Week 44 2012 (a Hallowe'en Special)

Tendring Topics………on line

 

A story for All Hallowe’en

            Especially for All Hallowe’en I thought that, instead of my usual comment on local, national and international affairs I’d publish my only foray into the field of fiction writing.  It is a horror story of just over 2,000 words and it was published in the ‘London Mystery Magazine’ some forty years ago.  I was paid five guineas  (£5.25) for it, which even in those days was a paltry sum!

I hope to be ‘back to normal’ next week.  There’s more than enough horror in the real world without any need for contributions from my imagination.  Anyway, here it is.

The Night Mare                                                                                                                

           Yet another spray of semi-liquid mud splashed onto my windscreen from the wheels of the removal van ahead.  My cleaning fluid had run out and the wipers gave an agonised screech as they dragged over the mud-spattered glass.  I cursed under my breath.  I seemed to have been staring at the back of that van, Harper Bros.Ltd., Saffron Walden, House Removals, for hours, the driver obstinately ignoring my bad-tempered hooting and refusing to pull over and let me pass.

               

It had not been my day.   I had made a late and hurried start from Manchester and had made myself even later by having had to go back to the hotel for the case of samples and order book that I had left behind there.  Then – and goodness knows how I had managed to do this – I had missed my turning off the motorway!

               

That was how it was that I was now hopelessly lost amid a tangle of narrow, muddy lanes somewhere on the borders of Cambridgeshire, Essex and Suffolk.  Darkness had fallen long before and it seemed increasingly unlikely that I would reach my destination that night.  I pondered as I drove on through the murk.  The next day’s appointment wasn’t until 2.00 p.m.   Probably my best course of action would be to find somewhere to spend the night and get my bearings; then to set off, rested and refreshed, in daylight tomorrow morning.  There must be an ‘A’ road, if not a motorway, reasonably near and, once I had struck it, Ipswich could surely be no more than an hour or so away.

               

A village loomed ahead.  Lighted front rooms and the flicker of television screens looked warm and welcoming.  Out into the darkness again and then – out of the gloom – the lights of a pub loomed ahead.

               

I pulled onto its forecourt.  At the very least it would give me a chance to let that wretched furniture van get well ahead. I’d be able to clean the mud off my windscreen and the lenses of my headlights.  Perhaps I’d step inside, have a quick drink, and find out where I was – and how best to get to Ipswich.

               

I got out of the car, stretching my limbs and shivering a little in the chilly northeast breeze.  It was still only mid-October but in East Anglia winter had come early that year.  The spotlight illuminated inn sign creaked as it swung gently to and fro above my head.  I stepped back so that I could see it properly. ‘The Night Mare’ it said.  There was a picture of a white horse, with staring eyes and mane blowing in the wind, galloping over moonlit fields.

Not a name that I had ever seen used before for a pub – and I’ve been in a few in my time!  Probably one of those trendy modern names that crop up nowadays.  You know the sort of thing ‘The Astronauts’ Arms’,  ‘The Moon and Rocket’, and so on.

But there was nothing trendy or modern about this pub.  The white plastered walls were of traditional wattle and daub.  Over them, and encircling the tops and sides of the dormer windows like bushy eyebrows, hung time-darkened thatch.  Through a window I could see a scrubbed brick floor and blazing log fire.

A large notice near the front door said:  ‘Good Pub Food; Bed and Breakfast’ and another announced ‘Rooms Vacant’.  It was enough for me.  I drove my car into the car-park, grabbed my overnight bag, pushed open the pub door and stepped into the warmth and light of the bar-room.

Two elderly men, playing dominoes by the blazing fire, looked up as I entered but quickly resumed their game.  The landlord, a slightly built man, auburn haired and with pale blue eyes, dragged himself away from the crossword puzzle with which he was struggling.

‘G’d evening sir.  What can I get you?’

‘Well, first of all I’d like to know if I can have some food – and a room for the night?’  

‘No problem with the room sir.  I’ll get Annie to show it to you, and you can leave your bag there before you come down again for a drink.  ‘Food though?’  He scratched his head. ‘The missus is under the weather so I can’t give you a cooked meal – but if cold meat and pickles with a crusty loaf, cheese and farmhouse butter will do – I’ll have it ready for you by the time you come back from your room’.

It sounded fine to me.  I signified agreement and he shouted for Annie.  She turned out to be a plump and friendly girl still – I guessed – in her late teens.  It was a pleasant enough room, comfortably carpeted with a good springy bed, a comfortable easy chair and a small tv set.  The window was one of the dormers that I had spotted from the forecourt.  There was a wash-hand basin with mirror and a clean towel in a corner, a radiator under the window was comfortably hot – and the bathroom was, as Annie showed me, just along the corridor. 

I hung my coat behind the bedroom door, with my hat on the peg above, and put my overnight bag on the bedside chair. Then I paid a brief visit to the bathroom, noting that there appeared no shortage of hot water, and made my way down a creaking wooden staircase to the bar.  The landlord had been as good as his word.  A plate of cold sliced beef, a pickle jar and a cottage loaf, with a good pound of mature cheddar cheese and a well-filled butter jar awaited me.

I smiled appreciatively.  ‘Thanks’, I said,  ‘I’ll have a pint of best bitter and a large Bells, with just a little water, to finish off with.  That should see me comfortably through till morning’.

I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so I enjoyed my meal, savouring every mouthful and feeling my body glow as the Bells began to take effect.  I was just wondering whether or not to risk another Bells – I had a longish drive in the morning – when the landlord looked at his watch and called out ‘Time gentlemen – if you please’.  

The dominoes players put away their pieces, finished their drinks, and trudged out into the night.  The landlord seemed fidgety and kept glancing at his watch – probably, I thought, he was eager to be with his ailing wife – so I wished him good night and went up to bed myself.

Before getting undressed I opened the casement and looked out.  The clouds had cleared and there was a full moon low in the sky. It shone, I realized, on the very fields over which that wild white horse galloped on the pub sign.  Cold night air blew into the room, bringing a smell of decaying cabbages.  I shut the window hastily, pressing the catch firmly down.  As far as I’m concerned those who like fresh air can go outside and get it!

               

I had had an exhausting day and I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep directly my head touched the pillow.  I don’t know how long it was before I woke but I did so with a sense of unease.  Someone, or something, had wakened me.

