Week 35 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Family Friendly?

          I am sick of hearing top (and lower rank) politicians going on and on about supporting ‘the family’ and hoping thereby to get a few more votes at forthcoming elections. Politicians (of both main parties) carry the primary responsibility for the creation of a society that is thoroughly Family Unfriendly and unlikely to be anything else unless there is a revolutionary change in society’s outlook.

            I have probably written in this blog before (one of the characteristics of old age is a tendency to repeat oneself!) that I quite often feel like a time traveller, a ‘poor man’s Dr Who' perhaps.  I  am an early twentieth century man, born in 1921, who finds himself in the twenty-first century and (although I fully appreciate, and take every advantage of, the many benefits the present century offers)  still isn’t quite comfortable with some of the twenty-first century’s practices and attitudes.  This is never more so than when I contrast pre and post World War II attitudes towards marriage and bringing up children.

            The 1920s and ‘30s were not a poor-people-friendly time. My mum and dad were poor though that isn’t how they would have described themselves.  There were plenty poorer.  My dad was never unemployed and I was always adequately fed and clothed.  In fact, I was one of the privileged minority, who went to a secondary school and, unlike most of my contemporaries who were thrown onto the labour market at 14, I didn’t leave school till I was sixteen. Then, armed with my ‘matric’, I went straight to a ‘white collar job’.  It was a struggle though and my parents had to watch every penny.  They were proud of the fact that they never had to ‘ask for charity’ and never owed anyone anything.

            It was a family-friendly time though.  My dad went to work and earned enough, with his army pension just enough, to keep us in what I think the Prayer Book Catechism describes as, ‘that state of life into which it has pleased God to call us’.  My Mum stayed at home, kept the home clean and welcoming, cooked the meals and ‘made do and mended’ as all housewives were exhorted to do during World War II.  Before marriage she had been a cook in an Edwardian household and knew how to cook and how to pickle and preserve!    She was always at home with a welcoming smile and something on the table when my dad and I arrived home from work and school.  We were a small and a united family.

            In those days young men ‘courted’ their girl-friends and didn’t ‘ask for their hand in marriage’ (now there’s a couple of old-fashioned phrases you don’t hear nowadays!) until they were earning enough to support both of them.  Once married their roles were clear.  The husband was ‘the breadwinner’ and went out to work every day to earn sufficient to keep them both.  The young wife stayed at home, cooked the meals and – in due course – had children.  They were a family, and a great many of them were quite content with their lot.  My dad, who had been a Regimental Sergeant-Major in the army – and the senior non-commissioned officer in the small garrison town in which I was born was – I  think – disappointed with his lowly job as clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody in a local veterinary practice.  My mum had married my dad ‘for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health’ and was, I am pretty certain, content with her lot.  They were both very proud of me and hoped I would ‘better’ myself.  I suppose that I have, though I doubt very much if I’ve ever been any happier than they were.

            When I married in 1946, it never even occurred to either of us that my new wife – who had been secretary to the Managing Director of a large firm of printers – would continue to work.  I was the ‘bread winner’ and she was the ‘home maker.’  Throughout our sixty years of marriage I always managed, though it was sometimes a struggle, to ‘win enough bread’ to keep my wife and, in due course, our two sons in modest comfort though certainly never in luxury.  She was always at home, ready to listen to their stories of school and play, and prepared to give an experienced hand with their homework, when our sons came home from school. She was always ready, with a meal on the table, when I came home from work.  We lived and brought up our two sons in ‘family friendly’ times.

            I really think that ours was the last generation able to do so.  First of all came the idea that in order ‘to keep up with the Jones’s’ young wives should continue in work until the first baby arrived.  Then it became quite acceptable for a young wife to carry on working after children were born.  I think this dated from the time when – eager for custom – banks and building societies decided that they would loan money for home purchase on the basis of a multiple of the family’s total income, and not just the income of ‘the breadwinner’,. Proper arrangements were needed, of course, for child care.  This helped some working couples to ‘get their feet on the home ownership ladder’ but, since it increased the demand for home purchase without increasing the number of houses for sale, inevitably pushed up the price of houses. That was a trend which – with a pause during the period of recession – continues to this day.

The joy of motherhood.  My wife Heather, with our first-born son, in 1953.

         
 Imperceptibly  (I think it gathered momentum during the years of Thatcher rule  in the 1980s) it became not only acceptable – but expected – that young mothers should get back to work ‘to help create wealth’ as soon as possible after the birth of a baby.  It has become increasingly difficult for a family to survive on one income alone.  How can family life hope to flourish when parents both come home weary from a day’s work and see their children, if they’re at home when the parents return, only for a few hours in each evening?  This system, I believe, is responsible not only for the break-up of family life, but for gang culture, juvenile crime and anti-social behaviour, and teenage pregnancies.

