5th April 2015 (Easter Day!)

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Voices of the People?

            I am interested in politics. That’s why they’re a recurring topic in this blog.  But I’m not really interested in politicians’ speeches, and in interviews with politicians.     They’re all too often a masterly demonstration of how to avoid giving a straight answer to a straight question; ‘What we should really be asking ourselves is…………………’ and so on! Then again what, at the time, seemed to be a firm promise turns out to have been no more than an ‘aspiration’.  I’m much more interested in what they do than in what they say!

            Even as recently as a week ago if someone had told me that for two whole hours I would listen to politicians arguing with each other on tv, I’d have thought they must have confused me with someone else.  Yet that’s precisely what happened during the evening of Maundy Thursday, 2^nd April.  A debate took place on ITV between seven prominent politicians, each the leader of a political party with candidates in the General Election on 7^th May.   There was David Cameron, Conservative; Ed Miliband, Labour: Nick Clegg, Liberal; Nigel Farage, UKIP; Natalie Bennett, Green Party; Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish National Party; and Leanne Wood, Welsh National Party.

            I started to watch when the debate began at 8.00 pm, telling myself that I could always turn it off or switch to another channel if it became really boring.  But it didn’t and I watched till the end at 10.00 p.m. Mind you I was sitting in a very comfortable armchair with a generous double-scotch (well watered down!) at hand. I really think that the ITV authorities who organised the event, and the presenter, who kept the participants in order, deserve to be congratulated.  It could have developed into disorganised pandemonium and threatened to do so on a couple of occasions.  However the presenter was polite but firm and order prevailed.

             I suspect that watchers heard what they wanted to hear from the debate.  The headlines of at least one newspaper reported that David Cameron had clearly triumphed, while an immediate post-debate opinion poll commissioned by another newspaper indicated victory for Ed Miliband.   Personally, I thought that Cameron and Miliband trotted out all the predictable arguments that we have heard from them before.  Nick Clegg remains confident that Lib.Dems. will help either Labour or Conservatives to form a government and will steer that government’s actions towards the ‘middle ground’.  He could, of course, be right – but I doubt it.  Nick Clegg also took pride in the fact that the coalition government had raised the threshold of liability for income tax thereby, so he claimed, lifting thousands of people ‘out of the tax system altogether’.  That is simply untrue.  It has raised them out of the ‘income tax’ system but they still pay the indirect taxes and customs duties like VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco that Conservatives much prefer.  It also perpetuates the myth that there is an under-class of non-taxpayers supported by tax-payers who have lifted themselves out of poverty by hard work and thrift.  I wonder how many of Britain’s thriving billionaires acquired their millions by their own ‘hard work and thrift’?   

            Nigel Farage was his usual obnoxious self, pouring scorn on the EU and suggesting that ‘Health Tourism’ is a serious problem and that a majority of folk diagnosed as HIV positive were immigrants.  Nick Clegg pointed out that not all foreigners in this country were malign.  Both he, and Nigel Farage, were married to ‘foreigners’!   Farage also claimed that all the other parties represented at the debate were the same, since they all supported EU membership. Only Ukip, he claimed, represented the will of the British people.  I continue to see in Nigel Farage’s progress parallels with the early political career of Adolf Hitler in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.  He too assured a disillusioned-with-politicians electorate that his Party (the NSDAP or Nazis) was ‘different’ – and so it was!   

            I was impressed with the three women representing the Green Party, the SNP and the Welsh Nationalists but am quite ready to concede that my judgement is largely founded on the fact that the policies they promoted are the ones that I believe are needed today.   The most impressive, confident and articulate was Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party.  She was the only debater who had the courage to refer to the UKs folly in its insistence on possession of nuclear weapons.  ‘The scarce resources of our country should be invested in the future of our children, not on new nuclear weapons’.  A comment on ‘I’ daily newspaper says that she gave an impressive performance and that ‘it is possible that some English voters watching might have been tempted to switch from Labour to SNP if the Party was standing outside Scotland’. I remarked in this blog a few weeks ago that Ms. Sturgeon was a worthy successor of Alex Salmond.  She certainly is! It is a pity that those three women party leaders with so much in common, didn’t get together to agree who was to say what at the debate!   Leanne Wood (Welsh Nationalist) and Natalie Bennett (Green Party) covered much the same ground as Nicola Sturgeon but less confidently and forcefully.  I’d have liked to have heard from Natalie Bennett rather more about the Green Party’s environmental policies – the importance of combating the effects of climate change world-wide; of finding and developing  clean and renewable sources of energy, and of urgently reducing our dependence on fossil fuels;  and, of course, of the utter folly of encouraging ‘fracking’.

