom worth fighting for.

           

           

Week 34 2012

Tendring Topics....on Line

Paying for Daytime Television

          For the two years following the accident in 2004 that resulted in my wife becoming increasingly disabled, she and I watched a good deal of both daytime and evening television. After her life came to an end in 2006 I watched ‘the box’ much less. I was desperately seeking busyness to help fill the gaping, and aching, space that her death had left in my life.

Since then the years have taken their toll.  I have moved from my mid-eighties to my early-nineties!  My physical activities have become increasingly limited and I again find myself watching tv both in daytime and in the evening.  The digital revolution, and the freeview box with integral recorder, have widened my choice.  On daytime commercial tv there is very little new to watch.  However, old age has one unexpected, if somewhat mixed, blessing.  Although I may recall a great deal of one of the Midsomer Murders or  Murder She Wrote episodes when I see either of them again for the second, or possibly the third, time – I rarely remember who-dun-it, and how and why!

            I do remember from the past the adverts filling the commercial breaks that irritatingly punctuate commercial tv programmes.  Some are entertaining and are regularly updated by the advertisers (I have in mind some of the Specsavers adverts and the always-entertaining Meercat adverts by Comparethemarket.com).  Others, repeated ad nauseum, are infuriating.  In particular I can’t bear that character who strides across the tv screen shouting maniacally that with his products, if you buy one, you get one free.  BOGOF indeed!

            Over the years these adverts have changed, reflecting the national mood. In the early years of the new millennium they seemed to be dominated by two themes.  One of them was all about ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers eager to inform viewers that if they had an accident that wasn’t their fault, they could be entitled to generous compensation.  These public spirited and altruistic professionals would ensure that those accident victims received every penny of it if only their help were sought.  The ‘other side’ would have to pay the legal expenses.  It was surely unfortunate that the presenter of one of these adverts was an actor best known to most of us as a bent copper in The Bill.

            The other theme, and this was surely the more noxious, was the offer by  money-lenders to give financial ‘help’ to people who, in their own interest, should never be allowed to borrow.  It doesn’t matter, these warm-hearted philanthropists insisted, if you’re old, unemployed, on benefit, and have a disastrous credit record. Get in touch with us.  We may be able to help’ 

            Others aimed at a slightly different class of viewer.  We were shown a lower middle-class householder (unquestionably a Daily Mail reader!) who had everything;  a nice home, a good job, a beautiful wife and marvellous kids, but there was just one tiny little flaw in this earthly paradise.  He and his wife were, well ‘a bit messy with money’.  There were two or three credit card debts to service, one or two HP agreements, the mortgage on their lovely home, and so on.  It could be something of a nightmare – especially to one whose mind was focussed on higher things; like for instance, whether or not the local football team would keep its place in the First Division at the end of this season.

            The tangle of family debts needed no longer  be a problem.  Those warm-hearted money-lenders would gather all of them together and take them over, so the instalments could be paid tidily, month after month.  Who knows, they added, it might even be possible to lend that delightful family more money to provide some of the other essentials of modern suburban life – a second car for the wife?  Perhaps a family holiday in the Bahamas?

            The benevolent money lenders are no longer quite so blatant.  A few months ago they were pushing their latest idea. Everyone, they said, at sometime or other faced a domestic crisis that needed a relatively small sum of money (perhaps £200 or £300) to settle.  Unfortunately these crises had a habit of occurring just a week or two before payday.   The answer was a payday loan.  Give them a ring and within minutes the two or three hundred pounds would be in your bank account.  It could be repaid on payday with what seemed a very small amount of interest. Easy – but the snag was that what was left of the borrower’s pay wouldn’t then be enough to last the next month.  The answer to that?  Perhaps another payday loan, and another after that – with the interest beginning to become anything but a ‘small amount’.  Following adverse publicity in the news media payday loan adverts are now becoming rarer

            Ambulance chasing lawyers still make their appearance on commercial tv offering ‘no win ….no fee’ services to accident victims.  They do seem to be a little less brash, a bit more grave and professional, than they once were. 

