Week 35 2010 6.9.2011

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘In the bleak midwinter…….’ Do we Heat or Eat?

I had thought that I might have been exaggerating just a little when I suggested a few weeks ago that during the coming winter many poorer families could well be facing a stark choice of ‘heat or eat’. I now believe that this gloomy prediction may prove to have been all too accurate. Since I wrote those words there has been an enormous surge in the price of gas and electricity and the cost of food has continued to increase. Inflation, particularly of the items that all of us need to purchase regularly, is now at more than double the government’s declared target, and increases in pensions and benefits are calculated by a method that no longer reflects accurately the increase in human need.

Our weather is notoriously fickle. During the past two weeks there have been days of wall-to-wall sunshine and others on which I have seriously thought of switching on my central heating! One thing is certain. Winter is coming. Like the last two winters, it could well be a long and hard one.


Dudley Road, Clacton, January 2011. It could have been much worse!

  There is not a great deal that we can do about government policy and even less that can be done about the weather! Most of us though can do something to counter the worst effects of both. When my family and I first moved into our bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road in 1956, space heating was by open fires in the kitchen and sitting room. Water was heated from a back boiler to the kitchen fire with flow and return pipes directly connected to an unlagged hot water storage cylinder in the airing cupboard. The bungalow was cold and draughty. During cold weather in the winter it had definite ‘no go’ areas.

Over the years (we had a car-loan from the council and a mortgage to repay, and two small sons to bring up!) my wife and I made improvements, all without any grants or subsidies whatsoever. A porch for the front door and, years later, an extension at the rear of the bungalow, helped with the draughts. After the back boiler, and, a few years later its successor, corroded and leaked, I had the ‘direct’ hot water system replaced by an ‘indirect’ one, but it was not until after my retirement from the Council in 1980 that we had a thermostatically-controlled gas-fired central heating system installed, with a gas fire and back boiler replacing the open fire.

We were early converts to the idea of cavity wall infilling and had ours infilled by Rentokil with their Rockwool system in the early 1970s. We had double-glazing provided throughout, and I clambered up into the roof space (I certainly couldn’t do that nowadays!) and laid a fibreglass mat between the rafters to reduce loss of heat through the ceilings. It had taken us a long time, but by the early1980s - and for the last twenty-five years of my wife’s life – there were no ‘no go’ areas in the winter and our bungalow was pretty comfortable all the year round!

Heather and I with our two sons outside our bungalow in 1947. The windows are not double-glazed and the porch not filled in


Sadly, my wife (and everything that had seemed to give my life a purpose) died in July 2006. With steadily diminishing strength and energy, but with the never-failing support of family, friends and neighbours, I have since kept myself fully occupied.





Nearly three years ago I decided to have a solar panel installed in my south-facing roof, harnessing solar power to augment my gas-fired boiler for water heating. It worked well, markedly reducing my fuel bills.

My solar panel.  My mobility scooter (iron horse) is in the driveway.

Just a month or so ago (in July 2011) my hot water storage cylinder (which had scaled up in over thirty years of continuous use) failed. I seized the opportunity to update my solar water heating system. It is now simpler and, I think, even more effective. I look forward to lower fuel bills despite the price increases. I would probably have to live to well over a hundred to recover, in money saved, the capital cost of the solar installation. However I have no doubt whatsoever that what I am saving is much more than the meagre interest I would have received on that sum had it remained in a Halifax Saving Account. I have added to the value of my home, made a minute contribution towards ‘saving the planet’ and, what’s more, I don’t have to pay income tax on the money I have saved , as I certainly would have had to on the bank interest!

All of the above – the porch and the rear extension, the cavity wall infilling, the double glazing, the roof space insulation, the solar water heating system – were done without any support from the government or the council.

The Government is currently paying the full cost of home insulation for the over-seventies including, for instance, increasing the thickness of loft insulation to a level considerably greater than I had installed. I decided to take advantage of this free service. The roof space was surveyed, the installers came by appointment a few weeks later. They did the job in about three hours without causing me any inconvenience, and departed without leaving any mess whatsoever behind them. If you think you may be entitled to free, or reduced price insulation, do enquire about it (the Council, or Age Concern should be able to suggest an approved firm). It really is worthwhile.

No-one can see what the future holds, but I now have up-to-date space and water heating systems, infilled cavity walls, double glazing and a heavily insulated roof space. My mobility scooter (my iron horse) has an all-weather canopy. It is therefore confined to ‘its stable’ (leaving me housebound) only by falling and laying snow.

I am able to face the winter of my ninety-first year with quiet confidence.

 Is your County Council really necessary?

 I was directly involved in the local government service for something like forty years. It was only fairly recently though that I fully appreciated that three quarters of my council tax payments were going straight to an authority based in Chelmsford in which I had no confidence whatsoever. I came to the conclusion that county councils were a layer of local government that we could well do without, and that among the first to disappear should be our own Essex County Council. While loudly blowing its own trumpet (‘Essex works!’) and embarking on such extramural activities as funding influential councillors’ world-wide jet travel ‘on‘County Council business’, taking over failing post offices, launching its own bank, and establishing a branch office in mainland China (some corner of a foreign field that is for ever Essex?) it was selling off its old people’s homes and failing in its statutory duty of child care.

 I didn’t, and don’t, believe that there is a single function of the Essex County Council that couldn’t be better performed by the county’s borough and district councils.

 I was heartened to see that a former Lib.Dem. Tendring Councillor Mrs Sue Shearing, has come to the same conclusion. She believes that Tendring Council should become a unitary authority, responsible for all local government services in our area. She is reported as saying that this would be, ‘a fantastic idea. It would benefit the whole district. Wouldn’t that truly be localism, as the government is pushing nationally ……….. local councillors know their areas and are passionate about them’.

 Mrs Shearing’s damascene moment came when she realized that the County Council had paid its Chief Executive Ms. Joanna Killian more than £5,500 per week last year, despite her generous acceptance of a ‘pay cut’ that had miraculously left her better off! Those who like to have a yardstick to compare incomes may care to know that that it would be possible to hire two Prime Ministers for that amount! She also realized that the County Council receives 74 percent of the money that she pays to Tendring District Council in Council Tax. Tendring retains 10 percent of it and the remaining 16 percent goes to the fire and police services.

 ‘Surely’, she says, ‘The time has come to rid ourselves of this burden and allow councils, like Tendring, to keep the money they collect and run the district in a much less grandiose way.

