Week 17 2013

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A Very Public Funeral

          ‘Speak no ill of the dead’, my mother used to say.  De mortuis nil nisi bonum, (of the dead say nothing but good) means much the same thing for those who wish to display their knowledge of Latin.  It has probably been this thought that has made me refrain from comment about the death of Baroness Thatcher and about her very public (and very expensive) funeral last Wednesday (17^th April)

            I’m certainly not going to add to the fulsome praise that has been lavished upon her during the past two weeks (you’d never dream that it was not Dennis Skinner, George Galloway, Glenda Jackson  or their like who put an end to her political career, but grandees of her own party!) but, on the other hand, I wouldn’t wish to descend to personal abuse or even personal criticism.  She was a very able and remarkable woman of strong and determined views and, as the UKs first woman Prime Minister, she set an example that all of her successors have tried to follow.  The fact that I consider her views mistaken and her example a bad one is beside the point.   I did warm to her just a little in the distress she displayed when her son Mark (now, thanks to mum, Sir Mark Thatcher Bart.) was missing for a few days in the Sahara desert while taking part in a motor rally.

            I have never for one moment hesitated to comment on and criticise the policies that she pursued so relentlessly. Only the week before her death, when I was unaware that she was even seriously ill, I wrote in this blog at some length about the ethics of compelling local authorities to sell off at bargain-basement prices houses that their predecessors had provided for the benefit of the people of their areas.  And I outlined the malign results countrywide of this successful attempt to widen political support.

            I have commented critically on her attitude towards European Union, her mass privatisations of public services, her widening the gap between the richest and the poorest in our society, her close association with Rupert Murdoch, a foreign media millionaire, in his conflict with British Trade Unions,  her friendship with General Pinochet, Chile's brutal fascist dictator, and her connivance with his escape from justice.

            One cannot but admire her resolution in recovering the Falklands after the Argentine invasion. However it should be remembered that she was the head of a government that had left the islands defenceless against such an attack, the last vestige of a British naval presence having been removed shortly before the invasion.  Patrolling Trident submarines (our ‘ultimate deterrent’) had not the slightest effect upon the Argentines, as they have had no deterrent effect upon any act of aggression that has occurred since World War II.  Might not the permanent presence in Port Stanley of an adequate British garrison been a more effective deterrent and possibly have saved a great deal of money and many British and Argentine lives?   

            Shakespeare got it right when he put into Mark Anthony’s mouth, ‘The evil that men do lives after them.  The good is oft interred with their bones’.  It doesn’t apply only to men.

The County Council Elections

Broken and dangerous paving stones in Agincourt Road, Clacton-on-Sea  

I have written several times in this blog about the dire state of Clacton’s pavements.   There are broken and uneven paving stones and kerbs in street after street away from the actual town centre.   They shake up the ancient bones of mobility scooter users like me.  They’re a danger to all pedestrians after dark and they’re a peril to those with impaired vision at any time of the day or night.

            I last wrote about them only six or eight weeks ago and was astonished, and very pleased a fortnight later to see the County Council’s contractors hard at work in Clacton’s Old Road near the Waterglade business park repairing one of the stretches of footpath about which I had complained.   Since then I have spotted other footpaths being repaired and have noticed that at least some of the potholes in the middle of roads, that had existed for years, have been filled in.

  

The relaid footpath in Clacton's Old Road.
             

Why, I wondered, is all this happening just now?  Had the county council (who are the highway authority) suddenly discovered a few thousand pounds that they hadn’t known they possessed?  All became clear when I realized that there is to be a County Council election on 2nd May.  Existing members of the County Council  had no doubt urged their contractors to get on with the job in the hope of encouraging residents to use their votes for candidates of their party.  I'm afraid they realized the importance of those repairs a bit too late to attract my vote.