               

Could it have been the creaking of the sign in the wind – or a strand of ivy tapping on the window?   Hardly; the wind had dropped and the night was deathly still

               

There was something at the window though.  I had pulled back the chintz curtains before getting into bed and could see clearly.  I rubbed my eyes and stared. It was a woman’s face, beautiful beyond words but nevertheless conveying a sense of ultimate evil. Her cheeks were deathly white but she had jet-black hair and full rosy-red lips. Her eyes were green-black bottomless pools of evil.  Keats’s ‘Belle Dame sans Merci’ and Housman’s ‘Queen of Air and Darkness’ came to my mind, which was beset with ugly jumbled images:  Those women of Paris during the reign of terror, who calmly knitted and gossiped in the shadow of the guillotine as the bloodied blade rose and fell and heads rolled into the basket; a Witches’ Sabbath on a bare mountain side; human sacrifices to Astarte, goddess of the Phoenicians and to Kali the many limbed Hindu goddess of death and destruction.

               

The face opened its mouth and spoke to me. My ears couldn’t hear the words but they seared directly into my brain: ‘Come to me, my beloved.  Come to me. All the riches of the world will be yours and together we shall enjoy pleasures beyond your imagination.  Come, come to me’.  The mouth twisted into a ghastly smile of welcome and I felt myself being drawn inexorably off the bed and towards the window.                

               

I prayed. I’m not a church-going man but my mother was a Catholic and my father a Quaker. I did know how to pray and I remembered a few prayers:  ‘Our Father’, ‘Hail Mary’, ‘the Gloria’ - and I remembered how old George Fox, founder of the Quakers, had had a vision of an ocean of darkness and death being overwhelmed by another ocean of love, light and peace. I could have done with that vision, then!

             
             As I prayed ‘Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil’;  ‘Holy Mary….pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death’, my mind became a battlefield. The evil whisperings from the thing at the window: ‘Come to me; come to me. You are mine. All the wealth and every pleasure the world has to offer will be yours’, tried again and again to block out my prayers. 

               

‘Lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil’, I prayed.  ‘Come to me, come to me, you are mine’ whispered that evil unbidden voice from beyond the casement. ‘Holy Mother of God, pray for us’, I begged.  ‘She won’t help you, come to me’, came the whisper.

               

Were my prayers answered?   In my better moments I certainly like to think so.  It was as though a stretched rubber band had suddenly snapped.  I fell back on the bed utterly exhausted. The whisper of the temptress faded and disappeared.  There was no longer anyone – or any thing – at the window.

               

Time passed.  Somewhere a door slammed, a car started, revved up and sped away.  I glanced at my watch – 2.30 a.m.  I had work to do in a few hours time!  I must try to get some sleep.  I closed my eyes and composed myself.  Eventually I fell into a restless, dream-haunted sleep from which I woke, still tired, at about seven o’clock.  Could it all have been nothing but a nightmare, brought on by too heavy a meal on an empty stomach?

               

Annie was in the corridor as I made my way to the bathroom.  ‘I hope that you slept well’, she said.  ‘Well no, I didn’t,’ I replied, ‘I had a most terrible nightmare.  I have never known one to seem so real’.

               

‘I’m sorry sir’, she replied, ‘but it’s no surprise. There were lots of comings and goings in the night and I reckon we must have disturbed you. T’missus’ baby was born in the night.  She had a hoolly hard time of it and we had to get the doctor out.  He waren’t best pleased, I can tell you, about being dragged out o’ bed in the middle of the night.  Howsomebe, she had her babe – a dear little owd gal - at about two o’clock.  I’m just goin’ in t’see to ‘em sir’, she said, as she disappeared through another door.

               

I had my shower and shave with a much lighter heart.  So that’s what the landlord had meant when he said that his wife was ‘under the weather’.  Of course that was what had happened.  The big meal on an empty stomach and the pub’s odd name had, no doubt, played their part.  The real cause of the nightmare or waking dream though, had been the commotion involved in a difficult childbirth.  The car that I had heard at about 2.30 a.m. had been that of the departing doctor.

               

I stepped lightly out of the bathroom.  Annie was in the corridor with a bundle in her arms.  ‘Hello sir’, she said.  ‘All’s well. The missus is sound asleep.  I’m going to look after the babe for a bit so she don’t get disturbed.  Would you like to look at the littl‘un sir?’   Babies aren’t my first enthusiasm but Annie was a friendly girl and I was in a cheerful mood..  I nodded.

               

She thrust the bundle towards me.  ‘Here she is sir’, she said.  Her Suffolk accent thickening as she gave way to her maternal instincts. ‘In’t she a little love?’  I smiled encouragingly.  Annie burbled on. ‘Look at that sir.  The dear little owd mawther ain’t more nor five hours old, but she’s opening her dear little eyes and looking at you – and I dew believe that she’s a smilin’ at you sir’.

               

The baby opened her eyes and focussed – yes focussed – them on me.  I looked down into the two green-black bottomless pools of evil that had haunted me in the night.  The baby smiled – in recognition.

Note - No, of course I don’t believe in infantile demonic possession.  It is only a story!  However, for those who are revolted at the thought of an evil baby and the apparent triumph of evil, here is a – previously unpublished - ‘Happy Ending’.

A couple of years after the events recorded above, the story teller again found himself in that corner of East Anglia.  He discovered that the pub, that had clearly had a recent makeover, was now called ‘The White Mare’.  Annie, two years older but as friendly as ever, welcomed him at the door, accompanied by a friendly (but rather shy) golden haired two-year-old toddler who showed not the least sign of recognition.

It was the same landlord and he did remember the overnight stay at the inn at the time of his daughter's birth. The now proud father made him welcome and introduced him to his wife.   It seemed that the child born on the night of that previous visit had for well over a year been ‘a right little terror; allus awake, allus a’hollerin, allus wantin’ feeding, never satisfied’. Yet her mum and dad, though often despairing. had at all times tried to be patient and loving. She was their only child. Then, when she was about eighteen months old, she had fallen desperately ill with meningitis.  In despair the landlord had begged for help from a cousin of his – an Anglican nun reputed to have the gift of healing.  The nun came gladly and held the child in her arms all one night, murmuring familiar prayers as she did so.  In the morning the fever had left her little patient – and so had the bad temper, the spitefulness, the insatiable greed and the tantrums – revealing the sweet child that had always been her true nature   The nun was now the child’s godmother. The child,, the golden haired toddler who, with Annie, had welcomed him to the pub had been named Susanna after her.  She  was, as Annie put it, ‘a hoolly nice little owd gal!' full of love and joy.