            The latest trend in daytime tv advertising is possibly a response to a realisation by members of the public that there’s little hope of becoming rich by diligence and hard work these days.  It is publishing opportunities for gambling – ‘Someone has got to win – it could be you!’   There are a surprising number of on-line Bingo games available to hopeful fortune seekers.  There’s Sun Bingo. There’s Foxy Bingo, and there’s Tombola.   There may well be others.   There’s an occasional advert for the National Lottery and for on-line roulette. There are also what I think of as disguised lotteries within the fabric of tv programmes.. ‘Secret Dealers’ and ‘Dickinson’s Real Deal’ for instance, always feature a ‘competition’ with  a single prize of several thousand pounds for phoning in, or texting, the correct answer to an easy (much too easy) question. A typical question might be.  Brussels is the capital city of (A) Bulgaria? (B) Switzerland? or (C) Belgium?   Viewers who think they know the answer are invited to phone or text A, B, or C to a given phone  or text number.  There must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of correct answers submitted.  As there is only one ‘winner’ the ‘competition’ really amounts to yet another lottery.

            It seems sad that so many of us appear to be hoping, by means of one or other forms of gambling, to win a life-changing sum of money to escape from the ordinariness of our every day lives. ‘Someone has got to win – it could be you!’   It’s not very likely though that it will be.  The only certain regular winners are the organisers of the gambling game or the Lottery.  They have to make a profit and pay their very considerable advertising or sponsorship costs.

Colchester Council ‘harnesses the sun!’

          A report in last Friday’s (17^th Aug.) local daily Gazette reinforced my confidence in the value of true localism – the devolution of the powers of central government to elected local authorities and the freedom of those local authorities to use those powers wisely.

Last July Colchester Council hired the Breyer Group to install photo-voltaic panels on the roofs of 563 houses managed by Colchester Borough Homes.  They had intended to provide the same service for 2,000 of those homes but central government (‘Nanny knows best dear) had cut their financial support.

            The fruits of the council’s decision are now being harvested and a very bountiful harvest it is proving to be.  Mrs Iliffe-Weston, one of the tenants involved, told the Gazette that for the six months from February to August 2011 her electricity bill had been £331.96 but that for the equivalent six months this year (most of which were not noted for their periods of warm sunshine!) it was just £96.33! 

            The good lady heeded the sage advice that if something seems too good to be true – it probably is!  She thought that there may have been a mistake and, as she definitely did not want a surprise bill of £1000 later, she phoned the Electricity supplier.  They assured her that the bill was correct and that the reduction was due to the photo-voltaic panels on her roof.

            I am not a bit surprised.  The installation on my roof is much smaller and less ambitious.   I have just two small photo-voltaic (I have always called them photo-electric) cells, servicing my solar water heating system. When the fluid in the solar water-heating panel on my roof is a few degrees warmer than the water in my hot water storage cylinder, those photo-electric cells activate the pump to circulate that fluid through the heat exchanger in the storage cylinder. The system is thus self-contained, needing no electricity from the grid.

            .   In weather such as we are having as I write (18^th Aug.) I don’t need to switch on my gas boiler o at all.  In the winter, and on overcast summer days, the solar panel doesn’t produce all the hot water I need but, in summer and winter alike, it preheats the water in the storage cylinder before it circulates through the boiler, which therefore needs to burn less gas to bring it to the required temperature.

            I pay my combined gas and electricity bill monthly by direct debit. My solar heating system has reduced those payments by £30 a month.  My saving is therefore in the region of £360 a year – not quite in the same league as that of Mrs Iliffe-Weston but then mine doesn’t take up so much of my roof surface and, I imagine, cost less to install.

            Congratulations to Colchester Council. As well as doing their bit for the environment, their initiative means that nearly 600 Colchester householders have a few extra pounds in their pockets to spend, and thus to help the country out of the recession.  Pity the Council didn’t get the central government support for which they had hoped – but there, central government has probably got other urgent concerns like nuclear submarines to service and multi-millionaires to keep on-side!

   

           

Week 33 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Olympics Fever (continued)

            My elder son Pete, a regular blog reader, felt that I wasn’t being quite fair to Great Britain’s Olympic team in my comments last week.  He pointed out that, taking into consideration the size of the populations from which each country has to choose its Olympic teams, Great Britain had already overtaken both the USA and China.

            Here’s what he has to say:

I see from your Blog that you have also been watching the Olympics. I would say that considering  our population, we are doing far better than the USA or China.  To be fair, you should compare Team GB with any collection of 10 American States. Similarly we are doing so much better than the Russians who have twice our population. Did you know that New Zealand is the country doing the best compared to its population, with 3 gold medals and only 4m people – about the same as Scotland?  Also Yorkshire has won 7 of our gold medals, which means they would be 8^th in the Country list.