         I certainly intend to use that vote in the County Council election  So far I have had election literature from the Labour, Conservative and 'Tendring First' candidates.  I understand that UKIP are contesting every county council seat in Essex.  I certainly won't vote for their candidate and, although I have nothing against the Conservative Candidate, I can't possibly vote for a member of the political group who elected and supported Lord Hanningfield as County Council Leader, who have neglected the maintenance of Clacton's roads and footpaths, who have closed, despite wide public protest, a recycling and refuse site in St. Osyth, resulting in fly tipping and congestion in Clacton's Rush Green Road site, and more recently have first closed Colchester High Street to traffic and then, just when members of the public were getting used to the closure, cancelled it - presumably because they could see it was losing them votes.   

'LEADER SLAMS BISHOP REMARKS'

          The above announcement, accompanied by a picture of the Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford (a diocese that includes Clacton-on-Sea and the Tendring District) greeted readers of the Clacton Gazette last week.  The ‘Leader’ of the headline is Councillor Peter Halliday, recently elected as political ‘Leader’ of the Tendring District Council.  Another smaller headline declared Church told not to interfere as benefits reforms hit Clacton hardest.   What, I wondered, could the Bishop possibly have said to upset the Council’s leader?  Had he insulted the Council in some way or made light of our current economic problems?  

He had, as might have been expected, done nothing of the sort.  The Bishop had expressed concern at the revelation in a recent report, that poor residents in the Tendring District are likely to feel the impact of the government’s welfare reforms more than those of most other districts.   It might have been expected that that would be a concern shared by Tendring Council and its political leader.   It appeared that working-age benefit claimants in Tendring will lose £620 a year by 2014/15 because of the reforms.  Those in the City of London will lose an average of just £180.

The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell is quoted as saying that he wanted to voice his concern about the injustice that had been revealed.   ‘Although some reform of the welfare system is necessary, I cannot turn a blind eye to the injustice that it is the poorest people in our poorest communities who will be paying the price of the current welfare reforms.  Of course benefits should not be paid to those who don’t need them or to anyone who is claiming them falsely.  But in a time of austerity there is actually a greater need to support the poor and to ensure that everyone in society bears the costs  of any reductions, especially those who are better able to afford it’.  That sounds eminently reasonable to me, especially in the light of recent figures showing that 3,480 people in Tendring are claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance – 4.5 percent of the working-age population.

But Mr Halliday will have none of it. ‘Are these people the poorest in society or are the poorest people those who are going to work, being paid the minimum wage and just managing to keep their heads above water?’, he asks rhetorically..  Perhaps the Bishop would arrange for Mr Halliday’s local parish priest to take him to one side and explain the ways in which those people being paid the minimum wage are also penalised by the so-called reforms.  Perhaps too, Mr Halliday will tell those 3,480 unemployed local residents where they can find work – at even the minimum wage.

Peter Halliday says, ‘I’m concerned at the level of interference by the church about changes to welfare and this government’s policies.  Some of the actions of his own organisation need to be sorted out before worrying about what other people are doing’.   A spokesman for the Diocese of Chelmsford gave some examples of the way in which Britain’s Christian Churches ‘interfere’ in the lives of their disadvantaged fellow citizens; ‘Churches are communities made up of people who care for one another.  They set up support groups for people affected by problems so that they can share their experiences and address the challenges they are facing together.  They help people who are struggling with debt, they work with charities to help people who are worried about losing their homes, and they are involved in setting up and running food banks’.

Mr Halliday might care to find out what local churches are doing in Clacton and in the Tendring District generally - and perhaps join in.   He’ll find there’s plenty of work to be done but it differs from that of district councillors in that there’s no payment made for simply turning up at meetings – and volunteers for church activities can rarely claim even their out-of-pocket expenses. 

‘He called for his Fiddlers three’

         There is, of course, a kind of fiddling that doesn't involve the use of a violin! Nowadays, I suppose, Colchester’s legendary Old King Cole would have called for his financial advisers. There have always been people who enriched themselves unscrupulously but I believe that the situation worsened during the avaricious 1980s when Mrs Thatcher was PM.   That was the decade in which the market philosophy of ‘get as much as you can for as little as you can get away with’ really took hold.  Everything – and everyone had a price - and the Daily Telegraph (surely reckoned to be one of our more responsible broadsheets) published a  leading article ‘A Defence of Greed’.