            No, I’m not suggesting that we should return to the ways of the 1930s where women were regarded as inferior to men and virtually barred from some professions. I believe that women can excel in any job or profession that demands something more than brute force and blind obedience.  We will soon have women bishops.  One day I hope we’ll have a woman Archbishop of Canterbury! Women are uniquely child-bearers though and I believe that many, though by no means all, women do find home making and bringing up children a thoroughly satisfying and fulfilling career. They too are helping to make Britain a better country in which to live. This should be recognised and made financially possible.  Only policies that work toward this end can properly be described as ‘family friendly’.

The Shadow of a Doubt?

          A recent email from a blog reader says that the activities of IS (Islamic State terrorists) in Iraq must surely present problems to Quakers like myself who look for a non-violent solution to every difficult situation and believe that no-one is one hundred percent evil.

            I wouldn’t pretend that it doesn’t.  Central to my, admittedly sometimes shaky, Quaker faith is the conviction that we all, every man, woman and child in the world, rich and poor alike and whatever our race, colour or creed, have a divine spark (early Quakers called it the ‘inward light of Christ’) within us.  St. John refers to it in the first chapter of his gospel as ‘the true light’ that enlightens everyone who comes into the world.  It shines in the darkness of the world and the darkness cannot overwhelm it.  It is the instinct that urges us to compassion, friendship, generosity, and forgiveness, and away from hatred, violence, greed and vengeance.

            During my long life, in the army and as a civilian; as a prisoner of war and as a free man, I have become acquainted with folk of every religion and none, and of every nationality – Germans, Italians, Russians, Serbs, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis, black and white Africans and North and South Americans.  Not all of them I would particularly like to meet again – but neither did any of them persuade me that the Quaker conviction that every one of them had ‘that of God’ within them was false.

            I have only met members of IS on a tv screen and that was quite near enough. War is defiling.  Every nation at war, at some time or another, performs acts that are clearly, I can’t think of a better word, ‘sinful’.  We could, no doubt, all list the ‘crimes against humanity’ of the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese and Japanese – but how about the blanket bombing of German cities, full of civilians, towards the end of World War II by the British and Americans?  What about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima by the Americans with British approval and support – and, after seeing the devastation wrought by that atom bomb, dropping another such bomb on Nagasaki? Those who have committed these crimes against humanity know full well they have done so and either deny their guilt or try to justify it.  ‘Our blanket bombing of Germany and the two atom bombs on Japan hastened the war’s end and may have saved untold numbers of lives’.  They may have!

            Members of IS though are unique among war criminals.  They not only commit unspeakable atrocities but glory in having done so – posting pictures of themselves on the internet with the broken bodies and severed heads of their victims.  And they claim that their actions will earn them God's approval.. I can think of nothing more likely to provoke God's wrath! They are surely uniquely evil - and among them are believed to be some 500 young men born, brought up and educated in the UK!

            I like to think that the inward light of God does still smoulder deep within the hearts of these evil men – and can somehow be rekindled.  Meanwhile their activities must be halted, and their victims protected and helped back to normal life. I can't bring myself to criticise those who resort to  violent means to achieve this, but I have observed that such violent means rarely, if ever, achieve their objectives.  I applaud those who bring humanitarian aid to the victims and I give as generously as I can to those who do this work.  Otherwise, and at my age, all I can do is to pray.  And, who knows?  Perhaps that is the most effective thing I could do.

           

Week 47 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Taking a Sledgehammer (if not a Pile-driver!) to crack a nut!

   Last week, a headline of the local Daily Gazette read ‘Use too many black bags and you risk a visit from the recycling snoopers’.  

            In fact there’s no such risk just yet, but the Gazette reports that, ‘From early next year, waste collectors in Colchester will begin using a new hi-tech computer system to log how much waste is left out for them.  Householders repeatedly caught leaving out too much trash in black sacks will get a visit from council wardens to ‘educate’ them on recycling.  Those wardens will go through the household’s black sacks and explain which items could be recycled instead of going into landfill.

            ‘The hope is’, Matthew Young, Head of Waste Services, says, ‘that we educate people and, collectively, the amount of waste going to landfill is cut massively’.

            I applaud Colchester Council’s aims but I can’t help feeling that they could have achieved their objectives much more easily without all the hi-tech computer activities, without having to rummage through other people’s refuse, and without kindergarten style lessons to householders on what can and cannot be recycled.  All of that seems to me like using the latest third-millennium technology plus the techniques of a seedy ‘private eye’ to teach grandmothers how to suck eggs!