 Mr Neil Stock, Tendring Council leader, is dismissive of the suggestion. Mrs Shearing, he said, was five years too late with the idea. He is reported as saying, ‘It was tried with others and one or two unitary authorities were created, but it was not very popular’.

 Well, it certainly wasn’t very popular with the County Council, or with Whitehall bureaucrats, who much prefer having to deal with one large authority rather than half a dozen smaller ones. I don’t think though, that Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock would describe their unitary status, and consequent independence of County Council control, as ‘not very popular’!

 I wish Mrs Shearing every success with her campaign but fear that it is doomed to failure. She should not, I think, pin too much hope on the government’s support of ‘localism’. Despite their verbal enthusiasm for giving power to local people I can’t think of a single example of a government or a county council service being handed down to a truly local authority. I can think of a number of instances of elected local authorities being divested of powers and responsibilities that they once had. These were either retained by central government or handed over to unelected groups or individuals directly funded by government.

 The recipients of this largesse would be wise to remember that, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune!’

 The Voice of the Voter

 Whenever I pick up a local paper, be it the Clacton Gazette, the Daily Gazette or the East Anglian Daily Times, after a quick glance at the front page headlines, I go straight to Readers’ Letters. These, whether they are simply restating the obvious, are controversial, or are just plain stupid, express the strongly-felt opinions of real people, not those who – as I did in the past – write for a living. What is more, it is usually the case that for every reader who feels strongly enough to write to the newspaper, and who write sufficiently coherently for the editor to publish the letter, there are likely to be dozens, perhaps scores, of others who feel just as strongly but who would describe themselves as ‘not much of a letter writer’, or feel that they have better things to do with their time.

 For that reason I was delighted to find that in the latest Clacton Gazette (1st Sept. 2011) there were no less than three readers’ letters echoing my comments in last week’s blog about Tendring Council’s Tourism boss Stephen Mayzes’ extraordinary outburst against the Coastal Academy for letting the school’s playing field for a fortnight during the school holidays to the highly respectable Camping and Caravanning Club of Great Britain for a rally of the club’s members.

 One of the letters is from Michael Weighell, a Governor of the Academy, one from Ms. Janet Hayes of the Grove, Clacton and the other from B. Nicholson of Douglas Road, Clacton who remarks that ‘Also, the site was left clean and tidy and not in need of cleaning up at the rate-payers’ expense’ thus confirming the accuracy of the prediction I had made in my blog the previous week.

 I think that Mr Mayzes owes an abject apology to the Coastal Academy, The half-million members of the Camping and Caravanning Club, and to the officials of the Council’s Planning Department, whose time he has wasted!

Week 22.2011 7.6.2011

Tendring Topics………on Line


‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
He hath put down the mighty from their seats’


These words from St. Luke's Gospel, part of the Magnificat as printed in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer came to my mind as I read in the local press the story of the trial and conviction of Lord Hanningfield.

Regular blog readers will recall that Lord Hanningfield, then leader of Essex County Council, had been the subject of criticism in this blog long before there had been any question of his facing a criminal trial. I saw him as bombastic, arrogant, publicity seeking and dictatorial, always ready with a news conference or a photo opportunity when there was any credit to be gained from it, or when he had one of his ‘ground-breaking new initiatives’ to announce, but quite prepared to leave the spotlight to someone else when (as for instance with their record in the field of child care) the County Council was found to be failing.

He was going to ‘Save the Naze’, ‘Regenerate Jaywick (by wholesale demolition!), ‘Take over failing Post Offices’, ‘Establish an Essex Bank where Essex entrepreneurs could obtain the finance they needed’ (few applied to it and those who did found that it was less helpful than ordinary commercial banks!), establish an Essex County Council Branch in mainland China to boost the county’s exporters (whatever happened to that ground-breaking initiative, I wonder?)

He led a campaign ‘To give Essex jobs to Essex men and women’, castigating other public authorities that sometimes gave contracts to firms in Suffolk or other nearby counties. He then, ‘saved taxpayers millions of pounds’ by contracting the County Council’s IT services out to a giant international corporation with its HQ in the USA – not just ‘not in Essex’ but not even in Europe. Oh yes, of course it did mean that a few dozen Essex men and women employed at the County Hall in Chelmsford lost their jobs. You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs!

While the County Council, under his leadership, was embarking on all these exciting activities they were, at the same time, selling off all their old people’s homes and failing their child care responsibilities. Lord Hanningfield wasn’t solely to blame. Almost equally culpable were his colleagues on the County Council, applauding and blindly following his lead.

It didn’t occur to me at that time that he might be criminally dishonest. I knew nothing about his claim for expenses as a member of the House of Lords. I did know though that he engaged in a great many very expensive activities for the County Council. There were, for instance, his globe-trotting trips – usually with top officials or favoured councillors – to China (the Olympics), India, the USA, and elsewhere, always, of course, on county council business! Were his official County Council car and driver sometimes to be seen at the House of Lords, as Colchester’s MP Bob Russell suggests? I don’t know, but I am very pleased that the Police are now examining very carefully his County Council expenses claims. The Council’s own internal audit may well have thought that it would be unwise to look too closely at the expenses claims of quite such a powerful and influential member.

Lord Hanningfield has yet to be sentenced. A lady with whom I was in conversation in my doctor’s waiting room last week, remarked, somewhat venomously, that she hoped he would be sent to jail. She was one of his Lordship’s victims – a county council employee made redundant from her job of supporting the sick and disabled. I would be satisfied if he were prepared to admit his guilt, refund the money he has obtained by fraud, and apologise. Not a bit of it though. After being found guilty Lord Hanningfield told reporters, ‘I’m devastated, but I have no regrets’. I am sure that he genuinely believes that he was too important to be expected to fill in claim forms properly, like other lesser folk. He had thought, as we know, that he was too important to be tried in an ordinary criminal court. He considered that he should have been tried, if at all, by his equals (his peers) in the House of Lords! The supreme court decided otherwise.

Before being ennobled on the recommendation of Mrs Thatcher and with the approval of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, Lord Hanningfield had been Paul White, a successful Essex pig farmer. He is a bit old to take that up again – but I expect that he has managed to put a bit aside for his old age. I hope so. He surely wouldn’t want to live on the state pension, plus whatever means-tested benefit his reduced circumstances might entitle him to claim.