It was a happy ending for all concerned  (even for the demon who hadn’t really enjoyed being trapped in a tiny body with a very limited capacity for evil!). 

We should be thankful that All Hallowe’en  is always followed by the Feast of All Hallows, or All Saints Day.!

Week 43 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

Congratulations!

It really is an unusual pleasure to be able to offer unqualified congratulations to a senior member of the Government but I have no hesitation in doing so to Home Secretary Theresa May for her refusal to extradite computer whizz-kid Gary McKinnon to the USA.  Whether or not he was suicidal is surely beside the point.  I don’t think that it needed an expert in international espionage or a leading psychiatrist, to realize that this young (by my standards!) sufferer from Asperges Syndrome had no evil intent whatsoever when he hacked his way into some of the USA’s most secret electronic files.

If the USA feels that someone should be prosecuted for this affair, the individual or company who sold them a system that could be hacked into by a lone 42 year old in a distant land, might be a more appropriate object for their urge for justice (or could it be an urge for vengeance after they had been made to look ridiculous?) than this hapless British citizen.

If Gary McKinnon managed to hack into the USA’s most closely guarded secrets it cannot be impossible for someone else, deliberately and with much less innocent intent, to do so.  President Barak Obama might find it worth his while to despatch one or two of his own computer experts to England to have a polite and friendly chat with Mr McKinnon.  If asked courteously he might be prepared to tell them just how he did it and even, for an appropriate fee, help them to devise a system that is not just American-expert-proof but McKinnon-proof!

Footnote:   Where, I wonder, was the voice of UKIP in the McKinnon controversy?  Usually their strident voice is in the forefront when British sovereignty is being defended.  Their silence over this matter reinforces my conviction that they are motivated less by love of the United Kingdom than by dislike and suspicion of our fellow Europeans..

Growing old on the ‘Costa Geriatrica’

          That’s how I have heard our Essex Holiday Coast disparagingly described.  It is true that we have a higher proportion of elderly residents than most other areas in the United Kingdom.  Holland-on-Sea in particular is said to have the highest concentration of pensioners in Europe!  For that, I have no doubt, there are two reasons.  Ours is a very healthy area so we natives tend to live longer than those elsewhere.  It is also a very pleasant area in which to live, with low rainfall, lots of sunshine and safe sandy beaches, so those who live in less fortunate regions often move here when they retire and are able to do so.  Surely those are features about which we should be proud, not apologetic.

            Old age does bring problems – not least, as I can confirm from personal experience, to those who achieve it.  When I was in my forties I remember thinking how silly seventy and eighty year olds were to cling so frantically to their independence.  Couldn’t they see how much better off they would be in a residential or care home – no more worries about preparing meals and washing up, about the laundry or the neglected garden, about fuel bills or house maintenance?   There would be no more loneliness, with plenty of contemporaries available to chat and share memories, and there would be medical and nursing care available at any hour of the day or night.   

            It sounded idyllic to my then middle-aged mind but now I am over 90, and clinging to independence myself, I well understand the fears of those old people half a century ago.  I find that shopping, preparing meals, doing the washing (with a reliable washing machine!), dealing with my email correspondence and preparing this blog every week, keep me fully occupied, avoid my vegetating in an armchair while watching daytime television, and prevent my thoughts dwelling too much on happier days in the past.   I am lonely only for the wife who shared my life for 60 years. I appreciate the occasional company of my contemporaries but I also enjoy a chat (I can only hope that I don’t bore them out of their minds) with younger people – the ladies at the supermarket check-out, the younger folk (that’s actually everybody!) at the Quaker Meeting and at the two Clacton churches I visit with a friend each week.  Then there’s the lady who spends an hour or so with me every Friday, preventing the interior of my bungalow from becoming a tip, and the gardener who slows down my neglected garden’s evolution into a wild-life sanctuary!  Nor must I forget the value of my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) that gives me the independence I need to do my shopping, visit local friends and get to those church services and Quaker Meetings.

And, although it may sound fanciful in this secular and materialistic age, I don’t feel that I have entirely lost contact with my late wife while I remain in the bungalow in which we spent half a century together.  Often I feel her, always benign and loving, presence.  Somehow I don’t think that that presence would follow me into a care home.

My wife Heather – as I remember her towards the end of her life.

Towards the end of her life I went with her when she visited friends who were spending their declining years in residential care homes in Clacton (she was the visitor – I was just the chauffeur!) and I learned from my own observation that while some such homes were very good indeed, others were awful – with noisy, un-cooperative and antisocial residents and inexperienced, harassed and uncaring staff.

            Nor does remaining in one’s own home with the support of social services necessarily provide a happy solution.  Once again a government report (that the government chooses to ignore!) highlights the danger of contracting these services out to ‘the private sector’.  Investigation revealed that some private agencies were found to be using totally untrained staff, and even staff with criminal records, for personal and social care of elderly and disabled people in their own homes.  I remember seeing, in a tv documentary last year, a secretly taken video of a ‘professional carer’ giving an old gentleman a blanket bath, with a sponge in one hand while the other clutched a mobile phone pressed to her ear with which she was having a chat with a friend!

            Last week’s Clacton Gazette carried the shock/horror headline SHOCKING ABUSE OF OUR ELDERLY.  This did not relate either to care agencies or social services authorities, but to abuse of some old people in their own homes by their own relatives.  Age UK Essex Advisory Service (based in Thorpe-le-Soken) has found that some local families, impoverished by unemployment and rising prices, are bullying elderly relatives into handing over some of their money to them or, in some cases, stealing from their bank accounts by fraud

                                                                                                                  

Mrs Belinda Griffith, the service’s co-ordinator, said that there had been a surge of people taking advantage of elderly relatives since the economic crisis started to bite four years ago.  They had for instance not understood why one old lady’s finances were in a muddle until they discovered that her grandson was turning up on pension day and demanding money from her.  In another instance an unemployed woman had taken her elderly mother’s cashpoint card and was helping herself to money from her mother’s bank account.  The victim was reluctant to report what was happening, ‘because she loved her daughter and didn’t want to get her into trouble’.