            I don’t suppose that the residents of Colchester Borough are markedly different from those of our own neighbouring Tendring District and, in particular, my own town of Clacton-on-Sea.  Driving, cycling or, in my case, mobility-scootering round Clacton’s residential streets on refuse and salvage collection day will reveal a number of households where the Council’s requirements are fulfilled to the letter.  On the boundary of the property will be a black sack containing non-recyclable land-fill waste and a smallish green plastic box with food waste for recycling. These are collected weekly.  There will also be either a larger green plastic box containing plastic bottles and metal food cans, or a red box containing cardboard and paper waste.  These are collected on alternate weeks. Each householder has been supplied with a chart showing which box is to be put out on each particular week.

            There will be a number of properties where there isn’t a red or a green box, either large or small, in sight.  There will though be up to as many as half a dozen filled black plastic bags put out for collection for landfill.  These are the homes of those who don’t co-operate with the council’s scheme, have never done so, and probably have no intention of ever doing so.  It doesn’t take hi-tech equipment to discover them and there really is no point in opening any of those back plastic bags and pointing out which items could have been put out for recycling.  The vast majority of non-co-operating householders know perfectly well what can and what cannot be recycled.  They simply won’t, or perhaps can’t, sort them out, put them in the appropriate box and take them to the boundary of their property on collection day.  It’s far simpler and easier just to put everything in black plastic bags. If the council supplies only one bag for each week, they can buy some more from the nearest supermarket.  They’re not expensive.

            An official should call on each one of those householders and find out why they are not co-operating with the council’s salvage collection scheme.  Some may have a perfectly valid reason.  Sorting out what is salvageable and what isn’t, putting it into the appropriate container and taking the correct filled containers to the property boundary each week will be beyond the capabilities of many elderly or frail people – and our Essex Sunshine Coast has a great number of these.  I am one of them!  By the time I have got the plastic sack and appropriate boxes ready for collection, I am exhausted and incapable of conveying them the few dozen yards to the end of my drive-way. A kind neighbour does so for me.  Not every one is so fortunate.

            Others may find that holding down a job, looking after a home and perhaps bringing up several children, leaves them with neither the time nor the energy to undertake an extra task.  Sorting out the refuse and salvage and taking it to the property boundary would, in their case, be the final straw that would break the camel’s back!  The Council may be able to help some of them by, for instance, arranging for the refuse to be collected from outside the back door instead of the front gate.

            It is those who could co-operate but choose not to on whom local councils should concentrate their efforts, first by persuasion and, if that fails, by rewarding those who co-operate and penalising the others.  Now that, despite talk about empowering local communities, local authorities have become little more than agents of central government, their ability either ‘to wield the stick or offer the carrot’ is probably extremely limited.  Nevertheless, that path – rather than by the hi-tech plus patronising educational efforts being attempted in Colchester – is the only one that can hope to bring the proportion of recyclables to that of land-fill to an acceptable level.

Another ‘Time Traveller’ finds himself in trouble!

          I sometimes feel that I am a kind of Time Traveller, a cheap ‘economy version’ of Dr. Who.  I am a mid-twentieth century man, with mid-twentieth century attitudes and a mid-twentieth century vocabulary, who finds himself in the twenty-first century and sometimes gets into trouble as a result.  As L.P. Hartley says in the first sentence of his novel The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’.

            It seems that I am not alone. Tendring Councillor Michael Talbot, the respected leader of the Independent Group on Tendring District Council (although I think several decades younger than me) appears to be a fellow time-traveller. He has got himself into serious trouble by using a phrase that was common enough in the time of my youth, and presumably in his, but is totally taboo in 2012

In a public meeting Mr Talbot used the phrase ‘the n……….in the woodpile’ and thus provoked shock and horror among his fellow councillors and some council officials.  He realized at once that what he had said was unacceptable and apologised to the Meeting, saying ‘It’s an old-fashioned term and I put it down to my age that I used it at all.  I understand that it has caused offence and apologise to all members of the Council for this slip on my part’.

The Daily Gazette explains that the offensive phrase was a figure of speech meaning, ‘a fact of importance that is not disclosed’.  It in fact a phrase that had its origins in the USA and has the wider meaning of an unexpected and usually unpleasant surprise concealed among otherwise harmless or beneficial material. It is similar in meaning to ‘the fly in the ointment’ or ‘the spanner in the works’. I can well understand that it is a phrase that would cause deep offence to black people, but in the 1920s and ‘30s many of us had never met or even seen a black person (I never had until I joined the army) so we used the phrase casually, totally unaware of its offensive and hurtful potential.

Following his immediate verbal apology Mr Talbot sent an email to his fellow-councillors apologising even more profusely for having used ‘what is a quite unacceptable expression regarded as being racist, in the conduct of a public meeting’.