            Voting in the General Election will be taking place the day before the 70^th anniversary of VE Day, the day on which in Europe World War II ended.   It comes as something of a shock to me to realize that you really have to be at least eightyish to remember anything at all about World War II, six years that were such an important part of my life..  On that fateful day in 1945 I was with a group of British prisoners of war being marched south-westward into Czechoslovakia, away from the inexorably approaching battle front.  Half-way through the morning our guards announced that they had heard on the radio that the war was over, and left us to our own devices.  We thereupon liberated ourselves – though with grateful thanks to the Soviet Red Army.  I walked through the front door of my home in Ipswich just ten days later – on 18^th May, which happened to be my 24^th birthday!

            I little thought on that day that seventy years later the world would be threatened by climate change; that Christians would be massacred in parts of Africa and the Middle East for no other reason than that they were Christian; that the Christian faith was in danger of being eradicated from the region that saw its birth; and that the world’s rulers believed that nuclear weapons, whose use could erase humanity, were needed to maintain a precarious world peace.  

Finally

Let's end this somewhat gloomy blog with a message of hope on an Easter Morning on which the daffodils in my garden announce that Spring is here.  Here is the traditional Easter salutation of the Universal Church of Christ and the response.

'Christ is risen - Alleluia!'    'He is risen indeed, Amen!'  

           

   

            

Week 18. 2011 3rd May 2011

Tendring Topics……..on line


An Easter Wedding

It is springtime, a season in which according to Tennyson ‘A young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’. This springtime phenomenon is by no means limited to young men. Nor are thoughts of love necessarily light!

On Saturday 23rd April I was present, and played a very minor role, in the official Civil Partnership Ceremony (in effect the same-sex wedding) of my only granddaughter Jo to her loving friend and companion Siobhan Donnelly. It was the first ceremony of its kind that I had ever attended and I found it to be solemn, love-filled and deeply satisfying.

The happy couple; Siobhan on the left, Granddaughter Jo on the right. I have loved my granddaughter since she was a little baby* and over the years I have greatly admired her courage in overcoming serious illness, her prowess on the football field, her capacity for study and hard work and her lively intelligence. She is the only member of our family who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc.! It was not though until I saw her in that white bridal gown, that I realized how truly beautiful she is!


There were about 100 guests at the ceremony that was conducted, with warmth, understanding and respect, by two mature and friendly women registrars. Both Siobhan and Jo had a great many loving friends and relatives. A number of Siobhan’s guests had come from the Irish Republic and one had travelled from Canada for the occasion. Jo’s guests included my elder grandson Chris who lives and works in Taiwan and had travelled halfway round the world for his cousin Jo’s ‘big day’, and my younger grandson Nick and his Belgian girlfriend Romy, both of whom work for the European Travel Commission in Brussels. They had travelled directly from an assignment in Budapest to the wedding venue (an imaginatively converted farmhouse in the Peak District near Macclesfield)

I was the oldest guest, probably by as many as twenty years! Siobhan’s mum and I had both been asked to read something appropriate during the course of the ceremony. I don’t find reading aloud from a script easy these days. Fortunately though I still have a good memory for things that I have read and that have impressed me years before – if not for the events of the previous few hours!

The 23rd was, of course, Shakespeare’s birthday and I enjoyed sharing with Jo, Siobhan and their guests his well-known sonnet; ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove………and so on. I am sure that readers of this blog will be familiar with it. I added that, many years earlier, when I had been a PoW in Germany we had had in our ‘barrack room’ a tear-off calendar with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for each day. One that I had remembered for nearly seventy years was by the German poet Goethe. ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’. In English ‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest happiness that this world offers’. In sixty years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had found that to be abundantly true. I sincerely hoped that Jo and Siobhan would find the same. My contribution seemed to be found acceptable.



At the Wedding Breakfast, Jo chats with her cousin (my elder grandson) Chris.

The ceremony was followed by a sumptuous ‘wedding breakfast’ and an evening of music and dancing that I was far too old to appreciate. I was glad when the opportunity arose for me to depart.