NB. Lord Hanningfield’s defence included the plea that members of the House of Lords receive no salary for their services. Quite so – but they do get a tax-free ‘attendance allowance’ of £300 a day for every day that they put in an appearance there, even if they only stay for ten minutes. I reckon that that is the kind of ‘no salary’ for which many people would be happy to swap their paid employment.


Meanwhile………


I was absent from Clacton (and England) for less than a week but, quite apart from Lord Hanningfeld’s nemesis, an awful lot seems to have happened world-wide while I had my finger temporarily ‘off the pulse’.

In Libya we are being drawn inexorably towards full active participation in a civil war. Allied bombing raids are effectively preventing pro-Gaddafi forces from defeating the insurgents, but the ill-disciplined, untrained and ill-equipped forces ranged against them are equally incapable of advancing to victory.

Britain is now using Apache helicopters to give close support to ground forces opposing the Gaddafi regime. These are capable of attacking individual armoured vehicles or gun positions. The French are using their own helicopter gunships for the same purpose. In being able to engage the enemy more closely, low flying and relatively slow helicopters are themselves much more vulnerable to attack from small arms or ground-to-air missiles than are missile projectors or high altitude bombers. We must expect losses – and casualties.

On 1st June the Daily Mirror revealed that there are now experienced British mercenaries, former SAS men, financed by our government, strengthening the insurgent forces. The government has not denied this and it therefore seems very likely that the report is correct. How long will it be, I wonder, before David Cameron and his associates will decide that in order to fulfil the United Nations’ mandate to ‘protect civilians' and to protect our own helicopter crews, there is regrettably no alternative to putting troops on the ground?

There is no sign of an end to the conflict in Afghanistan where the regular toll of British lives continues almost daily. The NATO general in command there says that it will be at least another year before we can think of beginning to withdraw troops. He’ll probably say exactly the same in twelve months time! It seems such a short while ago that Barak Obama’s generals were assuring him that they just needed another 30,000 men to secure a victory. Agreeing to that request was a decision that he may well live to regret. Of course, if the Taliban were foolish enough to engage in battle with the NATO forces they would be heavily defeated. But it isn’t that kind of a war. It is a war of ambush, of opportunist sniper attack, of booby traps, land mines, and of enemy activists infiltrating both the civilian population and the forces ranged against them. It is a war that can go on forever. It is a war that we may never completely lose – but that we can never win.

Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan when their government realized that – and a bloodbath of Soviet collaborators followed. Sooner or later our governments will realize it too. If I were an Afghan supporter of the country’s present government (or an Afghan woman enjoying a measure of freedom and independence under the current regime) I would be making plans to get out of that benighted country before it is too late!

Waiting for a Miracle?


I mentioned Holland-on-Sea’s missing beaches in this blog a few weeks ago. They are still missing and Tendring District Council seems to be viewing their loss remarkably philosophically; fatalistically in fact. The official attitude seems to be that freak weather conditions led to the sand being washed away and, in the fullness of time – Weeks? Months? Years? – weather conditions will replace the lost sand. It is, I suppose, always easy to be philosophical over other people’s problems.

In fact the weather conditions leading up to the disappearance of the sand were not particularly freakish. There had been several days of onshore winds but I have known stronger winds, and ones that blew for a longer period. I think that the explanation, offered by Mr Richard Powis’ one of the beach hut owners affected, and cogently argued in the Letters Page of the Clacton Gazette, is at least equally likely. He points out that never in living memory has the sand been so comprehensively swept away from any of our beaches (it has certainly never happened in the fifty-six years that I have lived here). In recent years though the neglect of groynes and breakwaters at right angles to the water line has allowed the existing sand to be washed away, and the construction of sea defences at Holland Haven has prevented the natural replenishment of the beach from the crumbling cliffs

I would have thought that the Council should have urgently been considering bringing in loads of sand to rebuild those sandy beaches that are among our district’s major attractions. It is a task that has been undertaken elsewhere and has proved effective.

In the meantime, and until the sand has been replaced, natural justice surely demands that hut owners should receive a rebate on the fees that they pay to the Council. As beach hut owners point out, they pay the council for the use of beach hut and if there is no beach the Council could be considered to be failing to fulfil its part of the contract.

‘Labour Rabble Rousers’


That was how Tendring Council Leader Neil Stock dismissed a lobby of about thirty people, including members of the Tendring Pensioners’ Actions Group, who were urging councillors not to support a plan to give newly appointed Chief Executive, Ian Davidson, sweeping powers which could put the jobs of as many as one third of the Council’s workforce, some two hundred employees, at risk.

I wonder if he would have been quite as contemptuous of the distinguished group of financial experts, some of whom had been recently employed by the government, who have warned David Cameron and his colleagues that their policy of cuts, and yet more cuts, is proving counter-productive. It is killing any possibility of growth in the economy, ensuring that tax revenues don’t go up and payments to the unemployed don’t go down. Probably because of a stalled economy in the USA and austerity measures in Europe, manufacturing isn’t steaming ahead as hoped, despite what amounts to a twenty-five percent devaluation of the pound.

A successful businessman and regular reader of this blog has reminded me of his forecast that this would happen. He says gloomily, ‘However I am pretty sure there won’t be a U-turn, too much political capital tied up in this, and a fundamental belief that, even if it doesn’t turn the economy round, the public sector needs to be cut down to size’, adding – even more gloomily – ‘Not that I think that Ed Milliband would have a clue what to do if he ever gets elected’.

It is not a very cheering prospect. Locally the protest lobby was in vain. In the final vote 33 councillors voted to give the Chief Executive the powers for which he had asked, 12 voted against, 4 abstained and one was absent.

Mr Davidson now has the power to agree voluntary redundancies and impose compulsory redundancies as long as he delivers the same service. He must also refer to councillors any ‘significant change’ in the way the services are delivered. These extra powers are expected to deliver £4.4 million savings over the next four years.

The proviso ‘as long as he delivers the same service’ may seem by some to be an adequate safeguard of Council services. It is hardly that. Redundancies have immediate effect. A gradually reduced or deteriorating service may not attract serious attention for days, weeks, perhaps months. And by then it will be too late.

Perhaps Mr Davidson can work miracles – but I think that it would be unwise to count on it!

