Fourscore years and ten?
According to Psalm 90 ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow’. During my childhood and youth that seemed pretty reasonable to me. The years stretched far ahead of me – seventy (threescore years and ten) was almost unbelievably distant. I could well imagine that those who made it to eighty (fourscore years) would be so weary and infirm that they would wish that they hadn’t.
Prior to World War II I had never personally known anyone who had reached that age. I do remember my mother pointing out a particularly feeble member of the church we attended and saying, in accents of wonder ‘He’s nearly eighty you know!’
My father died of a coronary thrombosis in 1939, at the age of 57. That was young, though not so young as to cause particular surprise in those days. My mother, born in 1888, made it to within a fortnight of her ninetieth birthday.
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| The Hall family in 1922 |
It startles me to realize that I have already done better (if that’s the word) than that. I was born on 18th May 1921. So, if I post this blog as I intend, on Monday 16th May, it will be just a couple of days before my 90th birthday – when I shall be fourscore years and ten!
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| The Zittau Great Lenten Veil on display in the Museum Chush of the Holy Cross |
I really must try to make it, because my immediate family – sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren (only they’re no longer children!) are doing their best to make sure that it is a very special birthday. I am going back to Zittau, the small town in eastern Germany where, as a PoW, I spent the final eighteen months of World War II, to celebrate my 90th anniversary with my family and my German friends. It will be the fourth time that I have been to Zittau as a free man. Some members of my family have already been there with me but this time they will all have the opportunity of meeting my German friends and seeing Zittau’s unique Great Lenten Veil with its 90 pictures from the Bible, 45 from the Old Testament and 45 from the New. It is the town’s pride and joy, and it was my quite inadvertent and accidental part in its five and a half century history that first ensured my welcome on my return to that small German town on the borders of both Poland and the Czech Republic.
I hope to be able to tell blog readers all about this latest and surely final visit. I may not be able to do so next week, as I shall be staying in Zittau until Sunday May 22nd and will probably not return to Clacton in time to prepare and post a blog on the 23rd or 24th.
Looking back over the two decades that have elapsed since I passed the threescore years and ten mark I certainly can’t claim that, as the psalmist suggests, they have been nothing but ‘labour and sorrow’. Until I was seventy I had never used a computer. Previously I had used a manual typewriter for all my writing. Since then, I have discovered the joys (and the frustrations) of the internet. I have hundreds of photographs on display on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea organised by my older grandson. My younger grandson fixed me up first with a blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and then with my own website www.ernesthall.net. I have been posting ‘Tendring Topics….on line’ on both of these for the past three years.
My wife Heather and I both lived to see our two sons establish themselves in their careers and our three grandchildren grow up into fine young adults, all three of them graduating at university (we had considered ourselves privileged to have stayed on at school till we were sixteen while most of our contemporaries had been thrown on to the labour market at fourteen!)
It wasn’t all plain sailing. From about 2,002 Heather’s health began to decline and I took on more and more of the tasks about the house. Eventually she became almost totally disabled and for two years I was her sole carer. I didn’t leave her side except for essential shopping and so on, and only then if I had left her watching a tv programme or DVD that she would enjoy. Those last two years were by no means all doom and gloom. We were quietly happy together and, in some ways, it was the most satisfying and fulfilling time of my life. Her life came to an end almost five years ago, three months after we had celebrated our diamond (60th) wedding anniversary at a meeting of thanksgiving at our Quaker Meeting House. All our friends and all members of our extended family were present.
Heather - as many will remember her
Since Heather’s death my family and friends have helped me to fill my life. It has been during those years that my Flickr site, blogspot and website have been established. I have made three visits to Zittau, several to Brussels to see my younger grandson, and to Sheffield to see my granddaughter who is a social worker attached to the renal department of a large teaching hospital. With her, and my son and daughter-in-law, I have seen something of the Peak District. I have acquired an electric mobility scooter with which I am able to attend Quaker Meetings, services at St. James’s Anglican Church and a weekday service and coffee morning at the local United Reformed Church.
The interior of Clacton’s Quaker Meeting House. An important part of Heather’s and my life for over fifty years.
I have revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England as well as retaining my membership of the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) of which both Heather and I had been members since 1948. And – in a few days time - I hope to be celebrating my ninetieth birthday with my family and German friends.
Most people would, I suppose, consider that (for my age!) I continue to live a pretty full and active life. To myself though (especially when sleepless at two in the morning!) I am just filling in time, turning over, and enjoying, the colourful pages of the glossy magazines strewn on the table of God’s Waiting Room.