Two families – left to right: Siobhan’s mum, me, Siobhan’s dad, Jo and Siobhan, Jo’s dad and mum.

23rd April (St. George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday) has been a significant date in the recent history of my family. It was on that day in 1979 that Jo’s mum and dad, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, were married. In 1946, thirty-three years earlier, it had been the date on which I had been discharged from the Army after nearly seven years service in World War II – and just four days before Heather Gilbert, destined to become Jo’s Grandma, and I were married.

23rd April 2011 is another date that I, and every member of my family, will remember warmly for as long as we live. We all wish Jo and Siobhan every happiness.

*Postscript

Jo was the most beautiful baby that I have ever seen. Here she is as I first knew her, just five days old! Very shortly after that photo was taken she showed the first symptoms of a life threatening illness from which, thanks to God and to the professional skills of the staff at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, she completely recovered.

……and the Royal Wedding!

I am not so tied up with events within my own family to have failed to note that there has been a Royal Wedding! I haven’t had my eyes glued to the tv all day, but I did watch and thoroughly enjoyed the wedding service for Prince William and Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey. I love the sonorous words and phrases of the Anglican wedding liturgy. The two hymns, Charles Wesley’s, Love Divine, all loves excelling and Blake’s Jerusalem are among my favourites, the former bringing back memories of my own wedding, almost exactly 65 years ago.

I was also delighted to hear Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est   (where there is love and compassion, there also is God) used as an anthem. This – surprisingly perhaps – is often used (in Latin!) at a midweek United Reformed Church service that I regularly attend with a friend.

This was one of those occasions on I am doubly glad that I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England a few years ago. I am now a regular communicant as well as, for well over half a century, a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a regular attender at Clacton Quaker Meeting. I find that Anglican sacramental and liturgical worship and Quaker worship, based on a prayerful and expectant silence, complement each other perfectly. I would be very sorry to lose either of them.

Today (I am writing this during the evening of the wedding day) I enjoyed the joyful peal of the Abbey bells, the thunder of the organ, the fanfares of trumpets, the dress and demeanour of the bride and groom, the colourful uniforms and the carefully rehearsed ritual, all performed before the  high altar and beneath the ancient soaring arches of the Abbey – and the noisy enthusiasm of the waiting thousands outside the Abbey. All are part of a thousand years of English history and part of our still-evolving culture.

Many of the thoughts that I have published in this blog could, I suppose, be described as radical, even – by the uncharitable – as ‘loony leftie’. But I am not a Republican. I think that there is a great deal to be said for having a head of state who is not closely identified with any political party, who can claim to represent all the British people. I do not see how that can be achieved except by means of a constitutional hereditary monarchy.

I wish the newly created Duke and Duchess of Cambridge every happiness and very much hope that they are destined to breath new life and credibility into a British institution that, I think, we would be very unwise to declare redundant.

My VE Day!

Partly perhaps, because the TV channel Yesterday has been running programmes on World War II and its climax, there seems to be greater public interest in the anniversary of VE Day, when in 1945 World War II in Europe came to an end, than there has been in recent years. I hope to publish this blog on the web on Tuesday 3rd May. The 67th Anniversary of VE Day will be the following Sunday.

I remember that first VE Day very well indeed. Still a prisoner of war, I was one of a party of 30 ‘other rank’ British POWs who had been marched away from the battle front (and possible liberation by the Soviet Army) the day before. At about 11.00 am our guards told us that they had heard on the radio that the war was over. In our area SS troops (Hitler’s elite army corps) were fighting on – as the sound of nearby gunfire made evident! However they were not SS. They proposed to get rid of their rifles and try to make their way home. They suggested that we do the same.

Myself, aged 24, in 1945

Jim Palmer, an Ipswich milkman who had been with me since our capture at Tobruk, and I decided to stay together. The next day found us in a part of Czechoslovakia liberated and occupied by the Soviet Army. I had learned, from Soviet POWs and civilian slave workers, enough Russian to explain that we were British comrades on our way home to England. No one hindered us as we hitch-hiked and grabbed train rides though Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia to Prague, and then on to American occupied Pilsen, by plane to a British army base near Rheims, and finally home.

Heather Gilbert.  The 'Essex girl' who waited for me for four long years.

 VE Day was on 8th May. Just ten days later, on 18th May, I stepped through the front door of 31, Kensington Road, Ipswich. It was my 24th birthday and – after four years overseas, three of them as a POW – I was home again