Week 31.10 3rd August

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Queen…….and I

The Queen and I haven’t a great deal in common. We’re both members of the human race, we’re both well past the first flush of youth and we both wore uniform during World War II, though hers was a good deal more elegant, and more comfortable, than mine was. When, in a mood of patriotic fervour, I volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939, she was included when I took my enlistment oath to protect her father King George VI and all his lawful heirs and successors. Oh yes, and my wife and I were very pleased when the Queen sent us a card and message of congratulation on our sixtieth wedding anniversary.

That was about it until very recently, when I learned that, like me, she had a collection of photographs displayed on the Flickr Web Site. This site displays many thousands of photographs submitted by people all over the world and is recommended to art teachers and students seeking inspiration and example.

Trooper Hall, F.C. 17th Lancers 1901

I have over 400 pictures on display – a great many family ones of course, with some of me as a tiny baby with my proud parents, culminating with some of me as I am now. There is a picture of my father in 1901 (one of Queen Victoria’s Redcoats) newly enlisted as a trooper in the very dashing 17th Lancers which, just fifty years earlier, had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War.

Right: Younger Son Andy with granddaughter Jo

There are pictures of my now-middle aged sons, and of my grandchildren as babies and, as they are now, in their late twenties.

Above - Myself, Chris girlfriend Ariel,Chris, Pete

Right - Arlene, Pete, Nick, Nick's girlfriend Romy

There are pictures of record too, some unrepeatable; a glance into a girls and a boys primary school class in the 1930s, pictures of a frozen sea off Clacton during a now-long-ago winter, and pictures of the famous Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia, taken in 1980 before it was destroyed in the Jugoslav civil war.

The old Turkish pack-horse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia taken on a never-to-be-forgotten holiday in 1980. Through the archway a mosque can be seen in the distance. The bridge was destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

You can see my flickr pages by accessing www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson Chris, who set the site up for me). The website has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA’s ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence, in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from mine.

Clacton's Bashful Fountains!

Clacton’s water feature, on what was once called ‘Christmas Island’ but is now ‘The Town Square’ has had a short history but a distinctly chequered one. When first installed in 2008 (amid inevitable accusations of its being ‘a waste of taxpayers’ money) it resembled similar water features in many other English towns. Fountains of water shot up into the air from hidden nozzles at pavement level.

It was attractive to look at. In what passed for a summer that year, it attracted small boys who enjoyed running through it and getting soaked. A great many adults enjoyed watching them do so!

Outside Sheffield’s Town Hall. This is how Clacton’s water feature is supposed to look

It was too good to last. First of all some joker introduced washing powder to it and the jets squirted bubbly suds! (Clacton, I’m sorry to say, has more than its fair share of such humorists.) The water feature was switched off, emptied and cleaned. It was at about that time that the Council realized that their fountain hadn’t been provided with an adequate water purification plant. It had been an economy measure, a typical case of spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar, though in this case it would have been a pretty big ha’porth.

Stray cats and dogs, and even seagulls, could be fouling the water through which little children were innocently disporting themselves! The possible threat of expensive lawsuits initiated by the kind of ambulance-chasing lawyers whose ‘no win: no fee’ adverts keep daytime commercial tv on its feet, began to haunt the dreams of Councillors and senior Council Officials. What if some child developed an unpleasant disease, blamed it on the fountain, and the parents sued? Playing safe, they switched off the fountain and off it remained for several months.

Last summer, again not much of a summer, the fountain started up again – but with an instantly derided (and expensive) fence all round it. The only justification for the fountain’s existence was the contribution its attractive appearance made to the town centre. The fence effectively destroyed that!

This year they are having another try. The ugly fence has come down and the fountain again enhances the attractions of the town centre.

Now though, thanks to electronic wizardry, it resembles the bashful heroine of a mid-Victorian romantic novel. The general public is invited to enjoy its beauty but strictly on a ‘keep your distance and touch me not’ basis. Get too close and electronic sensors send it into the equivalent of a Dickensian swoon – the fountains of water start to fail and eventually shut down altogether.

Nineteenth Century novels usually include ‘some blackguard’ managing to break down the young heroine’s reserve and threaten her virtue. So it is with our water feature. Already, so I understand, small boys have discovered a blind spot in the electronic barrier and have managed to get past it to frolic in the fountains without activating the protective screen!

A few days ago (28th July) I drove my mobility scooter to the town centre to get a photo of that accident-prone fountain. The jets weren’t working; presumably closed down again while someone sought an answer to the latest problem. I wonder what the one after that will be?

‘Essex Works’

‘Essex Works’, proclaims the headline on the latest edition of the County Council’s self-congratulatory newsletter. No one would doubt it, though I am by no means so confident that the same can be said about its County Council.

In the newsletter are set out five ways in which that Council proposes to save £300 million pounds – Buying better, Working smarter, Working together, Thinking ahead, and by means of Sharing and Trading Services. It reads to me more like a wish list than a programme for action but it ends with the bold claim that, by means unspecified, they have already saved £60 million!

I hope that they are successful. They have certainly been very good at spending our money. It seems likely that they’ll have to spend a good deal more of it if they are going to bring all their services up to an acceptable standard. Their child-care services, in particular, have long been below standard. I remember a year ago it being promised that they would take immediate effective steps to improve them. They don’t seem to have been very successful. During 2009/2010, 148 enquiries and complaints about the ECC were received by the Local Government Ombudsman, compared with 139 the previous year. Complaints relating to children and family services rose from 4 to 14 and those relating to adult care doubled from 9 to 18. There were also 36 complaints about education. As a result of these complaints the County Council had to make eleven local settlements in compensation, costing the taxpayers £16,456. This is trivial compared with the £300 million they are hoping to save but, as they say when commenting on these, ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’. The converse is also true, ‘Squander the pennies and you soon won’t have any pounds to save’.

In an attempt to improve their failing Children’s Services they have appointed a new Director of Schools, Children and Families. Dave Hill, the new Director, will be moving from a similar job in Croydon. His salary is not reported but it certainly won’t be peanuts! They are also offering a two-year contract of up to £150,000, not for new staff, but to a company able to bring in non-EU social workers to reduce reliance on agency staff. I’d have thought that non-EU workers from cultures and traditions very different from our own would be particularly unsuitable for social work.

I mentioned a few weeks ago in this blog that, despite their enthusiasm for saving, Essex Councillors had just voted themselves increased allowances. I now learn that during the last financial year they paid out £90,000 in staff bonuses, not to hard-pressed social workers and the like, but to top officials already on six-figure salaries. I have also discovered that they have spent no less than £800,000 (now that isn’t a trivial sum by anyone’s standards!) redesigning the Council’s website. Of this extravagance Emma Boon, campaign manager of the Taxpayers’ Alliance says, ‘The Council already has a site designed and built at the public’s expense. They shouldn’t spend more of our money doing it all over again’.

