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’.

Week 15.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Easter!

I offer all readers of Tendring Topics……….on Line every good wish for Easter, which is surely one of the happiest of our public holidays. For one thing, it is the longest of the official breaks; for most people from Maundy Thursday evening to the Tuesday of Easter week. It may, particularly for children, lack the excitement of Christmas but at Easter (however fickle may be the weather!) with the days getting steadily longer and the early spring flowers blooming in the gardens, we know that spring and summer are on their way.

Whatever our faith, or lack of it, we can all enjoy nature’s rebirth in the spring in the spirit of Browning’s Home thoughts from abroad: ‘Oh to be in England, now that April’s there………..’

The splendid interior of St. James’ Church of England church in Clacton-on-Sea.

For many of us, of course, Easter has a much deeper significance. It is without question, the most important festival of the Christian year. First comes remembrance of the terrible events of that first Good Friday. It is difficult for us to imagine the degradation, pain and horror of a Roman first-century crucifixion; to be nailed naked to a cross, struggling for breath and with every inch of one’s body screaming in agony. Every minute of those the three hours on the cross must, for Jesus, have seemed to be an eternity of never-ending pain.

The interior of Clacton’s Quaker Meeting House .

It is important that all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, should have this annual reminder of mankind’s capability for cruelty to his fellow men and women, which continues to this day.

Then, of course, came the miracle of Easter Day, an event that changed Jesus’ disciples from a faint-hearted rabble into proselytising heroes, prepared to suffer martyrdom for their faith. I think that there are few more beautiful passages in the Bible than the account, in Chapter 20 of St. John’s Gospel of Mary Magdalene who, having been the first to discover the empty tomb, ‘early, while it was yet dark’ lingered there weeping after the others had departed. The risen Christ approached her with the words ‘Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?’ She, (blinded by tears) supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, ‘Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away’. Jesus said unto her, ‘Mary’. She turned herself, and saith unto him ‘Rabboni’, which is to say ‘Master’.

The interior of Christ Church United Reformed Church in Clacton-on-Sea

It was the very beginning of a faith by which, over the past two thousand years, and still today, tens of thousands have tried to live, and for which they have been prepared to die.

Note: The three churches illustrated above follow three very different Christian traditions but all three have been, and are, of great importance to me.

Will ‘the arts’ give new life to Jaywick?

If you were to be asked which places in Britain are famous as centres for lovers of the visual arts you might well think of St. Ives and the Cornish coast, of the Lake District, the mountains and valleys of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and, in our own area, the lovely Stour Valley made famous by Constable and Gainsborough.

Jaywick is not, I think, a name that would spring instantly to your mind. Yet many thousands of pounds have already been spent on arts projects in this Clacton suburb (declared to be one of the most deprived areas in England) and more is promised!

In 2005, the Jaywick's Martello Tower was converted into an arts gallery and centre, and attracts many visitors. In November last year a £40,000 grant from Colchester based Firstsite, an organisation for the promotion of works of art, led to the commissioning of ‘acclaimed artist’ Nathan Coley. He created an admittedly unforgettable, and mercifully temporary, work of art out of timber in Jaywick’s Brooklands Gardens. I suggested in a local newspaper that it resembled an oversized but uncompleted poultry shed. Many others made similarly uncomplimentary comments.

It had its admirers though. Ian Burrit, member of the Jaywick Forum said, ‘I was all for the Nathan Coley project. It actually caught the attention that Jaywick needs to highlight its problems’. Well, if you believe that all publicity is necessarily good publicity, I suppose that it did.

Anyway, there’s more money to come. Essex County Council has made a successful bid for funding from the Department of Culture and Media’s Sea Change project. This project will give £15 million to culture and the arts in coastal regions over the next two years.

Out of this, £30,000 will fund a feasibility study into an art project for Jaywick featuring the creation of a park publicising art and architecture. Katie Canning of the County Council is quoted as saying, ‘We want to create an innovative arts and environmental parkland which will be a unique destination and a major tourist attraction, drawing on the heritage of the coast, the tower, the sense of place in Jaywick, as well as the environmental aspects of the area’. She added that local people would work with ‘facilitating artists to plan an innovative and environmentally-friendly landscape design that deals directly with the issue of flood-plain and sea shore.’

That’s certainly an ambitious programme and one that appears to promise rather better value for money than Mr Coley’s masterpiece. Many of the residents of Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate remain unconvinced though. They feel that if anyone has £30,000 to spare it would be much more sensible to spend it on repairing the estate’s appalling road surfaces, and generally providing better services to local people.

