Week 7 2013

Tendring Topics.....on line

‘Minute Particulars’

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William Blake, author of the poem and hymn Jerusalem remarked that those who wish to do good to their fellow men and women should do so ‘in minute particulars’.  Blake had no time at all for those with grandiose schemes for all mankind

.In Old Road a few hundred yards from the entrance to Morrison’sSupermarket. I took this photograph eighteen months ago. Nothing has been done since


I am not at all sure that Blake was right about that.   There certainly are times when it is necessary to take the longer and wider view. However I think of his words when I hear top politicians announcing reconstruction of the motorway network and the building of new railway lines that will make it possible for us to save an hour on the journey from London to Glasgow, while at the same time local roads and streets are potholed, and the pavements that we use every day are cracking and crumbling beneath our feet.

 They certainly are here in Clacton-on-Sea and I don’t suppose for a moment that the situation is materially different in many other towns   Outrage expressed in the correspondence columns of local newspapers as cars were damaged and accidents caused by potholed roads, has led to at least the worst of the potholes being filled and repaired by the County Council, though many still remain.

            The same cannot be said for the pavements.  Those, like me, who rely on an electric mobility scooter to go shopping, visit friends and, in Clacton  to visit the sea-front and the cliff gardens when the weather is warm and sunny, are acutely conscious of the state of the town’s pavements. Our ancient bones are jolted by every broken  paving stone and uneven surface. These are also a danger to all pedestrians after dark and to those with impaired vision at any time.

In Agincourt Road, not far from my home.  The uneven and broken paving stones are an obvious danger to pedestrians after dark and to those with impaired vision at any time.

In the town centre – in Pier Avenue and Station Road – the pavements have fairly recently been re-laid. They are safe for pedestrians and are a pleasure for us motor-scooterists to drive over.  Move into Old Road, just yards from the town centre or any of our urban side roads and you will find a very different situation.  These two pictures, taken of paths that I traverse regularly, tell their own story.

            I very much hope that no-one trips, falls and is seriously injured by these broken and neglected footpaths.   If anyone does, I suggest that they contact one of the no-win no-fee lawyers who advertise on daytime commercial tv and press for maximum compensation – not just for themselves but to encourage the County Council to give the repair of these broken down and dangerous pavements the priority that this service, for which we pay in our Council Tax, deserves.

Sacred (sea) Cows

            Since 1980 Britain’s armed forces have been involved in the Falklands War against Argentina, two Gulf Wars (the second involving the invasion and occupation of Iraq),  military actions in Sierra Leone and in Kosovo, a still on-going war in Afghanistan, a successful action against the Gaddafi regime in Libya, and peripheral (so far) action in support of the French in Mali.  The Army, the Navy and the RAF have all been involved in these actions that have cost millions of pounds and hundreds of British lives.

            There is no certainty that there won’t be similar calls on the armed forces in the near future.  We can certainly not claim to have been victorious in Afghanistan, Much of Libya appears to be a no-go area for Britons despite our active support for the successful revolutionary cause there.  Already our involvement in Mali has developed from the loan of a couple of cargo planes to help with the French intervention, to providing ground troops to help train the Malian Army. Is that to be the extent of Britain’s involvement – I wonder?   In Syria we are giving humanitarian and diplomatic support to the rebel forces (including fanatical jihadist fighters who are threatening us elsewhere!) trying to overthrow the existing government while  Foreign Minister William Hague  makes belligerent noises from the sidelines.  Oh yes – and in the background there is Iran which may or may not be developing nuclear weapons and which may be involved in armed conflict with Israel (which everybody pretends not to know does possess nuclear weapons!) at any moment.

            Despite all this the Government is including the armed forces in its austerity programme.  Currently the UK has no aircraft carriers (a ‘weapon of war’ that could have humanitarian uses) and battle-weary soldiers returning from Afghanistan are as likely as not to receive their redundancy notices as they ‘Stand Easy!’ and ‘Fall Out!’ after their triumphal homecoming parade!

            The Trident nuclear submarine fleet has escaped the cuts that affect every other area of the armed forces.  These are the United Kingdom’s own weapons of mass destruction; our own Sacred (sea) Cows!  They alone have been spared the cuts and – as it happens – they alone have not been involved in any way in the wars and rumours of wars that have cost so many British lives and so many billions of pounds during the past three decades.