And so say all of us!

Above left: myself, Ariel Chris' girlfriend, Chris.

Right: Arlene, Pete, Nick, Romy Nick's girlfriend

The Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar, taken while we were on holiday in 1980. The bridge was to be destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

There are some pictures of record too, some of them irreplaceable: a glimpse into boys and girls classrooms in primary schools in the '30s; the sea frozen over off Clacton Beach in a cold winter many years ago; the Turkish packhorse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, destroyed in the civil war.

You can see my flickr pages by clicking on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson, who set the site up for me). The website site has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA's ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with their requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from HM from mine.

week 12/10

Tendring Topics……on Line

An Easter Message – from Network Rail

The Government, so it is said, is urging us to get out of our cars (no, not me personally; I haven’t got one!) and onto public transport. By so doing we’ll be easing traffic congestion on the roads, reducing petrol consumption and doing our bit to ‘save the planet’.

Occasions in the year when large numbers of us are inclined to travel at the same time, are our public holidays. We don’t have as many as most of our fellow Europeans. Perhaps because of that, we tend to make the most of them – to get away from our town or suburban homes, see friends or relatives and perhaps visit the sea or the countryside.

Two of these holidays are really special – Christmas and Easter. For one thing, both have more than one day of holiday. Both are major Christian Festivals though sadly the ‘Christian’ dimension is now only a minority interest. At Christmas time families of every faith and of none like to get together – and families are much more far-flung than once they were. Easter is the first holiday of the spring. It is a time to get out into the country and enjoy nature as it wakes from its winter sleep, or perhaps to visit the seaside for the first time in the year.

It might have been thought that our railways would have seized the opportunities these universal breaks present. It was, after all, the railways that first made travel possible for ordinary people. I am sure that there was a time when that was precisely what the railways did. In the past the LNER (remember them? The London and North-Eastern Railway) put on extra trains into London and other big cities at Christmas to facilitate family reunions, and provided ‘special offer’ excursion trains at Easter, Whitsun and the August Bank Holiday to take passengers on day trips or for the weekend to holiday resorts like Clacton, Frinton and Walton. I have lived in Clacton long enough to remember crowded trains pulling into Clacton Station on Saturdays, and the local children with their home-made barrows supplementing their pocket money by transporting holiday-makers’ luggage to their boarding houses or perhaps to Butlins Holiday Camp.

Is that what Network Rail and the various railway companies created by privatisation, do today? Not a bit of it. The closure of Liverpool Street Station from Christmas Eve till after the New Year has become as much part of Christmas as Santa Claus, roast turkey and Christmas crackers. We count ourselves lucky if ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ the closure doesn’t extend days into the New Year.

This year the coming of Easter was welcomed in the Daily Gazette with the headline Easter closures and strike threat spell rail chaos. ‘Work to replace overhead power lines between Liverpool Street and Romford on Easter weekend will cause disruption across the whole of Essex’. There is also a strike threat over plans by Network Rail to axe up to 1,500 jobs and change working practices! Private enterprise and ‘throwing the railway service out to healthy competition’ has certainly made a difference!

We can look forward to the usual Bank Holiday chaos as special buses replacing disrupted rail services join the thousands of motorists taking to the roads over the East Holiday.

Remember the slogan 'Let the train, take the strain?' Perhaps it’s time to add 'But the road must carry the load!'

Essex County Council – an unwieldy and extravagant giant

I have just received my Council Tax Bill for the coming year. I expect that everyone resident in the Tendring District will get theirs during the next day or two. I really can’t complain. I pay my Council Tax by direct debit, in ten instalments. During the next financial year, after the first payment the remaining nine will be just £1 more each month than I have been paying during 2008/2009.

I note that of my total annual charge of £1123.66, Essex County Council gets £845.25, Tendring District Council £105.38, Special Expenses (I’ve no idea what that means) £18.61, the Essex Fire Authority £51.66 and the Essex Police Authority £102.76. On the whole I think that we get value for money from Tendring’s share and I don’t complain about the needs of the Fire and Police Authorities.

I do question the County Council’s £845.25 though – nearly three times as much as the sum of the requirements of the other authorities. I heard Lord Hanningfield, the County Council’s former leader, claim (as he was leaving court where he had been charged with fiddling his expenses) that he had given 40 years of his life to the public service and had saved the County Council ‘millions of pounds’.

If that claim is anywhere near the truth it makes one wonder what the County’s cash demands would have been like without his Lordship’s hand on the tiller!

A ‘Freedom of Information’ request by The Daily Gazette has produced some interesting statistics about the County Council’s staffing and expenditure over the past few years. I knew, of course, that Essex County Council was a gargantuan organisation and, I suppose, the biggest employer in the county. I was nevertheless surprised to learn that in 2005/2006 they employed no less than 38,589 staff either full-time or part-time. The majority of these were in the field of education but there were still 11,669 non-school staff. By 2008/2009 though, the total number had fallen to 37,764 and non-school staff to 10,0069.

You may think this kind of downsizing explains the millions of pounds Lord Hanningfield claims that he and his colleagues have saved. You would be wrong. During the same period, total spending on staff – in schools, at the County Hall and in other offices – rose from £880 million to £997 million.

But that is not the end of the story.

In addition to paying almost a billion pounds to their own employees, the County Council also paid £25.3 million to outside ‘consultants’ last year. This compares with the £14.4 million that they had paid out in this way in 2005/2006.


There are, of course, occasions when any local authority may have to spend a few thousand, perhaps a few tens of thousands, on outside consultants with the expertise to deal with one-off problems beyond the capacity of its own staff. With an authority the size and population of Essex, I suppose that the reasonable expenditure on such expertise might run to a few hundred thousands.

But £25 million spent in a year by an authority that is already spending almost a billion a year on the wages and salaries its own staff? I’d have thought that the £14.4 million paid to consultants in 2005/2006 was well over the top. I’m lost for words (which doesn’t often happen!) to describe last year’s £25 million!

The County Council has clearly become a huge, unwieldy and extravagant tier of administration that should be dismembered and replaced by smaller more local local authorities. I wish Colchester’s MP, Bob Russell, every success in his campaign to secure unitary status for Colchester. I’d like to see similar campaigns in the Tendring District and every other district and borough council in our county.