            In a later email sent on the eve of the Games’ closure, he wrote:

            I think it is  pleasing to see everyone cheering on the son of a Somalian refugee.  In the Games Britain has massively benefited from its immigrant population, and regardless of other allegiances, from what I saw in Greenwich where everyone was watching a giant screen, a very multi-cultural audience was rapturously cheering British athletes of any colour or creed. I think this has been a bit of a victory for “multi-culturalism”

Pete’s figures in that first email are, of course, based on the situation a week ago, but I doubt if the proportion of medals won by each national team changed all that much after that.

            On Thursday (9^th August) afternoon I had the good fortune to switch on to BBC 1 just as the Dutch contestant had begun her individual ‘dressage’ performance at the Greenwich equestrian stadium.  She was followed by British gold-medal-winning Charlotte Dujardin.  I have watched a few medal-winning performances during these games but this was the first time that I could truly say that both performances were not merely committed, flawless and thoroughly professional, but almost breath-takingly beautiful to watch. For her horse’s dance the Dutch contestant had chosen pieces from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, with which I was familiar.  I enjoyed every minute of it.

            Charlotte had chosen a patriotic medley of familiar melodies.  It included ‘I vow to Thee my Country…..’ from Holst’s Planet Suite and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance. Her performance too held me entranced.  Horse and rider were as one, both responding as a single unit to the mood as well as to the melody of the music.  When she bowed out I felt that though both were excellent, Charlotte Dujardin was the better of the two.

            Thus the announcement of the score, which made it clear that she had in fact earned another gold medal to add to the one already gained in the team ‘dressage’ competition came as no surprise. No-one who had experienced that performance could have doubted that Charlotte had earned her place in Olympic history. Nor, I think, would anyone have doubted that her Netherlands predecessor thoroughly deserved the silver medal. How my father, who had spent all his working life with horses, would have appreciated and enjoyed those performances! 

           

‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’

            The perception of beauty and ugliness is indeed, a very personal matter.  Many tv viewers may have been quite unmoved by the spectacle of Charlotte Dujardin and her horse earning their Olympic gold medal.  Similarly there are paintings and structures about which others wax lyrical and that seem to my eyes to be just plain ugly.  One such is that extraordinary structure in the Olympic Park which to me suggests a meccano model made by a baby giant and abandoned half-finished.  I feel much the same about ‘the Shard’, that other monstrosity that now dominates the London skyline.   Others though, find them beautiful and inspiring.  Probably my opinion says more about me than it does about the structures concerned.  Yes, I am an old fogy.

            Locally, I realize from comments in the local press, many people have similar feelings about the wind turbines that have become a feature of the local seascape and more recently a conspicuous spectacle inland between Clacton and St Osyth, plainly visible from miles around. ‘Ugly, monstrous, noisy, dangerous, an eyesore, expensive, useless, unnecessary, a danger to birds and wildlife, a threat to house values in the area,’ are just some of the accusations levelled at them.

            It was quite refreshing to get a different view in readers’ letters page of last week’s Clacton Gazette.  Mr C. Griggs of Walton-on-the-Naze, an artist who was formerly an engineer, finds them delightful.  He writes that his artistic nature sees tham, ‘as an awe-inspiring work of art…..huge sculptures that enhance our skyline and otherwise bleak seascape’. He adds that, ‘as an engineering project they are awe-inspiring.  I look at them as my bus passes and wish that it would slow down so that I have them in sight for longer.  One day, I promise myself, I will get off the bus and go to the site, have a good look and maybe do some painting’.

            John Kampf of Meadow Way, Jaywick is a little less poetic but equally forceful: ‘When I was driving in Jaywick Lane the first time, I saw this beautiful invention, an invention that benefits mankind.  I would like one in my back garden. Wind turbines are harmless and cheap to run’.  I don’t like to think of the furious response that those two letters may evoke in next week’s Readers Letters!

             Wind turbines as objects of art, arouse neither my enthusiasm nor my indignation.   They do have a certain stark grandeur and they are certainly not so ugly, nor so potentially dangerous, as the electricity pylons that stride across our countryside and to which we are now thoroughly accustomed.  I have no doubt at all though that – together with the means of harnessing the power of the sun, the waves and the tides – they will provide a badly needed alternative source of the power that is needed to support our civilisation.  They are energy sources that are infinitely renewable, unlike the fossil fuels that will eventually be exhausted and will in the meantime, year by year, become more and more expensive.   Unlike those fossil fuels (coal and oil) they do not produce by-products that poison the environment and hasten climatic change nor, like nuclear energy, do they have a lethal residue that remains dangerous for centuries and for which mankind has not yet discovered a safe means of disposal.