            We hear, and read in sections of the popular press, a great deal about benefit fraudsters and those who use state ‘benefits’, not just as temporary help in an emergency, but as a preferred lifestyle.  It’s a pretty uncomfortable and squalid lifestyle though and I don’t believe as many embrace it from choice as some sections of the press and some politicians would like us to believe.

 Nor is it only the poor who are on the fiddle.  We haven’t forgotten the many ‘honourable members’ of the House of Commons and at least one ‘noble Lord’ who, despite receiving what most of us would regard as generous salaries, claimed fraudulent expenses.  A very few were prosecuted and gaoled but many got away with paying back the money that they had fraudulently claimed.  I have just read in the daily Gazette a report about our very own Lord Hanningfield (who did serve a very brief gaol sentence for his fraud).  In the first eight months of his return to the House of Lords after early discharge from gaol, this convicted criminal has claimed £21,000 for attendance and £1,736 in travel expenses for his attendance there - but there is no record of his having said a word or asked a single question  in the ‘Upper House’.  Nor is there any question of his having once again broken the law. He could certainly teach a lesson or two to small-scale benefit cheats!

            Then, of course, there are the seriously wealthy cosmopolitans with their tax havens, their charitable trusts and their phony charities. They keep a whole financial industry profitably engaged in advising them on avoiding the taxation that should be the responsibility and privilege of everyone who enjoys British citizenship, is permitted to reside here permanently, or who operates a business enterprise within our shores.

            Catch the little fish with their benefit fraud by all means – but don’t forget the big ones with their stashed-away millions, and their armies of ‘professional fiddlers’. They may be more difficult to hook, gaffe and land but they'll prove to be a far more profitable catch!

           

           

           

  

 

Week 6.10

Tendring Topics………on line

Weather Folklore

Red sky in the morning,
Shepherd’s warning!

So says one of the best-known pieces of weather folklore. A red sky just before sunrise is a presage of strong wind or rain before night. This certainly proved to be true when a few weeks ago, I took this before-dawn photograph from the back door of my home in Clacton’s Dudley Road.

The second couplet of that particular piece of folklore, Red sky at night, Shepherd’s delight, I have found to be rather less reliable. A beautiful red sunset may be followed by a glorious windless and sunny day – but it may not be.

Another piece of thoroughly unreliable weather folklore is the prophecy that the weather on St. Swithin’s day (15th July) determines whether or not the next forty days will be wet or dry. It is true though that at about that time of the year we often do have long spells of either very wet or very dry weather.

Tuesday of last week (2rd February) was Candlemas Day, when the Church remembers the presentation of Christ in the Temple and celebrates his role as the Light of the World. Prior to the Reformation it was the practice on that day to bless all the candles to be used in the church during the year. I believe that the custom is continued in the Roman Catholic Church.

It is a day also associated with weather folklore that seems to come true rather more often than not.

If Candlemas be clear and bright,
Winter will have another flight.
If Candlemas be dull, with rain,
Winter has gone and will not come again.

This year, if you remember, Candlemas was ‘dull with rain’ for most of the day though there was a brief period of brightness mid-morning. I hope that the worst of the winter really is over – but I won’t be putting my winter overcoat and fur (synthetic of course!) hat away just yet!

Prince of Peace…..Weapons of War!

Among the recorded sayings of China’s former leader Chairman Mao Tse Tung, was that ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Who am I to say that he was wrong about this? Guns and political power can certainly make a deadly combination – as the current Public Enquiry into the causes, conduct and aftermath of the war in Iraq is making abundantly clear.