Oh dear – how very, very fortunate I am to have reached the age of 91 and – so far – to have lived independently in my own home, without help from Social Services, with an adequate income and with a loving (and certainly never exploitative!) family and good and steadfast friends.  I only hope that, like my wife, I end my days here.

The Global Market – a blog reader’s view

My last week’s blog about the global market certainly struck a chord with a regular blog reader with a strongly developed social conscience, who is the founder and managing director of a small but successful private consultancy. It evoked from him an immediate and forcibly worded response.  Here – almost unedited – it is.

The story in your blog about your Royal Mail Envelope (made in China) was a small example of the absurdity of globalisation. Did you know, for instance, that almost all the souvenirs for London 2012, selling Britain to the world, were made in China?

If globalisation is taken to its logical extreme – and there is no sign that it will not be – then wages and taxes, working conditions and the welfare state are all pitched into global competition. How can an unskilled worker in the UK compete with a billion workers in India?  He is funding a National Health Service and an Education Service which his counterpart in India is not, and he has expectations of Employment Rights which the average Indian cannot even dream of.

 The mechanism by which this deterioration in the UK workers’ standard of living will occur is also clear and is happening already.  His UK employer will go bust, or go global and move his job abroad*. The worker’s  own desperate need to live more cheaply will ensure that he accelerates the process himself, by shopping around for the cheapest goods - made in the Far East. This of course creates a situation where the demands on the welfare state are growing and its cost is falling on a reducing number of better off workers, who themselves are being squeezed by foreign competition.  In the end they will want to cut all this welfare expenditure and be rid of the burden of funding the poor and disabled.  I can see that happening both in the UK and USA.

            I think the Tory party conference gave us a breath--taking glimpse of the future; endless multi-billion pound cuts to welfare (this got the loudest cheer!) progressively opting out of Europe; workers bribed and, in the end, forced to sell or forgo their rights to almost everything in exchange for a job. I realized with some amazement how far the Conservatives have come since the days of Ted Heath and John Major!

I cannot imagine how Cameron has been said to have “detoxified” the Tory brand or how he managed to keep the lid on this groundswell of extreme right wing opinion so that at the last General Election many voters felt that there really wasn’t much difference between the parties.

That email  reminded me of a verse from a rarely-quoted poem by A.E.Housman:

The signal fires of warning

Burn on, but none regard,

And so, through night to morning

The earth spins ruin-ward!

Not the whole earth perhaps, but certainly our small corner of it.


*Only yesterday (23rd Oct.) I learned that Birmingham Corporation (Britain's largest local authority) was out-sourcing its IT services to India and making members of its own staff redundant!

Week 42 2012

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Global Market

            It was I suppose obvious, but it still came as something of a shock when I heard David Cameron’s final rallying speech at the Conservative Party Conference.  We have, he said, to compete on the global market with emerging economies like China, India and Brazil if we are to survive and prosper as a nation.  That is, of course, the logical result of the free global market that most, if not all, our national politicians are so keen on.

            It is a subject on which I had my damascene moment about a year ago when I bought a padded envelope at the post office to send a small gift to a very young friend of mine in Germany.  The packet had ROYAL MAIL in big bold letters at the top.  At the bottom, in much smaller letters, were the words Made in China.  It dawned on me that thousands of miles away on the other side of the world there was a firm that could manufacture those packets, intended solely for the British market, transport them half way round the world, and offer them for sale in Britain at a lower price than any British or European manufacturer, despite the fact that those manufacturers were virtually on-the-spot!  Market forces, whose gods are cost effectiveness and profitability, then dictated that the Royal Mail purchased them in preference to any locally manufactured product.

            To compete with those emerging economies we have either to undercut their prices or produce better quality products.  There was a time when we could confidently predict our ability to do the latter – but that time has gone.  Those other nations with emerging economies, whom Kipling dismissed a century and half ago as ‘lesser breeds without the law’ are as good at quality control as we are and, particularly in China, have a thirst for technical – and general – education that now seems to be lacking in Britain.

            If we are going to undercut their prices we have to create ‘a level playing field’ which would mean that our working men and women would have to accept the same wages as workers in those countries.  We would have to accept the same or worse living conditions than they do, tolerate the same slums, the same level of public services, and the same health and welfare services.  Have you seen the film ‘Slum-dog millionaire’?  In India’s cities in real life there are thousands of slum-dogs for every millionaire!

            Well, we haven’t got there yet, but if the present government pursues with even more vigour its present policies of slashing public services, freezing council tax, cutting grants to local authorities, freeing employers of the restraints that protect the safety and livelihood of working people, and cutting the benefits of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who cannot find work, they’ll get there in the end!  Think of that.  Thanks to David Cameron and his millionaire-friendly government, we may one day be able to make padded envelopes with large inscriptions in Chinese, Urdu or Portuguese printed upon them (and smaller inscriptions saying Made in the UK) and sell them to the postal authorities in China, India and Brazil!

‘Well might the Dead, who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre to crime’

          So wrote 1^st World War poet, war hero and, from 1917 onwards, fervent opponent of the war, Siegfried Sassoon CBE, MC.   He was referring to the Menin Gate, perhaps World War 1’s best-known memorial, on which are inscribed the names of 90,000 men killed in the third battle of Ypres, often known as the Battle of Passchendaele, whose bodies were never found!   I think it likely that were Sassoon living today, he would say much the same about David Cameron’s idea of a day of special remembrance on 4^th August 2014, the 100^th anniversary of the declaration of war between Britain and the Commonwealth, and the Kaiser’s Germany.

Probably most of the dead of the two World Wars would express similar sentiments.  They know that no memorial to their memory or ceremony of remembrance can ever give them back their stolen lives nor ever begin to compensate for their loss.  To pretend that  they do justice to their memory is just a joke in bad taste.

 A memorial to the Rainbow Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, that captures something of the tragedy of war.  (Photo by my younger son Andy)    

However that memorial at Ypres, and the memorial events proposed by David Cameron, are not really for them.   They are not for the dead but for the living.  Those 90,000 names carved on the Menin Gate must surely bring to even the most frivolous visitor a sense of the enormity and horror of World War 1, of the appalling loss of human life, and of the deep and inconsolable sorrow of bereaved widows and girl friends, of parents and of young sons and daughters.