            Now we have a new generation of wind turbine – and the prototypes are being installed for testing with the existing forty-eight wind turbines just a few miles off-shore from Clacton-on-Sea.  We may well think that the existing turbines are enormous but compared with these new ones they are pigmies!

            The new giants are said to have have a blade-span equivalent to the length of two and a half football pitches! – and two of them are currently being installed on the Gunfleet Sands.  Work began in May and installation is expected to be complete by November.  The installers are so confident of success that plans are already being made for 300 of these monsters to be installed round the coast of Britain between 2013 and 2017.

            This pioneering development on the Gunfleet Sands presents the Tendring District with great opportunities.  It will strengthen Harwich’s claim to be the centre for the servicing of North Sea wind farms, and will surely attract extra visitors eager to visit the beaches and the pier from which these new giants can be viewed in action.  I wish I felt confident that the current District Council is up to seizing those opportunites and making the most of them.

            The engineering genius at the dawn of history who first had the idea of a windmill, using turning sails to harness the power of the wind and thus to supplement man and ox-power, would surely have been astonished at the development of his invention, centuries later!  Perhaps, somewhere beyond time and space, he does know about it….and is applauding.

The Olympics Legacy

          I don’t think that it is in any way an exaggeration to claim that The London Olympics of 2012 have been a tremendous success,  Britain’s best ever.  The opening and closing ceremonies excelled and were lauded world-wide, though I can’t pretend that most of the music of the closing ceremony was quite my cup of tea. Actually I much preferred that of Songs of Praise on BBC2 a few hours earlier. But there, that’s just the old fogy in me surfacing again!  

British athletes and gymnasts, cyclists, sailors and equestrians have garnered an unrivalled harvest of medals, a gratifying number of golden ones among them.  Taking Britain’s population into account we have done better than any of our major rivals.  The participants have been a credit to themselves, to their trainers and to the cheering crowds who had supported them.

            It might have been thought that the government would have been pretty pleased with the result and feel that they had got something right at last.  Britain had demonstrated its athletic and sporting prowess.  Now, while maintaining the standard in those fields, we needed to concentrate on upgrading our young people’s scholastic, academic and technical standards to rival those of their contemporaries in Europe, Asia and the USA. This too, just like the training for the Olympics, will demand determination, hard work, and sometimes deadly-boring continuous repetition and practice.

            Is that what the government is doing?   Not a bit of it.  Against all the evidence, a government that has cut education grants and is even now encouraging the sale of school playing fields, has  chosen this moment of triumph to decide that there isn’t enough physical education in British schools. What, I wonder, would they have done had we failed to win any medals?  Nor are they going to leave it to Head Teachers, much less Education Authorities, to decide how much PE there must be and what should be its nature.  These devotees of ‘localism’ who had  insisted that all reforms must come from the bottom up, not from the top down, are going to dictate not only how much time must be spent on PE but how it is to be spent.  It must be on proper competitive sport (like 'we' had in Eton and Harrow), none of this mamby-pamby ‘Indian dance’ stuff, insists David Cameron.

            Needless to say local politicians are getting in on the act.  London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, whose current motto appears to be ‘Anything David Cameron can do, I can do better’, has been quoted as urging that every schoolchild should have two hours of PE a day!   That would leave just three hours a day for reading, writing and arithmetic (the foundation of any education), science, history, geography and religious education, not to mention frivolities like art and music.  It would not however need the daft idea of devoting almost half of each school day to PE, to derail an already flawed educational system.   Every extra hour that is devoted to physical education means an hour less for the teaching of academic, scientific and technical subjects.    

Thanks to the government’s policy of combating unemployment by training the young unemployed for non-existent jobs, and extracting the maximum work capacity from the disabled, we are already building up the world’s best-trained army of unemployed.  The government’s post-Olympic educational policy could result in our also having an unrivalled host of athletic and muscular illiterates!

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Week 32 2012

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

Two Grandsons……….and ‘The World-Wide Web’!

Nick and his Belgian girl-friend Romy in a Brussels Restaurant

            Since the death of my wife in 2006 my two grandsons, Chris and Nick have played an important, and very positive, role in my life.  Nick, who holds an honours degree in photography from Westminster University, was for some years the European Travel Commission’s On Line Sales Manager and subsequently the ETC’s acting Executive Director.  He is now the founder and managing director of SE1 Media Ltd, a consultancy for all involved in tourism and world-wide travel. 