A cause that I am quite sure is not best served by weapons of death of any kind, is the Christian Faith. As a Christian Quaker I believe that Jesus Christ meant what he said when he told us to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, do good to those who despitefully use us. He set an example that Christians should strive to follow – though few of us completely succeed. Furthermore I believe the everyone in the world, fanatical terrorists as well as men and women of peace, is endowed with Christ’s inward light, the instinct within us all that urges us towards love, compassion and forgiveness. Whatever the cause, it is not for us to snuff out that light in a fellow human, however much it may have become dimmed by bigotry, greed, superstition or fear. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things (good or bad) unto one of my brethren, ye have done them unto me’.

I was shocked therefore to learn that each rifle of the latest consignment for our troops in Afghanistan has inscribed upon it a reference to a New Testament text. An example quoted in the national press is JN8:12 referring the user to Verse 12 of Chapter 8 of St. John’s Gospel, within which Jesus proclaims, ‘I am the Light of the World. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’. United States firm Trijicon, said to have been founded by a devout Christian, manufactures the rifles. I find this message, engraved on what is a weapon of death, to be profoundly offensive, even blasphemous. I had a similar though I think lesser, shock when many years ago I discovered that in World War II every German soldier had ‘Gott mit uns’ (God is with us) engraved on the buckle of his uniform belt.

You may (or may not) be astonished to learn that this offensive aspect of the engraving is not the one that is bothering our politicians and the national press. Their worry is that a reference to a New Testament text might be used by the Taliban to persuade waverers that the allied forces in Afghanistan are engaged in a Crusade to convert them to Christianity. As the Taliban and Al Quaida are already trying to persuade Afghans that they themselves are engaged in a Holy War (a Jihad) to drive the infidels from the sacred soil of their country, that would hardly seem necessary.

In any case Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, who is usually prompt in telling us of anything that might offend his co-religionists, says that he regards the inscriptions as ‘fairly harmless’.

A single sentence in the Daily Mail’s report suggests to me that if the Press and Politicians hadn’t decided to publicise this silly business, it is likely that no one would have known about it. That sentence is, ‘The inscriptions appear in raised lettering at the end of the gunsight’s stock number’.

I haven’t always been a Christian Quaker and my views on the compatibility of Christian Faith with armed conflict haven’t always been those that I hold today.

During World War II I was a gunner in the Royal Artillery. I didn’t therefore routinely carry a rifle. We all had to learn to fire one though, and in the summer of 1940 when it was thought that a German invasion could be imminent, we were all issued with one (from which we were forbidden ever to allow ourselves to be parted!), together with fifty rounds of ammunition,

I did make sure that I was pretty familiar with mine, and was capable of using it effectively if the occasion arose. If I had happened to notice the manufacturer’s serial number it would certainly never have occurred to me that JN8.12 embossed immediately after it might be a Biblical reference………unless, of course, I had been alerted to the fact by the press and politicians.

Essex Jobs for Essex Enterprise?

Do you remember, it was only a few months ago that Lord Hanningfield, as leader of Essex Count Council, was urging Essex public authorities to choose Essex contractors to undertake their services? I remember suggesting that if Tendring District or Colchester Borough, for example, chose, without a very good reason, a tender for services from within Essex, rather than a lower one from across the border in neighbouring Suffolk, they would be in trouble with their auditors.

This advice from the County Council evidently applied only to other authorities, not themselves. More recently Lord Hanningfield has announced that he personally had negotiated a deal for a £9.4 billion contract with computer services giant IBM, a multinational IT organisation with its base in the USA and its tentacles worldwide. This, he assured us, would save the taxpayer thousands of pounds annually.

Let us hope that it does, because it has also recently been announced that the jobs of up to 275 County Council staff, Essex men and women, are to be axed either as a direct or indirect result of this deal.

I have no doubt that in the upper echelons of the County Council’s staff, there are a few faces that would never be missed. However, the inadequacies of, for instance, the Council’s child protection service, suggest that lower down the salary scales, among social workers at least, they need to be recruiting staff rather than dismissing them. No-one has yet invented a robot or computer that can knock on doors, interview householders, inspect their homes, assess the well-being of their children and their capabilities as parents, and take appropriate action.