It seems that these apologies were not really enough for Council Leader Neil Stock who had chaired the Meeting.  Calling for Mr Talbot to resign his leadership of the Independent Group he declared that the use of the phrase had left him ‘genuinely stunned’ and said that after the Meeting a Senior Council Officer had remarked that if Tendring had been a London Borough the use of the phrase ‘would not simply have been a matter for the conduct committee, it would have resulted in a full-scale police investigation’. If that is so then we certainly do need Commissioners to make sure that Police get their priorities right!   It seems that, as in my day, there are always a few officials eager to tell influential councillors what they think they would like to hear!

I suppose that Mr Stock’s professed shock and horror couldn’t have had anything to do with Mr Talbot’s earlier criticism of the oafish behaviour of the council’s finance supremo Councillor Peter Halliday whom Neil Stock is supporting as Council Leader when he leaves that post shortly?

‘In days of old, when knights were bold……

            The bad, bold barons of those days could – and did – get away with murder!   Things are different now but one local life-baron does seem to have got away very lightly with some pretty reprehensible activities.

            I have been strongly critical of Lord Hanningfield ever since I started to write Tendring Topics….on line, four years ago.  He was then political leader of the Essex County Council.  I thought that he was pompous, self-important, publicity seeking, always ready to accept graciously any praise accorded to the county council, while hurriedly passing on to someone else any criticism of any of its services, such as – for instance – its failing child protection service. He was always floating brilliant ground-breaking ideas that made headlines in the press but were either wildly expensive, ineffective or unwanted.

            There was the wonderful Essex Bank, for instance, that was going to offer quick and easy finance to Essex businesses.  It turned out to be less helpful than the ordinary commercial banks and was clearly unwanted.  There was the Essex County Council branch office in mainland China that was going to bring vast export orders to Essex firms.   Whatever happened to that, I wonder?  There was the ‘Essex jobs for Essex men and women’ campaign, urging potential employers to employ local staff.  That was followed by the Essex County Council, at Lord Hanningfield’s initiative, outsourcing its IT services to an international enterprise. Its HQ was not only not in Essex but not in the UK!  Members of The County Council’s existing IT staff lost their jobs. Then there was the conference he called of other highway authorities (Essex leads the way!) on combating the effects of hard winters.   The following winter Essex was the very first highway authority to run out of grit and salt!

            It was obvious to me too, that he had a taste for international travel at the tax-payers’ expense.  There was an event in Harwich, Massachusetts to which our Harwich Town Council sent representatives (at economy travel and accommodation rates!).   The County Council, quite unnecessarily, also sent a delegation, headed by Lord Hanningfield.  Its purpose was to encourage businesses in the USA to buy from Essex firms.   They did not travel by the cheapest means and use the most economical accommodation.  Did they bring back any orders?  I never heard of any.  He made similar journeys to China (for the Olympics!), Hong Kong, India, and the West Indies.  All of course were at our expense.

            All this time Lord Hanningfield was attending the House of Lords as a member, and it was in this capacity that Nemesis caught up with him!  In May, 2011 he was prosecuted and found guilty of fiddling his House of Lords expenses to the extent of £14,000 (it was subsequently discovered to be much more than that!) and was sentenced to nine months in gaol.   It was a light sentence and for reasons that have never been made clear, he served only a small part of it.   Shortly after discharge he was re-arrested on suspicion of fiddling his County Council expenses too and released under police bail.  Just last week we learned that no further action was to be taken by the police because of ‘lack of evidence’.  This did mean that all the evidence supplied by Essex County Council was returned to them.  They promptly published details of purchases made on Lord Hanningdale’s corporate credit card, and paid for by the county council, during the last five years of his Lordship’s nine year reign as Leader of the County Council.

            During those five years he spent £286,938 on that credit card – on flights round the world, on luxury hotels and on hospitality in the House of Lords and elsewhere. It was also revealed that the County Council employs three chauffeurs working up to 97 hours a week.   They were often employed to convey the peer to and from his home to the House of Lords!   There was, it appears, no firm policy on the proper use of the chauffeurs and it is difficult, if not impossible, to work out which travel expenses were allowable – and which were not.

            Lord Hanningfield was not the only guilty one.  Senior officers and fellow-councillors must certainly have known of his profligacy – and done nothing about it.  Others took advantage of his generous hospitality (at our expense!).  They must surely bear a share of the guilt.

            I’m not surprised that the present leader of the County Council now wants closure on the past and concentration on the present and future!

           

         

   

  

           

           

           

              

           

  

Week 42 2012

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Global Market

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well might the Dead, who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre to crime’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Time Traveller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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