         It was he who established the blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and web site www.ernesthall.net  on which, every week for the past four years, I have published this blog.  I now know from Google that I have readers in the UK and throughout the world – in Russia, the USA, most western European countries and as far afield as Peru,  Australia, China and Japan.

Heather Gilbert (destined to become Heather Hall) as I first knew her, aged fifteen. A line drawing by elder Grandson Chris

    His elder brother Chris earned an Honours Degree in art after studying in Boston, USA and Camberwell College of Art in London.  He has for several years lived and worked in  Taiwan, teaching English to children and adults.  He speaks Mandarin fluently and a couple of years ago was declared Teacher of the Year by the educational organisation that employs him.  It was Chris who first involved me with the internet.  I had never touched a computer before I was eighty and when I first had one I used it strictly as a word processor and for sending and receiving mostly family emails.  He realized how much I was missing his Grandma and how much I needed some creative activity to fill the gap left by her death.             

For that first Christmas, using an old photograph as a reference he made me a  pencil drawing of Heather as the still-fifteen year old schoolgirl that she had been when I first met her.  That pencil drawing stirred my memory in a way that a photograph could never have done. I was deeply grateful and have it framed in my home today.  He then remembered that I had an enormous collection of photographs both recent and from years past.   He arranged for me to have a Flickr site on the web where I could post copies all of my photographs, each with a commentary, for all the world to see.

Chris receives his 'Teacher of the Year' award. 

And so I have done!  Over the years I have scanned into my computer and posted on my Flickr pages some four hundred photos, many taken by me but some by others; a few from years before my time!  Some are of historic interest.  There is, for instance, a photo that I took on holiday in Jugoslavia in 1980 of the famous Turkish pack-horse bridge in Mostar before it was destroyed in the Civil War, others of the sea off Clacton-on-Sea beach when it froze over during one memorable winter, glimpses into boys’ and girls’ classrooms in primary schools in the 1930s, one of a passenger hovercraft on Calais beach in the 60s, and one of my father in 1901 as  one of Queen Victoria’s redcoats,  a dashing newly recruited trooper in the 17th Lancers!

 Nor is it only pictures of obvious public interest that attract viewers’ attention.  Here is a very ordinary picture of my wife and I in 1991 when I was seventy and she was 67.   Only yesterday (2nd August) I received the following email from someone whose memory had been stirred while browsing through my photographic collection.  Here is the picture and what she had to say about it:

What a lovely picture. This is how I remember you at the Quakers Meeting house in Clacton. I'd recently lost my dad and was seeking solace. Heather and Ernest, you were both so welcoming and friendly thank you.  I'm sorry to read that Heather is no longer with us.x

            Thank you dear viewer! 

If you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of my Flickr site, here is the web address. www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea   Perhaps, if you have half an hour or so to spare, you too would find something of interest there: Chris gave me that rather romantic Flickr identity because, so he said, all the appropriate but more mundane, names were already in use

Some thoughts on Higher Education

            Blog readers may be interested in the thoughts on ‘Higher Education’ of a regular fellow reader who had attended state primary and secondary schools, had gone on to University and had done well both there and later in life.  These thoughts were inspired by the contention of another former fellow graduate that, ‘Since LEA grants have been abolished Cambridge Uni has once again reverted to being the social network where public schoolboys make their connections to further their future privileged lifestyles. Perhaps I'm exaggerating but I'm sure that those of us from the state sector, who went there to tackle the academic subjects on offer, raised the standard’.

            My correspondent has a rather more positive outlook than that on private education in ‘Public Schools’.   He believes that:   Yes, there is a lot of social networking for the furtherance of privilege, but I couldn’t help but feel that the “upper class” had actually had a better education – not necessarily in their specialist subjects – but in just about everything else that matters:- self-confidence, eloquence, ambition, breadth of knowledge, general knowledge in the arts (even though they were scientists) and social skills. Frankly, these are  things that don’t demand an IQ of 150 or cost a lot of money to impart, and state schools would do well to take on board.

 State schools tend to turn out a handful of brilliant geeks with no breadth of knowledge or social skills at all, together with a huge number of people who don’t meet the first criteria for public contact work - which is being well presented, polite and able to converse intelligently with customers, speaking grammatically without resorting to swear words or text speak. Later the ‘brilliant geeks’ can’t understand why they  don’t get to be Managing Directors, Cabinet Ministers or High Court Judges while those who don’t meet the basic requirements for public contact work find themselves beaten to a job in a coffee shop by almost any Polish migrant!