Assuming that computerising many of the County Council’s services would be a good idea, are there really no Essex, or at least East Anglian, IT consultants who could have offered the same service as IBM, probably at a lower price?

Latest Developments

I wrote the above before the news broke that Lord Hanningfield was the one member of the House of Lords who faced prosecution in connection with the Parliamentary expenses scandal. I have decided to let the blog stand.

I have been very critical of Lord Hanningfield in the past. I have thought that many of his policies, especially his ‘ground-breaking initiatives’, were mistaken and that his style of leadership introduced an undesirable ‘cult of the personality’ into local government. However, I never, for one moment, thought of him as being dishonest, and I hope that he succeeds in clearing himself of the current accusations.

I am not going to pretend though that I am not pleased that he has laid down his leadership of the County Council. I hope that under its new leader, whoever he or she may be, the Council will spend rather less time and money on globe-trotting trips abroad for its members and senior staff, on seeking customers for Essex products in China and elsewhere, and on running banks and failing post offices (though I do think that the latter was a worthwhile exercise). This should release resources for the County's failing child protection and child care, its care of the old and disabled, education, maintenance of highways, consumer protection, refuse disposal and recycling and other responsibilities entrusted to County Councils by central government.

I hope too, that the expenses claimed by County Councillors in connection with their duties, will be investigated every bit as meticulously as those of members of parliament have been.

A Seventeenth Century Law

I find it almost unbelievable that MPs, accused of fiddling their expenses should have the effrontery to seek to avoid the judgement of the criminal courts by means of a three hundred year old law enacted for no other purpose than to ensure absolute freedom of speech for MPs within the House of Commons! Is that what they meant when they said they would be 'defending themselves robustly?'

Perhaps, as they are seeking the protection of a 17th Century law they should, if found guilty, suffer a 17th Century penalty. A few months in a cell in the Tower for instance, under the conditions of prisoners there in the sixteen hundreds, might be appropriate. Or, and this would be by far the cheapest option for we tax-payers, a few hours in the pillory in a public place within their own constituencies.

Week 22.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

An undignified exit

There is no doubt that the Speaker of the House of Commons had to depart. He had tried to conceal the venality and greed of many of the House’s members, and had shown himself much more interested in the identity of the whistle-blower than in the activities that had been exposed. I didn’t care for the manner of his going though. Could it be that some MPs were less concerned about the fact that he had attempted a cover-up than that it had proved to be unsuccessful?

I have little doubt that he saw himself as trying to protect the honour of the House and of its members, in the tradition of the 17th Century speaker who famously defied the emissaries of King Charles I when they sought to arrest rebellious MPs. Did all of those members who demanded his resignation have nothing whatsoever about which they would have preferred their constituents to remain unaware?

I wasn’t particularly pleased to see our own MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, among the leaders of the pack. I have no doubt that he hasn’t spent a penny that wasn’t permitted by current rules, but we learn that he has claimed for the cost of a fridge freezer and two tables that wouldn’t have been permitted under the agreed new code of conduct. His last year’s claim of £23,083 for his second home was almost a thousand pounds below the permitted maximum. Compared with some of his colleagues he is a paragon. Doesn’t he sometimes though, feel a shade uneasy about the fact that for just a part of his ‘necessarily incurred expenses’ he received a tax-free payment in excess of the total income of a great many, possibly a majority, of his constituents?

One of the saddest, and potentially most dangerous, results of this whole sad affair is the disillusion of the general public with the whole democratic process. Cynical jokes are enjoying a new lease of life: ‘How can you tell when a politician is lying? When you can see his lips moving’; ‘An honest politician is a politician who when he’s been bought, stays bought’; ‘Don’t vote for them. It only encourages them!’; ‘If voting changed anything, they’d have banned it!’; and so on. It is amid such general disillusion that charismatic new leaders, promising to cast out the ‘tired old men of politics’ and bring in a new, clean, all-British era, emerge and flourish; such new leaders, in fact, as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and in our own country (though he never succeeded in persuading more than a small minority) the late Sir Oswald Mosley.