So of course it would, but as the County Council received the funds solely for use on ‘cultural and arts projects’, they have to spend it on such projects. Jaywick is at least as worthy a recipient as anywhere else. Perhaps the ambitious scheme envisaged by the County Hall’s culture-vultures will come to fruition. Perhaps it will bring some much-needed prosperity to that run-down and neglected area.

Certainly those Jaywick residents who take a pride in their homes and gardens and would like to be able to take a pride in the community in which they live, deserve something better than they have at present.

Local Government reform……again!

News of the latest ‘reform’ of local government has inevitably been overshadowed by the international economic summit that was taking place in London at the same time. Nevertheless it has still managed to make at least the second pages of some national newspapers, as the greatest shake-up of local government since 1974. That, you will recall was the year that saw the abolition of the Harwich Borough Council, the Urban District Councils of Clacton-on-Sea, Brightlingsea, and Frinton and Walton, and the Tendring Rural District Council. All were replaced by the new Tendring District Council.

I hope that the fact that both that reform and the present one took effect from 1st April was simply due to the coincidence of the date with the beginning of the financial year – and had no other significance!

We in north-east Essex remain unaffected by the present upheaval but elsewhere in the country, forty district and county councils will disappear and will be replaced by just nine ‘unitary authorities’, responsible for all local government functions in their areas.

Although hailed as a new bold experiment in local administration there is, in fact, nothing new about it. Unitary authorities existed prior to 1974 and were called County Borough Councils, having the responsibilities and powers of both boroughs and county councils. Ipswich and Norwich were both County Borough Councils and it was in Ipswich’s public health department that I began my local government career in 1937.

Today’s unitary authorities are pale shadows of the ones that existed in the pre-war years. Ipswich Corporation, for instance, ran its own gas, electricity, water, sewerage and sewage treatment services and its own public transport service.. It had its own General Hospital, its own Maternity Home and its own Isolation Hospital for patients suffering from infectious diseases. It owned and ran its own large housing estates, its own magnificent parks and museums and its own primary, secondary and technical schools. It had its own social services, maternity and child welfare services, and its own school medical and dental services as well as all the services and responsibilities that local authorities have today. And at that time Ipswich had a population in the region of 100,000, rather less than that of the Tendring District today!

I think that one of the most serious mistakes of that first Labour Government that I am proud to have helped to elect in 1945, was in imagining that the only way in which essential services could be brought into public ownership (an aim that I whole-heartedly support) was to create enormous ‘nationalised industries’ encompassing local authority owned services as well as privately owned ones. I believe that they should have built on the success that many local authorities had enjoyed in owning and running those services and have put more and more of them into their care.

Yes, the results would have been uneven and there would have been bitter complaints about ‘postcode lotteries’. I believe though that these negative effects would have been outweighed by the healthy competition for better and more cost effective services between neighbouring local authorities, and we ‘consumers’ would have been able to express our satisfaction or otherwise with those services at the local elections. That was a privilege that we didn’t enjoy when they were run by giant nationalised organisations, nor do we enjoy it now that they are mostly run by private enterprise!

Week 13.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘The Year’s at the Spring….

…………and the day’s at the morn.
The lark’s on the wing, and the snail’s on the thorn.
Morning’s at seven, the hillside’s dew-pearled.
God’s in his Heaven; all’s right with the World’

So sang Pippa, in Browning’s poem ‘Pippa Passes’, on a very similar morning and at much the same time as that on which I am typing these words. It would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that all is right with today’s world, and I hope and believe that God isn’t confined to ‘his Heaven’ but is also present and active in his Creation.

Otherwise, I fully endorse Pippa’s sentiments. Even a world-weary old man like me feels a lift in his heart on such a morning, especially when looking out of the kitchen window I see the daffodils, golden in the early sunshine, blooming round the apple tree in my garden. Mind you the scene also brings back memories of the many, many similar spring mornings on which I looked out of that window at those same golden daffodils with Heather, my wife for sixty years, who is sadly no longer with me.

Wind-farm Progress

On recent visits to Clacton both my sons and daughters-in-law have driven along the sea front to see any signs of the developing wind-farm. There hasn’t really been a great deal to be seen. Some kind of structure was just visible and one or more craft near it were the only evidence that anything was taking place.

All that is due to change within the next few weeks. The Danish construction company’s heavy lift ship Titan 2 is getting ready for service at Harwich and will very shortly sail out to the Gunfleet Sands to erect the first turbine. Six of these have already arrived from Denmark and are to be erected on the foundations that have been prepared for them during the past six months.