A Thought for the Thoughtless

In last week’s blog I mentioned motorists who park their cars over dropped kerbs or partly on footpaths, as being among the problems faced by mobility scooterists and by those who push prams or wheelchairs. Scarcely had I posted it on the web when I learned of Brightlingsea’s Considerate Parking Initiative that appears to be dealing with that particular problem. What’s more it is doing so without the kind of heavy-handed officiousness that can be guaranteed to create resentment and antagonism.

Recognising that those who park badly do so from thoughtlessness rather than from malice, drivers of badly parked vehicles are given written notice that they are causing a problem. Ian Taylor, a Tendring Council parking services official involved with the scheme, is quoted in the Clacton Gazette as saying, ‘We are specifically looking at anti-social parking, which doesn’t necessarily contravene any regulations but annoys and upsets people………We want drivers to stop and think about where they are leaving their vehicles and what effect it can have on those around them’.

It especially targets parking in front of dropped kerbs, at junctions and on pavements and grass verges. Street wardens and some council officers issue the notices. These may be followed up by a visit to the offender’s home. Photos are also taken so that persistent offenders can be identified. The scheme has worked in Brightlingsea and is to be introduced in Harwich and Manningtree next month. I hope that the needs of Clacton haven’t been overlooked!

At the risk of seeming preachy, I cannot do other than to point out that the real answer to this, as it is to so many other problems arising from human behaviour, lies in advice given some two thousand years ago, when road transport consisted largely of ox-carts, pack horses, and chariots: ‘Treat other people as you would like them to treat you

How much indignation and anger would be averted if all of us – motorists, cyclists, mobility scooterists and pedestrians always tried to obey that rule.

There are Six of them – and all of them are Great!

I was an ‘only child’, with neither brother nor sister. However an unexpected blessing resulting from my sixty-year long marriage to Heather was the acquisition of a sister-in-law, a fine nephew, and four lovely nieces – all much kinder and nicer to me than a mere ‘uncle-by-marriage’ has any right to expect.

They in their turn have given me five great-nieces and a great-nephew in whom I take pride and interest – and whose birthdays I make every effort never to forget!

Here they are – all together to celebrate two important ones.



Nicola (‘Nikki’) first on the left, had just celebrated her 18th birthday and her cousin Catherine (‘Cat’), fourth from the left, her 16th. Clinging to Nikki is her five year old cousin Rosie. Between Rosie and Cat, is Cat’s twelve year old brother Adam. On the right of the picture, Rosie’s seven-year-old sister Millie is in the arms of Nikki’s sister Tania. Tania, of whom we’re all very proud, is a second year medical student. It astonishes me to realize that she will be twenty-one later this year. It seems such a little while ago that her Mum and Dad brought her to Clacton as a tiny baby to introduce Heather and I to our very first great niece!

They are five great nieces and a great nephew!

Tendring Topics……on line

Essex Social Workers

It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that Social Workers are concerned only with those at the extreme ends of their lives…..with the very young and with the very old. However I have little doubt that it is with these two groups that they have most problems and find themselves spending most of their working time.

My own experience has, naturally enough, been with their concern for the old. When, at the age of eighty, my wife was discharged from Clacton Hospital disabled, after having fallen and broken a hip six or seven weeks earlier, I was her sole carer. I was eighty-three myself so I was mildly surprised, and perhaps a little relieved, that no Social Worker looked in to see how I was getting on, to find out what support I might need and to tell me what I was doing wrong.

I was sometimes having trouble parking my car in the road immediately outside my bungalow – and my driveway was much too narrow for me to get my wife’s wheelchair beside the passenger seat so that I could get her into and out of the car. I phoned social services asking if I could have a ‘disabled parking’ notice on the road. I already had a narrow driveway with a dropped kerb and it would be necessary only to extend the width of that vehicle access by two or three feet to achieve this. I expected to get a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but instead I was told that my wife would have to be ‘assessed’ and that that would be done in about three months time!

It didn’t actually take quite as long as that. A very pleasant lady visited us with a form with lots of questions to answer (‘Can the patient feed herself unaided? was, I remember, one of them) and boxes to tick. I was told, as I could have been told over the phone two months earlier, that the County Council’s policy was not to provide a ‘disabled parking’ space where there was a dropped kerb and a driveway, however narrow and inadequate. They could concrete over my front garden to provide a parking space there if I wished. I didn’t. They could also make a concrete ramp to provide access for the wheel chair to my front door. I already had a perfectly satisfactory wooden ramp provided by a friendly, and very competent, neighbour. After a friendly chat the social worker departed – and that was that!

A couple of years later, after my wife’s sad death and following another phoned query, I too was assessed. Again, after a long wait, another, equally agreeable and eager-to-be-helpful lady called on me and we had a chat. It turned out that I had already provided for myself all the services that she would have been able to offer me. We parted with a warm handshake and, in her case I think, a sigh of relief.

My impression was that the County Council’s Social Services Department was able to offer valuable services to the old and disabled who needed them (I mustn’t forget that they are the source of my blue disabled-parking badge!). There are though, far too few social workers for them to be able to deal rapidly with people whose needs are brought to their attention, and to seek out those – whose cases may be even more urgent – about whom they have not been informed.

The same seems to apply at the other end of the age spectrum. Essex County Council has been repeatedly criticised by public service watchdogs for the standard of its child protection. An Ofsted report published last March described children’s safeguards in Essex as ‘inadequate’. A recent report in the Daily Gazette recorded that 1,000 Essex children who are on the ‘at risk’ register do not have a social worker looking after their interests. Bob Russell, Colchester’s MP is reported as saying ‘This is a failing of the officers at the highest level and the political leadership at the Essex County Council. They cannot hide behind the national shortage of social workers as the excuse’. It is clearly only by good luck that Essex has so far not made the national headlines with one of those tragic child neglect or abuse cases that attract national opprobrium and condemnation.

Perhaps the county council would do better if they concentrated on the boring old jobs with which they are charged by parliament, such as care of the young and the elderly, highway maintenance, refuse disposal, and education, even if that meant their members and senior staff spending a little less time jetting round the world, seeking customers for Essex manufactures in mainland China, running banks and post offices, and buying (with our money) advertising space for ‘Essex Apprenticeships’ on commercial tv.