            I think that both  those Cambridge alumni exaggerate a little.  I’m pretty certain for instance that my correspondent (who as it happens, is a managing director) does not consider himself to be a ‘brilliant geek’.  Nor, though I left a state school at the age of 16, do I believe that, even then, I was a total barbarian. Thanks to an inspiring English teacher I did leave school with an appreciation of English Language and Literature and, through wide reading, a considerable store of general knowledge. I knew very little about either either art or music though and  I was agonisingly shy and certainly lacking in self-confidence, eloquence and social skills.  Nor did seven years in the army (in the barrack room, not in the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess!) do anything to remedy those deficiencies, though I hope that over the years I have managed to counter some of them.

            I am not at all sure that they are qualities that can be instilled in state day schools to pupils with non-privileged backgrounds, though I would very much like to think they can be.  Pupils at posh boarding schools are exposed to the school’s ethos for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week during term time – and probably spend their holidays in an atmosphere of culture and privilege. State day-school pupils are exposed to their school’s ethos for only about six hours a day for five days a week. For some unfortunate kids the rest of the time may well be spent in an atmosphere that accords with the late Air-Marshal Hermann Goering’s remark ‘When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver’.  It is hardly surprising that, in some fields, they are virtually unemployable.

Olympics Fever!

           Among my possessions is a certificate to the effect that Hall E, of the 5^th Form of the Northgate Secondary School for Boys, Ipswich swam a distance of one mile on a date in July 1936.  I also possess the Bronze Lifesaving Medallion of the Royal Life Saving Society, presented to me during that same year.  They comprise the record of the sole athletic and physical achievements of my school-days. I have always been uniformly useless at gymnastics, athletics, rugby, hockey, cricket and tennis. 

            I had therefore imagined myself to be totally immune to the epidemic of Olympics Fever  (Pyrexia Olympica to the scholarly) currently sweeping the country.    Certainly I showed no signs of the early symptoms exhibited by tens of thousands of others when ‘The Olympic flame’ made its leisurely progress through the country on its way to the Olympic Stadium in London. ‘What possible connection’, I asked myself rhetorically. ‘can that gas flame within an aluminium holder being paraded round Britain, have with the flame that had been ignited by the rays of the sun, hundreds of miles away in Olympus a week or so earlier?

            I was amazed when thousands of apparently rational people turned out in wind and rain to watch and cheer its passing, and when locally, Tendring District Council and the local press were so upset when they learned  that the towns of the Tendring Peninsula – Clacton, Frinton, Walton, Harwich and Brightlingsea – were to see nothing of its progress.  I was quite pleased that local residents were to be spared the resultant traffic congestion and expense.  I pride myself on keeping a finger on the local pulse.  On this occasion it clearly wasn’t!

             The Olympics Opening Ceremony, which I thoroughly enjoyed and said so in this blog, did nothing to arouse my fears of contracting Olympics Fever.  Britain had produced Shakespeare and Milton, Isaac Walton, Isambard Brunel, Florence Nightingale and the NHS.  It was only fair to leave gymnastic and athletic prowess to other nations.

            The first symptoms appeared within a couple of days of the Games beginning.  The fact that Great Britain (I hadn’t yet quite reached the stage of saying ‘we’!) had not yet been awarded a gold medal, began to arouse a certain disquiet. Surely we (it was just beginning to creep into my vocabulary!) would get one soon.  Over the weekend (3^rd to 5^th August) I realized that I was severely infected.  I found myself glued to the telly, willing our girl, or our fellow, to win.  I was delighted when they did, dismayed when they didn’t, and found myself wondering why we were only in third place on the league table.  What’s so special about those Chinese and those Yanks that we can’t beat them?  Perhaps in Rio?

            Oh dear; obviously a severe case of Olympics Fever, an affliction for which there's no known cure!   However I am assured that the more distressing symptoms are likely to disappear within the next few days and that I should be back to normal by the end of the month.   What a relief!    

  

           

:           

Week 31 2012

Tendring Topics.....on Line

The Mote in your neighbour’s eye…….

 A month or so ago, when the back-boiler in my kitchen that serves my hot water supply and central heating systems had its annual service, I had quite a shock.  I was told by the heating engineer that it had sprung a leak and needed to be replaced urgently.  My dismay was compounded by the fact that its manufacturer no longer makes back-boilers.   I would need to have a new modern boiler installed in quite a different position!