It was Winston Churchill who said that democracy was, ‘the worst form of government, except for every other form of government that had yet been tried’


Using your vote ‘responsibly’

Nowadays young people have the right to vote in European, National and local elections once they are eighteen. In my day it was twenty-one but, because I was a prisoner of war from the age of twenty-one till I was twenty-four, I was not able to exercise this right until three years after I became eligible.

I welcomed the opportunity to do so in the parliamentary election of 1945. Home from Germany, I was still on leave from the army at the time. My mother and I went together to the polling station to register our votes. As we left we encountered a neighbour who my mother knew perfectly well had different views from our own. ‘Just voted, have you?’ she asked, ‘I hope that you voted the right way’. On my own, I would have either stammered something totally incoherent or, just possibly, launched into a long-winded and totally fruitless argument. My mother who, I discovered, was well able to ‘think on her feet’, smiled sweetly and replied, ‘We all think that we do that, don’t we?’

I thought of that diplomatic reply when I read the leading article in a recent issue of the Clacton Gazette. The editor had clearly realized that, as I have warned in the article above, the current MPs’ expenses scandal could result in electors either refraining from voting in disgust or, in anger, registering a protest vote for a minority candidate whose policies they would normally have held in abhorrence. Here are the editor’s wise words:

Please use your vote, no matter how much it makes you want to hold your nose. Use your vote freely, but also wisely and responsibly. Many people will be tempted to use this time as an opportunity to protest. However protest votes can result in unintended consequences which may pose a threat to democracy, not enhance it

I couldn’t agree more; but don’t we all think that we vote ‘wisely and responsibly’? I would hate to see the BNP gain a foothold either in the County Hall at Chelmsford or in the European Parliament. Nor would I like to see UKIP increase its influence, either at home or on the European mainland. Geographically and historically we are part of Europe. Our destiny is to play a leading role in a culturally, economically and politically united Europe, not to try to position ourselves somewhere in mid-Atlantic.

We are fortunate in having a secret ballot. We cannot be penalised or ostracised by bosses, landlords, trade-union leaders, or even indignant friends and neighbours, for voting what they consider to be ‘the wrong way’. If I were younger I might have preferred to keep my own voting intentions secret, but at eighty-eight I have no hesitation in announcing that on 4th July my vote for the European Election will be for the Green Party and for the Essex County Council my vote will be for the Liberal Democrat candidate.

Eighty-eight is Great…….so far

I certainly celebrated my eighty-eighth birthday in style. It all began a fortnight earlier when my younger son and daughter in law, Andy and Marilyn, came down from London to visit me. After an enjoyable lunch at the ‘Bowling Green’, Weeley, we drove on to the Beth Chatto Gardens, a visit that I wrote about in a recent blog.

The following Saturday Pete and Arlene brought grandson Chris from Taiwan and his girlfriend Ariel to see me. Their visit was mentioned last week.

Left:Ariel and myself in my home in Dudley Road, Clacton

Above: Andy and Marilyn high above London in the 'London

Eye'

Then, for the weekend immediately preceding my birthday, Pete and Arlene took me to Brusselsto see younger grandson Nick and meet his charming girlfriend Romy, a young Belgian lady whose first language is French but who speaks English fluently and with barely a trace of accent. Like Nick, she works for the European Travel Commission. I found her to be intelligent, a good listening-as-well-as-talking conversationalist, and an altogether warm and cheerful companion. Both in her appearance, and in some of her mannerisms, she reminded me strongly (and heart-breakingly!) of my late wife Heather, Chris and Nick’s grandma, when she was in her twenties…..and that is the greatest compliment that I can pay to anyone.

While in Brussels, Pete, Arlene and I stayed at the very posh Raddison Hotel (favoured by visitors to the European Parliament!). We all went to an enormous multiplex cinema and enjoyed watching ‘Slum-Dog Millionaire’ (in English with French and Flemish subtitles) and drove out through the Ardennes to the lovely Meuse Valley, scenically comparable with the Valley of the Rhine.