One thing (just a coincidence I’m sure) that I have noticed is that whenever there is a news item that appears to cast credit on the County Council’s activities, a photo of the Council’s Leader, and a few of his wise words, appear in the press. Whenever there is criticism of the Council, some other previously little known face will be on the news pages, together with his apologies, excuses or explanations. On this occasion it was County Councillor Peter Martin, ‘responsible for children’s social services’.

Our Broken Society

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that my views don’t all that often coincide with those of the leader of the Parliamentary Opposition or of the leader writers of The Daily Mail and the Daily Express. I do agree with them though that in Britain today we are living in a ‘broken society’, and not all the reassuring statistics produced by the government and its supporters will convince me otherwise.

I see the signs of it every day both in tv news items and with my own eyes. There may be less reported crime (though that could be due to victims seeing little point in reporting it – or being scared to do so!) but there is certainly more binge drinking, hooliganism, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, vandalism, and, in schools, indiscipline and truancy, today than there was in the past*. It isn’t just the lure of ‘the telly’ that has reduced the number of Sunday evening church services, and weekday evening meetings of social and cultural clubs and associations. Many people (I am among them!) especially pedestrians and cyclists, are reluctant to venture out of their homes after dark. Others hesitate to respond to callers at their front door outside daylight hours.

Where I possibly disagree with Mr David Cameron and the popular press is on the causes and possible cure of our fractured and disintegrating society. I believe that it was in the ‘avaricious eighties’, the 'Thatcher years' that the rot set in. It was then that greed and avarice, disguised as ‘wealth creation’ became virtues, that ‘the nanny state’ was derided, the public services denigrated, and the super-rich became our role models and super-heroes. Everybody benefited, it was claimed, when the multi-millionaire made another couple of millions – because the wealth ‘trickled down’ to the rest of us. What rubbish!

‘New-Labour’, to its shame, did nothing to reverse that trend. Last week it was reported that in this country the gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and those of the poorest of our fellow citizens is wider today than it has been for forty years. For over a quarter of those forty years Britain has been ruled by a party founded for no other purpose than to secure social and economic justice for everybody! 'What shall it profit a man (or a political party) to gain the whole world – and lose his soul?'

Closing that yawning gap must be a first step taken toward mending our fractured society. It has been established beyond doubt that more equal societies have fewer and less serious social problems than widely unequal ones like our own; less crime, fewer broken homes, fewer illiterates, fewer teenage pregnancies, a lower infant mortality rate, smaller prison populations.

Those who yearn, as I do, for a fairer society are sometimes accused of being motivated by envy. That simply isn’t true. My income isn’t large, but then my needs are few. I don’t envy those who can buy yachts, mansions on the shores of the Mediterranean, and British football clubs. They’re welcome to them.

I don’t mind paying my share of taxation – in income tax, in VAT and in customs and excise duties. However, I do bitterly resent the fact that taxpayers on low incomes pay back to the state a much greater proportion of their incomes than do the seriously wealthy. In the forthcoming General Election I shall vote for any candidate whose Party, in power, would take serious steps toward narrowing that gap between the highest and the lowest incomes.

Helping the poor is not, on its own, enough. There is no gain without pain – and Britain’s less-than-wealthy have born that pain too long. Sharing it is overdue.

*Since writing the above I have read in the local press that for protection against vandalism and theft, Colchester’s Greenstead Public Library has had to install seven CCTV cameras and employ a fulltime guard!

A Royal Visit

The furore over the sale of Cadbury’s to the American firm Kraft reminds me of a story told me in the late 1940s by Jessie Adams, a Quaker lady in Ipswich, then well into her eighties. She had been among those present on 21st May 1919 when King George V and his consort Queen Mary had visited Bournville Model Village, designed and built by the Quaker Cadbury family to house the workers in their nearby chocolate factory.

It was decided that the Royal Party would visit one of the worker’s homes, which were shining examples of their kind. Formally dressed in top hats and frock coats, King George and George Cadbury walked in front while Queen Mary and Elizabeth Cadbury followed. Both ladies were known as being of strong character and forthright manner.

As the King and the Quaker were welcomed into the model home, Elizabeth Cadbury raised her voice and addressed her husband decisively, ‘Take your hat off George!’

Instantly and instinctively, King George’s hand went up to his hat!

The Inscrutable Chinese?

I have mentioned my grandson Chris and his Taiwanese girlfriend Ariel on a number of occasions in this blog. At the beginning of 2009 Chris was named as ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the Joy Organisation (educational providers) by whom he is employed. I thought that blog readers might like to see him with the children whom he taught during his first year with the school.


Chinese are often popularly described as being to ‘inscrutable’. To me, these children look anything but that. They look remarkably similar to any group of European kids of the same age – and every bit as cheeky and mischievous! I particularly like the shy little girl right at the back who almost didn’t make it into the picture. I am assured though that, unlike some British kids, they are obedient and eager to learn. Teaching them is a pleasure.

Week 3.10

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Vandals!

I have been familiar with the effects of vandalism for many years. I have seen young, newly planted street trees broken off and destroyed, windows smashed, public toilets wrecked – apparently with a sledge hammer – beach huts and public shelters set on fire, and telephones (that could be needed for some life-threatening emergency) torn from the public phone box in which they were installed.

When I was Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I publicised with some enthusiasm, the council’s reward scheme for those who provided information leading to the prosecution of vandals. I made certain that the very few occasions on which this reward was paid out were well publicised. I often wondered what on earth could be the motive for vandalism. Why and how could anyone derive pleasure or satisfaction from defacing something that was beautiful, destroying or disabling something that was useful, or desecrating something that others considered to be sacred? Theft, fraud and even homicide seemed positively reasonable by comparison.

Vandalism had rarely affected me personally. In the pre-mobile phone age I had, on occasion, been annoyed when I found a public phone box out of order because of it. I had been displeased when I had found a public convenience closed for the same reason. But nothing of mine had ever been vandalised. I had no reason to suppose that I would ever be the vandals’ target.

I was wrong. A low brick wall marked the front boundary of my property in Clacton’s Dudley Road. It had been provided when the bungalow was built in 1953 (three years before Heather and I had bought it and moved in) and had been showing signs of its nearly fifty-seven years of use. The top course of brickwork had weathered and was probably due for replacement. However, it was perfectly serviceable when I departed from Clacton on Christmas Eve. When I returned home five days later, the top few courses of one section of the wall had been knocked off and were lying in my front garden.

