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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