               I can just remember Remembrance Day (Armistice Day we called it then) memorial parades and church services in the late 1920s, when World War I was still a dreadful memory in the lives of most people.  There were ex-servicemen, some blinded, some with missing arms or legs. There were widows and girl-friends, some still wearing mourning black.  There were elderly mums and dads fighting the tears as they remembered their own sons whose lives had held so much promise, but who were now among the ‘heroic dead’.  Those scenes were replicated all over the world in lands of former allies and former enemies alike.  Death, love and sorrow hold no passports and know no national boundaries.

            I hope that the centenary of the beginning of World War I will be observed in sorrow and with repentance……certainly not in an orgy of self congratulation and triumphal nationalism.  World War I was declared to be a war to end wars.   It didn’t.  World War II was fought to defeat for ever the forces of Nazism and Fascism and to establish a new world order of peace, tolerance and prosperity.  It didn’t. Two Gulf Wars disposed of Saddam Hussein but have failed to make Iraq a safer, happier place in which to live.  Whatever may be the outcome of the current bloody civil war in Syria the one  prediction that I can make with total confidence is that we shall end with a Syria having less tolerance and freedom than it had before the conflict started. 

Peaceful negotiations do not always obtain their objective.  Warfare and violence never do.  The very best memorial that we can give those 90,000 lost soldiers who perished as they ‘struggled in the slime’ of Passchendaele and whose bodies were never found, and the millions of others of every nation who were slaughtered in two Word Wars, is an end to the international arms trade and real progress towards a lasting peace such as Tennyson prophesied nearly two centuries ago in a world where:

The war drum throbs no more and the battle flags are furled,

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

The Time Traveller

I have in the past written in this blog that I sometimes think of myself as a time traveller; a mid-twentieth century man who has managed to stray into the twenty-first century and isn’t completely comfortable there.  Last week I travelled back in time, at least in my memory, some eighty years – and found that I was even less comfortable there!

 My new gas-fired boiler with automatic control was installed in July.  As  I am an early riser I have set the automatic controls so as to ensure that by six a.m. when I usually get up, my bungalow is warm and comfortable and there is plenty of hot water for my wash, shave and shower.  The boiler is set to switch off at 6.30 am. However I can, and do, switch the central heating and/or the water heating on manually at any time during the day when the need arises.

Last Thursday (11^th October) I was out during the morning and returned home at about 11.00 am.  It was, as Clacton blog-readers may remember, a chilly, cheerless and overcast day with occasional light rain.  I decided to switch on the central heating.  I pressed the appropriate button.  Nothing happened.  The boiler obstinately refused to respond.   I phoned the installer (the system was well within its guarantee) and was promised that an engineer would call and sort out my problem early the next day.  That was the most I could have hoped for.  The installer could hardly have been expected to get one of his men to down tools instantly in order to sort out my problem.

In the meantime I had to face the next twenty-four hours with no hot water on tap and no central heating.  Thursday was one of those relatively rare days on which there had been no sign of the sun – and therefore no heating of the water in my storage cylinder from the solar panel on the roof!   My mind shot back eighty years to my childhood.       

I was back in my mind to that small and draughty jerry-built terraced house in Ipswich where I spent most of my childhood. It was no longer 2012 but 1932 and I was eleven years old.  I climbed the stairs to my unheated bedroom, a lighted candle in a candle-stick in my hand, undressed, climbed into my pyjamas, and crept shivering between the icy cold sheets.  When I had warmed up a little I would blow out the candle on the bedside chest of drawers, and try to go to sleep.

In the morning I would hear my parents get up before 7.00 am.   I would do so at about 7.30, when I could hear the kindling crackling on the coal fire that my dad would have lit in the living room.  In the winter I would relight that candle before stepping out of bed with bare feet onto icy lino and hurriedly dragging on my clothes.  There might well be a film of ice formed from the condensation on the inside of the bedroom window. By the time I got downstairs the gas light hanging in the middle of the room would have been lit and, with any luck, the fire would be burning merrily.

My Mum and Dad would have finished their ablutions and Mum would be busying herself preparing breakfast.  The kettle, with water for my wash, would have been singing on the gas stove.  We washed in a bowl in the kitchen sink of course. We had a bathroom but it was a tiny room with space only for a small bath with one cold water tap, and a gas fired ‘copper’, in which on Saturday nights, we heated our bath water.   The loo was outside.      

No, my present predicament was really nothing like that, and it was even less like my experiences in the army and as a PoW (but I preferred not even to think of them!).  My bungalow is double-glazed, with cavity walls infilled and roof space thoroughly insulated.  My bedroom is carpeted. My bed, with its duvet, is warm and welcoming and there is a bedside electric lamp.   I had a portable electric fire to take the chill off the room as I dressed.

The bathroom was chilly but, in any case, I had no option but to miss my usual morning shower.  Hot water for my wash and shave was supplied from an electric kettle.  In my home in the ‘20s and early ‘30s there was no electricity. That was provided, for lights only, in the mid-1930s. In 1932 my mum and dad and I would have considered that my living conditions today, even without running hot water and central heating, were luxurious beyond their wildest dreams!

Be that as it may, I breathed a deep sigh of relief when the heating engineer turned up, brought my boiler back into service (I hope I remember his advice on the prevention of a recurrence!) and restored my home to the comfort and convenience that we expect today.  Despite my occasional nonagenarian despair at aspects of 21^st Century life, I really wouldn’t want to revisit the daily discomforts that we took for granted just eighty years ago,

           

           

           

Week No 41 2012

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

‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat………’

            It might have been thought that we had seen and heard the last of Lord Hanningfield.   After almost a decade served as leader of Essex County Council he was discovered to have been fiddling his expenses as a member of the House of Lords, claiming expenses for overnight stays in London when actually he had been driven to his home in West Hanningfield by his Essex County Council funded car and driver!  On one occasion he claimed for an overnight stay in London when he was actually on a flight to India at County Council expense!  In 2011 he was found guilty of having stolen £13,379 by fraud and received the very lenient sentence of nine months in prison – the lowest sentence of any imposed as a result of the Parliamentary expenses scandal.  Alone of those convicted of fraud during that investigation, he showed no contrition and, while not contesting the facts, clearly considered himself to be innocent. ‘I did just the same as hundreds of other Peers’, he claimed.