            Trident submarines, roaming the world’s oceans carrying their deadly arsenal, have prevented no act of aggression or terrorist act – and have cost no Middle Eastern or African Dictator  a moment’s peaceful sleep.  They are our ultimate deterrent – but they deterred neither the invasion of the Falklands by Argentina, nor that of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.   They didn’t prevent ‘nine eleven’ nor did they prevent the bomb outrages in London.  They inspire no terror in the hearts of the members of the Taliban.  They didn’t bother Colonel Gaddafi and they don’t worry either side in the civil war in Syria. This week they failed to deter North Koreans from testing their nuclear weapon!  They are, in fact, completely useless as a deterrent or as a weapon.   A deterrent only deters when the perpetrator of aggression believes that there in a serious chance of its being used.  They, and our government, are well aware that to release a nuclear weapon, whether by design or accident, could produce a chain reaction that would destroy countless millions of us and poison our world for centuries to come.  We hope that  they are not quite stupid enough to do that – Let us hope that nuclear weapons never fall into the hands of those, in Pakistan for instance, who are.

            I would like to see the day, prophesied nearly two centuries ago by Alfred Lord Tennyson, When the war drums throb no more, and the battle flags are furled, in the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World, but you don’t have to be a pacifist, a member of CND, or any kind of ban-the-bomb enthusiast, to see that preserving this useless and ridiculously expensive service in a violent world and in the midst of a programme of extreme austerity is utmost folly.

            Perhaps this is beginning to be realized.   Writing in The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, Ken Veitch a Cheshire Quaker, says that ‘Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, has stated that Britain does not need to replace the Trident missile fleet with ‘like for like’ nuclear submarines that will cost the country billions of pounds at a time of national  austerity.’   He adds that senior officers in the army and air force have denounced Trident as an unaffordable irrelevance to the UK’s real security needs.  Opinion polls reveal that in the UK as a whole, over fifty percent of we Brits are opposed to Trident and that in Scotland, where the submarines are based, over seventy percent are opposed.

            ‘The cost of upgrading Trident has been put at about £97 billion for its projected life to the 2060s.  This would be a clear breach of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and would be likely to encourage other nations to base their ‘security’ on nuclear weaponry.

            Mohammed El Baradie, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency commented that, ‘It is very hard to preach the virtues of non-smoking when you have a cigarette dangling from your lips and are about to buy a new pack’

It's a small, and very strange, world! 

This photo of mine, of a cable car making an ascent to the summit of the Muttersberg just outside Bludenz in Vorarlberg, Austria's western-most province, brought back memories of a happy camping holiday spent there many years ago. It was in 1971 and, for the first time, I was able to share driving the family car (a Ford Cortina Estate) with elder son Pete.

We set up our tents, a large frame tent for Heather and myself and for family meals, and a smaller sleeping tent for Pete and Andy our then-teenage sons, in the Grosswalsertal and drove out every day to explore the mountains and lakes of western Austria.

The cable car to the summit of the Muttersberg was, as you can see, quite small.  It accommodated ourselves and a very similar German family, mum and dad about the age of Heather and myself, with two children a year or two younger than our two sons.

Our camp in Vorarlberg, The car infront of our tent. The boys tent is the small one on the right

When I commented on the father's excellent command of English he explained that he had been a PoW in England for three years during World War II and had worked on a farm the whole time, learning English as he did so.   I replied that I too had been a prisoner of war for three years but had spent 18 months locked up in a large prisoner of war concentration camp in Italy and only eighteen months in a working camp in Germany.  Hence my German was far less fluent than his English.

I then asked what  ex-PoWs always ask a fellow former war prisoner, 'Where were you captured?'      He replied 'Tobruk', adding, in case I had never heard of the place 'that's in North Africa'.    I knew it all too well.   I had myself been captured there in June 1942 when Tobruk had fallen to the German Afrikakorps.  He had been captured towards the end of the same year after the defeat of the German and Italian armies at El Alamein. We had undoubtedly both taken part, on opposite sides, in the many tank-and-artillery engagements that had taken place in the desert to the south and west of Tobruk during the spring of that year.

How extraordinary that this friendly middle-aged stranger and I should thirty years earlier have been in a distant barren and inhospitable land alien to both of us, where we had been trying (fortunately unsuccessfully) to kill each-other!

It really is a small - and very strange - world!