A family meal in a Brussels Restaurant. Left to right; Arlene, Pete, Nick and Romy

There we lunched in an open-air restaurant beside the Meuse in Dinant (did you know that it was in the Dinant area that fish and chips was invented?) and travelled by cable railway to the Citadel, on a rocky cliff-top high above the town. I was sorry when we had to leave late on the Sunday evening.

Dinant and the River Meuse from the Citadel, built on a commanding clifftop above the town and its strategic bridge over the Meuse.

Back in London for my actual birthday Pete drove Arlene and myself into Essex to enjoy a celebratory lunch at ‘The Cricketers’ in Clavering, owned and run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the celebrated down-to-earth tv chef. The food and service were, as one would expect, impeccable. I am glad that I didn’t even catch a glimpse of the bill! Pete drove me home to find twenty greetings cards awaiting me; not bad for an octogenarian who has outlived many of his friends and relatives.
One of my favourite stories is of the unfortunate chap who fell off the roof of a skyscraper. As he hurtled past the eighth floor he saw all the anxious faces watching him, and called out reassuringly, ‘I’m all right so far!’

Bearing that story in mind I am able to assure blog readers that, for me, eighty-eight is great…..so far.

18th May 2009
Me at my birthday celebratory lunch at 'The Cricketers'. Clavering

Week 16.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

The Easter Holiday

As so often happens, in London at least (and I doubt if it was very different in Clacton!) Easter was overcast, drizzly and chilly until the afternoon of Bank Holiday Monday when, just for a few hours, we basked in warm spring sunshine.

However I had a very enjoyable and active break. My grandson Nick was home from Brussels for Easter, and granddaughter Jo was also home from Sheffield with my younger son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn. They live just a mile or two from my elder son and daughter-in-law, with whom I was staying. It was therefore an opportunity for a family get-together.

On Sunday morning Pete drove Arlene and myself to Southwark Cathedral where we attended and took part in an Easter Choral Eucharist. It was a really special occasion as it was televised live for BBC 1. Every seat in the Cathedral was occupied and there were over forty in the choir! If you watched it on tv you’ll know that it was a very splendid and a very happy event.

Afterwards we watched the service on BBC i-player. Arlene and I were able to spot ourselves in the congregation, but we did of course, know where to look.

Left -Magnolia in Bloom in the gardens at Wisley

Then, on Bank Holiday Monday, Pete drove us to the Royal Horticultural Society’s HQ and gardens at Wisley in Surrey. The sun came out while we were there and it was lovely to see the spring flowers and the blossoming trees and shrubs in the spring sunshine. There was a fascinating selection of plants in the enormous glass house where, thanks to clever design, plants from dry and temperate parts of the world are able to live and flourish under the same glass roof as those from tropical rain forests.

It was a lovely break and I enjoyed every moment of it. It's nice to be home in Clacton again though!

Right - a woodland path at Wisley

The Lovely Stour Valley

A new exhibition of John Constable’s work displaying his portraits rather than his already well-known landscapes*, a new biography ‘Constable in Love’, featuring his seven-year long courtship of Maria Bicknell, the girl he was to marry, and a National Trust Tour ‘Early Summer in the Stour Valley’** starting on Saturday 23rd May, brought back memories of my own of the lovely Stour Valley and, in particular, the ‘Constable country’ centred on Flatford and Dedham.

I was a keen fresh-water angler in my teenage years and sometimes on a Saturday or during the school holidays, I would seek a change from the familiar reaches of the River Gipping. I would get my mother to make me a packed lunch and carrying all my fishing gear on my bicycle, peddle my way along the London Road from Ipswich to East Bergholt and then on to Flatford for a day’s angling in pastures new.

Below - Bridge Cottage, once owned by John Constable’s father, and now a welcoming restaurant, is the first sight that the visiting motorist or cyclist sees in Flatford.