This, I thought, is going to be an expensive job – and so it proved to be.  It took two heating engineers two full days to remove the old boiler and complete the installation of the new one (and they really did give me two days service – taking only half an hour or so for lunch, and drinking while working the mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee that I made them)  In addition, another operative was called in to arrange the new boiler’s ventilation by means of a pipe and fitting taken through the roof, and there were several hours work by an electrician who provided and tested the boiler’s electronic controls.  Then of course there was the cost of the boiler itself!

Yes, it was expensive.  Fortunately though I have an emergency fund saved for just such a crisis (though I wouldn’t want too many of them!) and I wrote out my cheque in payment without resentment at the cost of the work.  I had no doubt that I had received value for money.  Furthermore, the efficiency of the new boiler would complement my solar water heating system to reduce my energy bills still further.

What I did resent though was the £500 VAT charge that the Heating Engineering firm had to add to my bill and hand over to the government.   I never complain about my regular income tax payments because I appreciate the public services (depleted though they are nowadays!) that I receive for them, and because I realize that I am fortunate in having an income large enough to be liable for income tax.  I do object though to having to pay a considerable sum to the government for the privilege of carrying out the essential maintenance of my own home!    

I remember Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher explaining unctuously that the great thing about VAT (unlike income tax!) was that you could choose not to pay it.  That may well be the case for those considering the purchase of diamond ear-rings or designer ball-gowns, or having a new garage built to accommodate the second car.  There’s precious little choice though about mending a leaky roof, keeping a car that you need for work, on the road or – in my case – replacing a leaking boiler!

My resentment at VAT payments was reignited last week when Treasury Minister David Gauke complained about the way in which, so he claimed, tax liability was being regularly avoided by the payment  of small bills in cash. He claimed that jobbing builders, gardeners, domestic cleaners, window cleaners and the like would offer substantial discounts for cash in hand to avoid paying tax.  The resulting loss to the Treasury was comparable with the loss resulting from the tax avoidance by the wealthy that had recently been publicised.

Much of the news media seems to have assumed that David Gauke was referring to avoidance of VAT.  I find that difficult to believe.  Surely he must be aware that only quite large firms are required to be registered for VAT (the proprietor of the garage where I used to have my car serviced took some pride in the fact that he managed to keep his turnover below the level of liability) and I can’t believe that many, if any, jobbing gardeners, odd-job-men, window clearers and general cleaners need to be VAT registered.

What probably does happen is that these small self-employed entrepreneurs pocket unrecorded the fruits of their labours and neglect to declare them to the Inland Revenue. Probably quite a few of them would remain below the level of liability for income tax anyway! I’d be very surprised if many formally offer a discount for cash.  They simply agree to do a job at a lower rate than they would were they expecting part of their earnings to be skimmed off by the government.  They work on the principle that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and some of them may not even have a bank account. 

It isn’t all that long ago that all transactions of ‘working class’ people were carried out in cash or with postal orders.  As a lower ranking local government officer I was paid in cash (and paid all my bills in cash) until I came to Clacton in 1956 and opened an account with the Co-op Bank. 

It is probable that the government does lose a small amount of revenue through the unrecorded cash receipts of some of these self-employed workers.    I am quite sure though that it bears no comparison whatsoever with the tax avoidance of the super-wealthy and of Britain’s and the world’s giant corporations, though Mr Gauke and his well-heeled friends and colleagues may prefer to think otherwise.

I suggest that they take the advice in Chapter 7 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which can be loosely paraphrased as,  ‘Don’t worry too much about the speck of dust in your neighbour’s eye until you have got rid of that enormous log obscuring your own vision!’

A Prophetic Email

The news that Britain had slipped even further into recession than had been forecast  (due, according to our Chancellor, to the weather, and to our all having taken our eyes off the ball, our shoulders away from the wheel and our noses from the grindstone for a whole working day to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee!), and David Cameron’s subsequent public affirmation that the government would not change its economic policy, reminded me of a prophetic email that I had received from a regular blog reader a month or so earlier.

I really feel that George Osborne’s and David Cameron’s financial strategy is now in ribbons, don’t you? The country’s debt burden is growing as tax receipts go down and benefit payments rise.  The Governor of the Bank of England seems to be convinced that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, so that’s it – the economy just carries on shrinking.  The really pathetic thing is that these two failed leaders have only one response to everything, which is to do more of the same; carry on with policies that have been shown to be counter productive.