            Extremely lucky in the length of his sentence he was even luckier in being discharged, for reasons beyond my understanding, after serving only nine weeks of it. In due course he again took his seat in the House of Lords (I know of no better reason for the urgency of reform of the ‘Upper House’!) where he now considered himself to be an authority on the penal system!

            But Nemesis awaited him.   It appears that the £13,379 for which he served his brief sentence was only a fraction of the sum that he had really stolen from the public purse. Further investigations had revealed that he may have helped himself to over £67,000 of taxpayers’ money.  Now Southwark Crown Court has given him the option of repaying a further £37,158 within the next six months or of going back to prison for a further 15 months.

            Lord Hanningfield’s lawyer Mr Mark Spragg is quoted as saying, ‘He’s appalled.  He’s not a wealthy man.  His only asset is his house.  He may have to sell it and have a council house’.  Mr Spragg is unduly optimistic on his client’s behalf.  He clearly does not keep up with the news.

            I have never seen Lord Hanningfield’s bungalow home in West Hanningfield but I would be extremely surprised if when sold it failed to realise many times the £37,158 that his lordship has to raise to stay out of gaol.   Even in the more relaxed days in which I was Clacton’s Housing Manager a homeless single man of 72 would have had pretty low priority as a council housing applicant. Today, thanks to the policies of the political party in which when in opposition Lord Hanningfield was a ‘shadow minister’, a single homeless man of 72 in possession (even after paying the money he owes!) of what all other housing applicants would consider to be a vast fortune, would have no chance whatsoever!

            Nor would the raising of that £37,158 necessarily see the end of Lord Hanningfield’s troubles.  So far, only his misuse of public funds as a member of the House of Lords has been brought into the cruel light of day.  His possible misuse of funds under his control in his capacity of Leader of Essex County Council is currently still under police investigation.  I think that other county councillors and, possibly, senior member of the County Council staff may also be awaiting the outcome of that investigation with some trepidation.   Surely those who knew or suspected that they were accepting hospitality provided by misappropriated funds would be in much the same position as receivers of stolen goods.

‘One Nation’ Britain!

            It was a brilliant slogan for Ed Miliband to adopt for his (if I may coin a phrase) ‘Even-Newer-Labour’.  Easily remembered, it recalls the national unity displayed in support of the recent Olympic Games, it outbids the government’s quite obviously false claim that ‘we’re all in this together’,  and since it is a phrase coined by Benjamin Disraeli founder of the modern Conservative Party, it makes a bid for the Conservative voter.

            It is worth remembering that Disraeli began his political career as a Radical, one of the ‘loony lefties’ of his day, and a supporter of the Chartists who, outrageously in the early 19^th Century, demanded among other things payment of MPs and universal voting rights for all adult males. He was a successful author. The two nations portrayed in his novel ‘Sybil’ or ‘The Two Nations’, published in 1845, were the nations of the rich and the poor.  He obviously had observed at first hand the appalling living conditions of the industrial poor in the early part of the 19^th century, and he described them in graphic detail.  His description is, in fact, remarkably similar to that in Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, also published in 1845, and written by Frederick Engels, joint founder with Karl Marx, of the Communist Party!

            By 1845 Disraeli had become a Conservative MP.  The political scene in Britain at that time was very different from that which prevailed throughout the twentieth century and that of today.   Core support for the Conservative Party came from the landed gentry and the aristocracy, their tenants and dependents.   Support for the Liberal Party came not from working people (they couldn’t vote so no-one bothered much about them!) but from the new-rich factory and shop owners whom Disraeli may have seen as responsible for the plight of the industrial poor.  It is possible that he had a romantic notion of the landed gentry and nobility freeing the urban poor from the clutch of the materialistic ‘worshippers of Mammon’ who owned England’s ‘dark, satanic mills’ and the slum-towns surrounding them.  As the years passed, Disraeli’s dream of ‘one nation’ seems to have faded.  The pursuit of imperial glory took its place.  He became a personal friend of Queen Victoria whom he persuaded to accept the grandiose title of Empress of India.

            Is Ed Miliband destined to revive the dream of One Nation?   It will take more than just stirring words and inspiring speeches to do so.  Britain’s poor today, thank God, do not live in the squalid poverty that they did nearly two centuries ago, but the gap between the nation of the poor and the nation of the wealthy is as wide as ever. It has in fact widened during the past twenty years, which include a decade of New Labour government.  Until he actively promotes and pursues practical measures to narrow that gap he has no more right to claim that the Labour Party  stands for One Nation than his opponents have to claim that ‘we’re all in this together’, and to speak for the whole nation of the population of the United Kingdom.

Some thoughts on Education

A fortnight ago I gave a qualified welcome in this blog to Education Secretary Gove’s idea of a Baccalaureate examination, closely resembling the ‘Matric’ exam I had taken in 1937, to replace the GCSE examinations that had, in many people’s eyes, become discredited.   I think perhaps that I should give a similarly cautious welcome to Ed Miliband’s suggested Technical Baccalaureate that would test candidates in their knowledge and experience of technical subjects.  I think that he had a quite separate examination in mind but it occurs to me that the scope of Mr Gove’s ‘academic’ Baccalaureate could be extended to include technical subjects.   Mathematics and English would remain compulsory subjects in the joint examination since it is really impossible to study seriously any other subject, academic or technical, without them.  They could perhaps be the only compulsory subjects, but to pass the examination candidates would need to secure a pass mark in them and in at least three other subjects.  Some technical fields are so wide that they might need to be divided into two or more sections, each one of which would count as a ‘subject’ for the examination.

I think that it is an idea worth considering.  I think too that we shouldn’t worry too much about children leaving school without any kind of exam certificate.  Prior to World War II the overwhelming majority of kids did just that – and some of them went on to become millionaires.  Many jobs do not demand paper qualifications.  Yet they may be jobs in which those that do them deservedly take pride, and that are more socially valuable than many more prestigious occupations.  If I were a potential employer I’d much prefer a note from a head teacher saying that the bearer was not a brilliant scholar but was hard working, conscientious and reliable, than that he had just about managed to scrape a pass mark in two or three GCSE subjects.  When everyone can gain some kind of educational certificate those certificates quickly lose their credibility.   As it says (or rather is sung) in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers , ‘When everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody!’