Sun, Sea and Sand – and 'The Case of the Missing Beach!'
The last really hot, dry summer that we had on the Essex Sunshine Coast was in 2006, five years ago. Since then, although we have had hot, sunny summer days, we have also had grey, chilly ones with strong winds and more rain than we expect. We haven’t had, as we had five years ago, day after day of hot, dry sunny weather.
Will 2011 prove to be as good as, even better perhaps, than 2006? We are still in the spring but the auguries are good. A cold, windy and often wet Easter had become almost traditional – and it really didn’t seem to matter whether it was a year in which Easter was ‘early’ or ‘late’; but not this year! It was warm and sunny throughout the Easter holiday where I was, up in the Peak District, and I’m told it was just the same back here on the sunshine coast. On my return to Clacton we had a few days of bitter northeast winds blowing in off the sea but now, as we approach mid-May we have gentle breezes and summer sunshine again. The solar panel on my roof is working overtime, supplying me with free hot water!
Everything seems to have conspired for our benefit. Always we have a plethora of public holidays in the spring when the weather on the southern East Anglian coast is rarely at its best. This year we had an extra one of those early spring holidays – and the weather was perfect for it! I have been to the sea front on several occasions recently and once onto the pier and on each occasion there seemed to be crowds of happy shoppers and visitors. I’d be surprised if Clacton's tills haven’t been ringing merrily!
A natural feature of our Sunshine Coast of which we have every reason to be proud is the quality of our beaches. Compare our miles of tide-washed golden sand with the shingle and pebbles of other east coast resorts like Felixstowe and Southwold, and such famous south coast resorts as Brighton and Eastbourne. No wonder William the Conqueror stumbled and fell when, in 1066, he leapt from his invading landing craft onto the pebbled beach of Pevensey Bay!
Nature has been generous to us and Tendring Council deserve credit for having done their bit to complement nature. Blue flags, prestigious standards of European excellence fly proudly over Clacton’s Martello Beach, Brightlingsea Beach and the Beach at Dovercourt Bay. Quality control awards from the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, denoting freedom from litter and a safe environment, have gone to beaches at Frinton, Walton and Harwich as well as to those that have been awarded a blue flag.
A sad exception is Holland-on-Sea, once as proud as any of its safe and sandy beaches but which quite suddenly finds that part of some of them has disappeared almost overnight. Mrs Read, a Clacton mother of two who exercises her dogs and whose children play on Holland Haven beach is reported as saying, ‘We were there at Easter and there was plenty of sand’. Now, she says that the beach is no longer there. So much sand has gone that steps leading down from the promenade would no longer reach the beach – if there were any! ‘You can’t get down them’, says Mrs Read, ‘but you wouldn’t want to anyway, because there’s no beach there any more……..it’s just rubble, estuary mud and bits of metal sticking out of the ground’.
In response the Council has closed two sections of beach – almost a third of a mile between Hazlemere Road Car Park and the Queensway toilets and about 300 ft at Holland Haven.
The Council blames the disappearing sand on heavy onshore winds over several days and says that it can only wait for the tides to deposit fresh sand. Council Leader Neil Stock says that, ‘This loss of beach has been caused by nature and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it’ which is not a thought that brings much consolation to beach hut owners. Mrs Read says, ‘A beach doesn’t just disappear without a reason. Beach hut owners pay the council hundreds of pounds, but having a beach hut, sort of implies that there should be a beach’.
‘Neither a borrower, nor a lender be…..’
This was the advice given by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet but it seems that it is only the second part of that advice that is the message to us from our government today. Increased tuition fees force debt on university students, and continuing record low interest rates plus rising inflation encourage borrowers and do nothing to hasten the clearance of their debts. Meanwhile those same low interest rates discourage savers and impoverish those who rely on their savings to augment their meagre incomes.
I suppose it couldn’t be all part of a cunning government plan to transfer the nation’s debt (incurred not by the last New Labour Government and the ‘public sector’ but by the cupidity and incompetence of the financial division of the private sector) from the government to us as individuals!
The imposing City Hall dominates a landscaped pedestrianised area containing the water feature and surrounded by attractive buildings. Nearby is ‘Sheffield’s Wheel’, Yorkshire’s answer to the London Eye. Not as enormous as the ‘Eye’ it is arguably better sited than the latter, in the administrative centre of Sheffield. We found it to be an object of grace and beauty, illuminated as it was in the twilight of the dying day.