That was not my only experience of Flatford. Mr Alfred Morris, the headmaster of Ipswich’s Northgate Secondary School for Boys (there was a separate girls’ school) was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Accordingly, he had established a tradition that the day before the annual London University School Leaving Exam began, all the candidates would spend a day on the river.

We turned up at school as usual on our bikes (we were nearly all cyclists in those days) but bringing with us packed lunches. We then cycled en masse to Flatford. Here we clambered into skiffs hired by the school and spent an enjoyable day rowing (and some of us swimming) on the Stour between Flatford and Dedham. Those, of course, were the days before everybody became obsessed with ‘health and safety’!

By about 4.00 p.m. we all made our way up river to Dedham, where a lavish tea was provided for us in one of the village’s restaurants. The tea, like the hire of the skiffs, was paid for by the school. Replete, we rowed back to Flatford for the long cycle ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with aching backs and limbs and blistered hands but, on the whole, I think that our results justified the headmaster’s obsession.

I have been back to Flatford many times since and on one occasion hired a skiff and rowed some visiting American friends from Flatford to Dedham and back again. It still retains the charm that it exerted in the mid-1930s. Age however has brought a greater appreciation of Flatford and the River Stour as the inspiration and subject of Constable’s best-known works, together with the historical interest of Dedham’s cathedral-like parish church. Just opposite is Sherman House, the ancestral home of the Federal General who marched his victorious army through Georgia ‘from Atlanta to the sea’, during the American Civil War

Left -Sherman House, Dedham. Above Dedham Parish Church

It has been forecast that, thanks to the economic down-turn an extra £5 million will this year be spent on holidays in England. I certainly hope that our Essex Holiday Coast gets its fair share of it. The fact that we are little more than half an hour’s drive from the lovely Stour Valley, with its natural beauty and its artistic and historical associations, should attract the many discriminating visitors who want a little more from their holiday than sun, sea and sand.

*‘Constable Portraits; The Painter and his Circle’, National Portrait Gallery until 14 June.
** First tour begins at 10.30 a.m., cost £5 per person. For details phone 01206 298260

MPs’ Expenses

I have found the unfolding revelations about MPs’ expenses depressing rather than (or perhaps as well as) outrageous. I don’t find the continual excuse and justification that not a thing has been done that is against the rules, in the least reassuring. Yes, of course the rules need a thorough overhaul but somehow in my innocence I had imagined that MPs weren’t in the business for their personal profit but to serve their fellow men and women; ‘to make a difference’ as they say these days.

Surely that doesn’t include making a close study of the rule book to find out exactly how much money you can extract from the public purse in ‘expenses’ without risking expulsion from Parliament or having to ‘assist the Police with their enquiries’. Our parliamentary representatives continually refer to each other as ‘honourable members’. I would have thought that it was thoroughly dishonourable, even if not illegal, to claim for expenses that were unjustifiable or clearly need not have been incurred.

Could it be because our representatives are no longer conviction politicians with a cause that they find themselves compelled to promote at whatever personal cost? Nowadays are they simply men and women who have chosen politics as a career? Many would find it a very attractive one and it is one for which there is never a shortage of applicants. MPs enjoy a generous salary and (at the moment anyway) almost unlimited expenses, together with a certain local and possibly even national and international celebrity. Provided that they keep on the right side of the Party whips they can expect occasional luxurious ‘fact finding’ trips abroad at the national expense plus, if they can manage to get re-elected often enough, a very comfortable pension, and possibly a knighthood or a life peerage, at the end

I have, in the past, been highly suspicious of burning-eyed, honey-tongued (or vitriol tongued!) zealots, ‘who will not cease from mental fight, nor will their swords sleep in their hands’ till they have built their own particular version of New Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’. Experience suggests that they are every bit as likely to lead us to disaster. I have to say though that I can’t imagine Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Tony Benn or Eric Skinner considering, even for one moment, the possibility of ‘fiddling their expenses’.