There is in any case a lot more to education than obtaining some sort of a qualification.  It would be nice to be able to think that all children leave school with something of the three ‘rs’ (reading, writing and arithmetic), something of the nature of science, and at least something of the world’s and their own country’s geography and colourful history. I believe that, for the most part, that was the position pre-World War II. It surely isn’t too much to ask for today, after at least eleven years full-time education

 The Dynamic (or should it be Disastrous?) Duo         

I sometimes wonder if our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer (described by one of their supporters as ‘posh boys who don’t know the price of milk’) really inhabit the same world as I do. In rejecting the idea of a Mansion Tax, for instance, David Cameron says that he doesn’t feel that if someone has worked hard and saved to get the home he wants, he should be penalised for it.  For goodness sake! – nobody is thinking of extra taxes for the owner of a comfortable home with a double garage in a leafy suburb, or even of a ‘desirable residence with stabling and a half acre of land’ valued at about £500,000, of the kind that those participating in BBC tv’s Escape to the country’ usually find to be ‘not quite what we were looking for’.   The ‘mansions’ that proposers of this tax had in mind were those worth over £2 million – the sort of place, for instance, that might be occupied by the  chief executive of a large international corporation  who invited  prime ministers or other influential politicians to jolly Christmas Parties!

            Then there’s George Osborne warning us that, unless he can manage to squeeze a bit more out of the poor and disadvantaged we shall – for the first time in 200 years – have a situation in which children are worse off than their parents.  Now I fully accept that I was been better off in every way than my parents, and that my sons have been better off than me and have had opportunities that I never had.  I am very glad about that.  I cannot see though any way in which the next generation that includes my grandchildren, are anything but much worse off than their parents.  Their parents, if they aspired to university, had free tuition, and means-tested grants from their local authority on which to live while they studied for their degrees.   On completing their education they generally had no great difficulty finding suitable employment, they usually had no serious debts and were free to save up to get married and make a home.  By their time (unlike mine) it was usual for a wife to continue in work, at least until the first child of the marriage was born.  For some though, being a full-time wife, home-maker and mother was a possible and wholly acceptable option.

            The price of properties was still relatively low and there were plenty of houses to let at a reasonable rent (the noxious ‘right to buy’ legislation had yet to be enacted!)  Building Societies were eager to enrol house purchasers and were asking for deposits of no more than 10 or even 5 percent of the value of the property to credit-worthy applicants

How very different things are today!  Graduates leave university with a crippling debt that may hang over them for the whole of their working lives.  Young people, whether or not they have graduated, have the greatest difficulty in finding a job (both my grandsons, graduates with good honours degrees, went overseas – one to Europe and one to the Far East – to make their careers).   House prices have escalated, building societies and banks now demand enormous deposits before giving a mortgage, rents are also prohibitively high and only those who are abjectly poor can hope to get a short term tenancy (government policy demands that that’s all there are) of a council or housing association property.

As for marriage and the family (institutions that the government claims to value!) young wives nowadays are expected to be in full-time work up to the time that they give birth, and to start work again as soon as they can obtain all-day child care!    No wonder that few couples bother to marry, that we have an unprecedented number of teen-age pregnancies, an unprecedented number of abortions, and an unprecedented amount of youth crime, much of it violent.

How dare George Osborne claim that so far, each generation for the past 200 years has been better off than its predecessor!  For several years, thanks to policies that he has supported, Britain's young people have been worse off than their parents in virtually every possible way!

 I notice that he is going ‘to ask the wealthy to make a bigger contribution towards solving the nation’s problems. The rest of us don't get polite requests. We just get 'tax demands'! I wonder what he’ll do if they say NO!

             

           

Week No 40 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Patronising the Poor?

            Nick Clegg continues to insist that the wealthy must make a bigger contribution to the nation’s finances, though quite how he hopes to achieve this is far from clear.   There are financial incentives to encourage universities to accept more students from deprived backgrounds and schools are given similar incentives to provide extra educational help to children from deprived families.  There are free school meals for children who need them and free public services for those in receipt of means-tested benefit.  Meanwhile well-meaning politicians boast that they have removed the income tax burden from thousands of less-well-off families by raising the level at which this tax becomes liable.

            These measures are like treating acute pneumonia with a couple of aspirins!   Our aim should surely not be to make poverty more tolerable but to reduce and ultimately abolish it.   I do not believe that it is a good idea to remove those with low incomes from income tax liability.  This encourages the idea of the division of society into the tax payers, whom the taxman robs of the fruit of their labours, and the rest of the population who benefit from this, including of course the scroungers and benefit cheats of whom we read so much in the popular press.   It encourages folk like Mr Romney, Barak Obama’s opponent in the forthcoming Unites States Presidential Election to announce that he has no interest in the 47 percent of the American population who are not wealthy enough to be taxed.

            In this blog I have again and again stressed my conviction that income tax should be the principal source of government revenue and should be regarded as our annual subscription for membership of a very exclusive international club; British citizenship.  It should be a fixed proportion of the gross income of every adult British citizen without exception, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest.  The contribution of those surviving on job seekers’ allowance, disability living allowance, the state retirement pension, or the minimum wage would be very little, while that of the very wealthy would be a great deal. We would though all be contributing an equal proportion of our income to our country’s needs.  All of us, from the very lowest to the very highest, would have a stake in our country’s future prosperity.  Did not Jesus Christ point out that the widow who contributed her ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury was making a bigger sacrifice than the wealthy – since they merely handed over part of their surplus wealth while  she gave all that she had? 

            The proportion of each adult’s income that would be needed to balance the nation’s books could be worked out every year.  If everybody contributed I’d be surprised if it would need to be higher than 20 percent.  This, I believe, would be sufficient to fund all necessary public services (a government sensible enough to adopt such a system would surely also have the sense to scrap those nuclear submarines!) and to pay generous allowances to those unable to work or unable to find work.

            Don’t let us patronise the poor.   Let’s abolish them!

It’s just a word!

           As incidents go, it wasn't  a very important one, but Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell’s reaction when frustrated by the Police in Downing Street, certainly demonstrated that when the occasion arises, well-heeled patricians from society’s top drawer can be as bad tempered and foul-mouthed as the very toughest and roughest of plebs.   I thought that Mr Mitchell was at his most objectionable, not when he lost his temper (we all do that sometimes!) but when he made a half-hearted apology, implying that the long-suffering police were lying about the actual words that he had used.