The Bank of England is considering cutting interest rates further (to zero?)  This is like driving a car with one’s foot flat on the accelerator, and trying to push it through the floor to get some more power!  As for George Osborne; he’ll need to make more cuts to benefits and public services to pay for the cost of the cuts that he has already made!  Meanwhile David Cameron, the front man, will run a diversionary campaign, whipping up suspicion and hatred against groups of claimants, the old, the disabled, the unemployed, against public sector workers (despite the fact that they have cleared up the muddle in which the private sector had left security at the Olympics) and against our European neighbours and partners.

Cameron was right in one respect – about the problem of a ‘benefit culture’. .It takes some of the sting out of poverty and unemployment.  If the victims of the government’s policies were actually starving and their families were actually out on the streets, I have little doubt that we would see demos and riots that would make those in Egypt and Greece seem like Sunday-school picnics!  As it is I suspect that most of those affected didn’t even bother to vote in the last election, and probably won’t bother to vote in the next one either!

‘Which came first - The chicken or the egg?’

This ancient conundrum comes to my mind when I think of the government’s ineffectual efforts to solve our national economic problems.  To deal with youth unemployment they make every effort to make unemployed young people employable by learning new skills; and to find employment by learning how best to apply for a job and to behave at a job interview.  These skills are not much use while there is little demand for either new or old skills, and a score of applicants for every job that is available.

One reason for the shortage of jobs is that the banks, despite all the financial support they have been given are reluctant to lend money to entrepreneurs who would like to set up a new business or expand an existing one. The banks’ reluctance to lend is because they are by no means certain that the new or expanded businesses would attract enough customers to service and ultimately repay the loans.

The remedy is to make sure that the potential customers, the general public, have enough money for them to buy the services or manufactured products that those new or expanded enterprises would offer.  But the government’s austerity programme, coupled with a taxation system (VAT and customs duty increases and reduction of the highest rate of income tax) that penalises ‘ordinary’ people at the expense of the super-wealthy, has precisely the opposite effect.

Another blog reader (I really do read and appreciate readers' comments!) reminds me of my pie-in-the-sky dream of a UK government funded largely by a compulsory annual ‘citizenship membership subscription’ consisting of 20 percent of the gross annual income of every adult citizen from the very poorest to the most wealthy.  This could, at a stroke, be a means of redistributing our national income without impoverishing anybody, and would put money into the pockets of those who would spend it to revive our moribund economy.

One day that pie-in-the-sky may be seen as the only diet capable of restoring our nation to health.  The chances of my seeing that day dawn are pretty slim - but there's no harm in hoping!

Lord of the ‘Olympic’ Rings!

That, I think, certainly describes Danny Boyle, creator and director of the wonderful Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.  It was watched and appreciated world-wide.  Here is an email that I received early on the morning of Saturday 28^th July from a friend in Zittau, in what is to us the most remote part of Germany.

Dear Ernest,

Did you watch TV yesterday evening? Julia and I watched the opening performance of the Olympic Games in London. It was marvellous - congratulation!

Yours Volker and Julia

            My friend is a Cultural Senator of the Federal State of Saxony and is a Ph.D. whose specialism is European history.   His praise for what was a graphic portrayal of the transformation of the verdant England of tiny villages, green fields and rural pursuits of the 17^th and 18^th centuries to the chaotic and ugly (but productive) ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution of the 19^th and 20^th  therefore carries some weight!  I thought that the idea of the symbolic forging of the Olympic rings as one of the positive results of that revolution was especially brilliant.  

So too, was the idea of visiting Buckingham Palace and involving the Queen (and her corgis!) at the very beginning of the celebration.  James Bond was, I suppose, an appropriate escort though he isn’t one of my favourite fictional characters. I’d have preferred Brother Cadfael or the first Chief Inspector Barnaby, and think that the Queen would have found either of them a more congenial temporary companion. The helicopter ride and parachute drop would surely have tested Brother Cadfael’s faith to the utmost, though to Inspector Barnaby it would no doubt have been just another of those last-minute calls of duty that constantly prevent him from spending a quiet evening at home with his family.

Other highlights of the evening for me were the splendid celebration of the NHS, one of the achievements of the immediate post-war years that hasn’t – yet – been totally destroyed by the forces of Mammon, and that wonderful soprano solo voice singing Blake’s Jerusalem.  At first I feared that we were to hear only the first verse of that magnificent poem but later – at an appropriate moment – we had the other verse:

Bring me my bow of burning gold.

Bring me my arrows of desire.

Bring me my sword, O clouds unfold,

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I shall not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till I have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

It is a wake-up call that the disheartened, disillusioned and dispirited Britain of today badly needs.