Left – the wall as it was before Christmas. Photo taken about 18 months ago. The top course of bricks is looking distinctly weather-beaten!
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It was no big deal; not worth claiming on the insurance. I asked a builder friend if he would fix it and he promised to do so directly the temperature dropped below freezing. Sadly, that wasn’t the end. On Sunday night, 10th January and again on Monday night, 11th January, the wall was again attacked, finally leaving barely a quarter of the original wall standing.

Its replacement is covered by my ‘Age Concern’ home insurance – which is just as well, as clearance of the site, removal of rubble and construction of a new wall or other boundary is unlikely to cost less than £1,000. As I write I am considering whether to replace it with another similar wall (which might well be subject to immediate vandal attack!) or some kind of a wooden fence. The latter, I think, might be less attractive to vandals and if any parts of it were damaged they would probably be easier to repair or replace.

Right – the wall as it was on Tuesday 12th January. The rubble had already been cleared from between the two concrete posts in the foreground

As I am claiming on my insurance policy I had to notify the police. A very pleasant young police officer visited me and, in a friendly chat, apologised for the fact that there really wasn’t much possibility that the culprits would be brought to book. I had already known that to be the case and, rather to my surprise, I realized that I didn’t particularly want them to be caught and ‘taught a lesson’. I think it likely that all they would learn from such a lesson would be to take greater care not to be caught next time.

It would be nice to be able to claim that I forgive them, as I assure God that I do every time I recite Our Lord’s Prayer (‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’). It wouldn’t be quite true though. It isn’t so much that I forgive them as that I can’t be bothered to judge them. I think that I feel quite sorry for them. What sad and empty lives must be led by young people whose pleasure in life comes from destroying, defacing, or damaging things that give other people service or pleasure. Towards what a joyless, purposeless and loveless adult life and old age they are heading!

Essex Works (wonders – thanks to other people’s efforts!)

'Essex Works' is the bold claim to be found on all Essex County Council published material. You'll see it on their leaflets and on their, quite wexpensive, tv adverts. A few weeks ago I wrote enthusiastically in this blog about Essex County Council’s ‘Telecare Home Safety Service’. This service was intended for ‘vulnerable adults who would like to feel safer, more protected and independent in their own home, particularly perhaps for ‘older, infirm or disabled people’.

The 'Telecare Home Safety Service' of the Essex County Council provided, according to need, a personal alarm that enabled the user to summon immediate help if he or she were suddenly ill, fell over or had some other emergency while at home or in the garden; a bogus caller button by the front door for use when a stranger tried to gain entry to the home; a smoke detector; a fall detector; a flood detector; and a ‘movement detector’ that would verify and record the presence of an intruder or alternatively detect prolonged inactivity. What was more the service required was available on twelve months free trial to those over 85.

I am less steady on my feet than I once was and, if I do fall, am unable to get up unaided. The personal alarm system would obviously provide an answer to some of my problems. At eighty-eight I possibly wouldn’t need it longer than the twelve months trial period. If I did the monthly charge of £16.47 wouldn’t make a serious impact on my financial resources. I filled it in the form, posted it off to the County Council and awaited developments.

As I waited I felt just a little remorseful about some of the less-than-kind things that I had written about the County Council and its hierarchy in this column. I had, for instance, said that I thought that the County was a stratum of local government that could well be dispensed with. I had urged that all Essex District and Borough Councils should be accorded unitary status and, within their own districts, should carry out the tasks entrusted by central government to county councils. There was every reason to believe that they would do so more economically and more effectively. Tendring Council, for instance, had been declared by the Audit Commission to be the best performing council in Essex while the County Council’s performance had been designated only as ‘adequate’.

Perhaps I had been wrong and, at least in providing the Essex Telecare Home Safety Service, the County Council was performing a valuable countywide service.

Here is the front of the brochure publicising the Essex Telecare Home Safety service

My written request was attended to with commendable speed. An appointment was made by phone and, at the time and date arranged, a very friendly and helpful lady appeared at my front door to explain and install what I understood to be the County Council’s service. It transpired though that the service had nothing whatsoever to do with the County Council. I had been a little surprised when the lady had turned up in a Tendring District Council vehicle. In conversation it soon emerged that she was, in fact, a Tendring District Council employee and that the service for which I had asked was not a new, or even an old service of the Essex County Council. It was, in fact, the long-established Tendring Careline, founded and run for at least the past twenty years, by the Tendring District Council.

It is indeed a very worthwhile service and I am glad that I have had it installed in my home. An unobtrusive ‘Lifeline Home Unit’, functioning rather like the ‘router’ of a wireless broadband installation, is connected to a power point and to a nearby telephone socket. The user is issued with a pendant having a large red activating button, that is worn round the neck at all times (after an hour or so you forget you’ve got it on). In an emergency anywhere within 50 metres of the Lifeline Unit, pressing the red button will alert the operators at base. The Unit then acts as a radio station with which you can converse and which will set into motion whatever is needed to help you.

On the very back page of the County Council’s publicity brochure all the district and borough councils are listed with a little notice stating Essex County Council – working in partnership with local service providers to support independence in your own home. Well, that’s some sort of an acknowledgement of the work of district authorities, I suppose. If you are interested though, I suggest that you phone Tendring Careline at Clacton Town Hall 01255 222727 email: careline@tendringdc.gov.uk Don’t bother with that expensive and self-satisfied ‘middle-man’ in Chelmsford.

My belief that, in Essex at least, the County Council is an extravagant, uneconomical, and unnecessary tier of local government has been reinforced!

Disaster in the Caribbean

My own worries about my garden wall, my concerns about the future of democratic government in this country, even my occasional worries about my friends and family, pale into insignificance before the appalling disaster in Haiti. How sad it is that the world’s worst natural disasters always seem to afflict the world’s very poorest communities, whose members have to struggle for survival during the best of times!

The Haiti earthquake rivals the south-east Asian tsunami in its catastrophic effects. I find the depiction of human misery, despair and desolation in tv news bulletins almost unbearable to watch. How much more shattering they must be on the spot and in reality!

Over the Christmas/New Year period I have received an unprecedented number of appeals from thoroughly deserving charities in desperate financial straits due to the recession. Most I have had no alternative but to ignore. I do intend though to give as generously as I possibly can, to either the British Red Cross Society or to Christian Aid for the Haiti Disaster Relief Fund.

I hope that all readers of this blog will be prepared to do the same.