 It all brought to my mind (as so many things do these days!) an incident that occurred, it must have been in 1932 or ’33, when I was eleven or twelve and we had Ron, a cousin of mine from Bethnal Green, staying with us in Ipswich during the school holiday.  Ron’s dad, my uncle, was a mounted policeman and the family lived in married quarters in Bethnal Green Police Station.  Ron was a few months younger than me.  We were good friends and we got into all sorts of trouble together.

Ron (on the right) and I

           

On one occasion I remember that something had upset him and he used one of the words that, from Mr Mitchell’s lips, have caused offence.  No – it wasn’t ‘plebs’. I doubt if Ron would have heard of that.  It was the other one and, just like Mr Mitchell, he used it ‘adjectively’.  It happened that he was at the time within the hearing of my normally easy-going mother – and I was totally astonished at her reaction.  That, she thundered, was a truly dreadful word that was used only by the very lowest of the low.   If she ever heard him say it again he’d be packed straight off to Bethnal Green and his mum and dad would be told why!  Goodness!  He certainly didn’t use it again, or at least not when my mum was around.

            This was in the early 1930s and I don’t recall often hearing that word again until I was in the army, nearly ten years later.  Even there it was used quite sparingly until I was a PoW when we really did have something to swear about.  I remember it particularly in Germany where we were working regularly both with German civilians, and with conscripted slave-workers from Russia, the Ukraine and other occupied countries.  They were fascinated by our bad language and our ready use of it, and would try with varying degrees of success to follow our bad example!  Perhaps, even as I type this, some very elderly Ivan or Natasha (well, I’m still around so why shouldn’t they be?) in St. Peterburg, or Odessa or Kiev, may have clumsily knocked over a glass of vodka and have used an expletive that, as they explain to their puzzled grandchildren, they learned from some Anglishky comrades way back in 1944!

            Here in England the use of that word is no longer limited to the lowest of the low’ as my mother had insisted it had been in 1932. You may well hear it if you walk behind any group of school children chatting to each other! It is to be found in the first line of a poem by a celebrated modern poet.  It was used very effectively in the acclaimed film The King’s Speech. It is used, as we now know, by ex-public-schoolboy cabinet ministers. It sometimes appears in the press and has lost much of its ability to shock. However, I am old fashioned enough to be able to declare confidently that you will never come across it in Tendring Topics…….on line! 

A Footnote

While I was writing the above I found myself thinking of my father.  He died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis in 1939 at the age of 57.  I was 18 and just in the army at the time.  My father had enlisted in the 17^th Lancers in 1901 when he was 18 and left the army as Regimental Sergeant-Major of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps in 1922 after having completed 21 years service.  At the time of his death he was employed as clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody to a local veterinary surgeon.

      As I wrote about the use of bad language by myself and others I realized, with some astonishment, that I had never at any time throughout my childhood and youth heard him swear or use any ‘bad language’. On reflection, I hope that as far as their childhood was concerned, my sons would say the same of me.  How about during the years since their childhood? .............. well they do read this blog, so I had better claim no more than that neither they, nor their mum, were ever either the cause or the  object of any verbal lapses that I may, very occasionally, have had!  

  

Above are pictures of my father - as a staff sergeant before his final promotion to Regimental Sergeant Major and, as I knew him best, a few years before his death.

A Promise Fulfilled (sort of!)

          When, earlier this year, Tendring District Council introduced its new refuse and recyclables collection scheme there was a storm of protest.  Apart from the fact that the new scheme demanded extra effort from householders, there were two main criticisms of the new system.

            One I wrote about in this blog a few weeks ago.  It was that with the new scheme only plastic bottles (milk bottles, cleaning fluid bottles and the like) were collected for recycling.  Plastic bags and wrapping and plastic food containers, that had been collected for recycling under the old regime, now had to be put into our black plastic bags for landfill.  That problem may be solved in a few years’ time when it is hoped that a new plastics sorting centre will be built in the south of the county.

The other criticism was that, presumably to save a few pounds, there were no lids provided for the red boxes intended for the reception of waste paper and cardboard for recycling.  We in Clacton may have the lowest rainfall in the UK but there are still occasions (particularly during this summer!) when the contents of the box could be reduced to a soggy mess.  We do have our fair share of ‘sea breezes’ and these are quite capable of scattering paper from the uncovered red boxes far and wide.

            The justification for this complaint was demonstrated on every breezy collection day, with paper litter bestrewing footpaths and nearby front gardens.  The council promised to do something about it.  And now they have, but in a way that explains my ‘sort of’ in the heading above.   They have obtained a supply of fitting plastic lids for the red paper-and-cardboard boxes but, presumably again to save themselves a few pounds, are not arranging for the refuse/salvage collectors to leave them with householders on their rounds.  The lids are available for householders to collect from centres in the district. We Clactonians can pick one up from the reception desk at Clacton Town Hall.

            That’s fine for car owner/drivers but what about the rest of us?  The lid will hardly go in a shopping basket and, although light enough in weight, isn’t the easiest thing to carry under one’s arm!  Were it not for my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) I would be housebound.  Would I be able somehow to load the lid onto it I wondered.   I asked an anonymous but helpful voice on the phone, ‘Has the council made provision for delivery of lids to the elderly and disabled?’   ‘Only to those who have already made arrangements for their refuse and salvage to be collected from outside their back door’, came the reply. That ruled me out! A kind neighbour puts my plastic sack and salvage boxes out every week.  I had friends whom I was sure would collect a lid for me if asked, but I don’t like taking advantage of their good nature unless absolutely compelled to do so.

            I drove my scooter to the Town Hall.  At the reception desk a very helpful young lady supplied me with a lid and even gave me a tip on how best to transport it (Clacton is a town of mobility scooters and I clearly wasn’t the first with the same problem!).  I got it home safely.

            So – I now have my full quota of refuse and recyclables collection equipment, and hope, with the help of my friendly neighbour, to have my black plastic bag for landfill, my food waste container (never much in that!) and either my red paper-and-cardboard box, or my green plastic-bottles-and-metal-can box at the entrance to my driveway ready for collection early on every Tuesday morning.