The turbines will be commissioned in phases as they are erected and the electric cables between each turbine and the off-shore substation laid. It is expected that the first group will be fully operational before the end of the summer. The work of installation will continue until its completion some time next year. When the wind-farm is complete it is expected that it will generate 172 megawatts, enough electricity to meet the needs of 120,000 homes ….the equivalent of 90 percent of the homes in Colchester and the Tendring District.

Solar Heating Progress

It is good to see a ‘green’ project being pursued with vigour and, despite the vagaries of wind and weather, adhering to a timetable laid down many months ago.

I wish that I could feel quite the same of progress toward the installation of a solar powered water heating system for my bungalow, which should reduce markedly my own dependence upon gas for water heating (but see Late News on the Solar Front at the end of this item) It got off to a splendid start. Little more than a week after I had made my first tentative enquiry Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems’ surveyor had inspected my bungalow, made notes of my bungalow’s requirements and had confirmed my own belief that the solar heating installation would prove to be a pretty straight-forward job. Scarcely more than a week after that I had a phone call to inform me that the next day would see the fitting of the solar heating panels on my roof. This would be followed by a date on which the internal plumbing alterations and the connection of the solar heating system to the existing hot water supply system would take place.

Exactly as promised two very pleasant young men arrived with their van and did the necessary work on the roof of my bungalow quickly and efficiently. They fitted two solar panels, together with two much smaller panels one on each side of them. The purpose of these (photo-electric cells?) is to drive the pump that will circulate the antifreeze solution through the two solar panels and thence through my hot water system. The system will thus operate independently of the bungalow’s electricity supply.

The solar panels go up on my roof

The two young men told me that the remainder of the operation was usually carried out about a week after their visit. They advised me to phone Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems if I hadn’t heard from them by that time.

The roof job completed. To the left of the solar panels you can see the photo-electric cell operating the pump. My mobility scooter ('iron horse') complete with all-weather canopy, is in the foreground.

I didn’t hear from them and on 17th March I phoned as advised and asked when the job would be completed. The reply was unsettling. There was a component needed for my particular hot water system that they hadn’t yet been able to get hold of. They weren’t yet able to tell me when they’d be able to complete the job. Yes, they thought that it would be before Easter ….but couldn’t give a firm promise.

The claim that my system needed some unique component didn’t accord either with the assurance of the firm’s own surveyor that it would be a perfectly straightforward job, or with my own assessment of the situation.

It is a week later, and I have just phoned the firm again. This time I did at least learn which component it is that they're waiting for...........and it now makes sense. When the system is in operation water will be heated by the sun's radiation in a series of copper tubes within the glass-fronted solar panels on the roof. These will be connected to heat exchanging tubes within a heavily insulated copper cylinder in my roof space, thus heating the water in that cylinder.

The cold water supply to the hot water system will be connected to this cylinder instead of to the main storage cylinder below and a connecting pipe from the upper cylinder to the main one below will take its place. Thus all water flowing into the main storage cylinder will be pre-heated from the upper solar heated cylinder. In the winter it will supplement the boiler as a source of heat for hot water supply. In the summer it may well replace it altogether.

The missing component is, in fact, the special upper cylinder to be heated by the solar panels.

This is, of course, absolutely vital to the system and I am persuaded that the installers are doing their best to expedite its delivery. I shall just have to be patient. Sadly, I fear that those who know me best would not include patience among my most conspicuous characteristics!

Late News on the Solar Front!

I won't need to exercise my limited supply of patience after all. I wrote the above this morning (24th March) and at 3.45 p.m. this afternoon I received a phone call to say that the special cylinder had now arrived and that they would be calling on me tomorrow morning between 9.00 a.m. and 11.00 a.m., to complete the installation! I am more than pleased and hope that next week I'll be able to give you a glowing report of the system's installation and early functioning.

Golden (and diamond-studded!) Handshakes

When I referred a few weeks to Sir Fred Goodwin’s walking away from the ruins of the Royal Bank of Scotland, at the age of fifty, with a pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds a year I really didn’t think that that was the last we would hear of the matter. Surely, I thought, either he will see the reason for the public outrage and relinquish at least part of that enormous pension, or the government will find some way of relieving him of it.

Well, I was right about our not having heard the last of the matter but quite wrong about Sir Fred losing any part of his pension either compulsorily or voluntarily. The latest news that we have heard about this sorry affair is that in addition to his almost three quarters of a million a year pension (well over £1,500 a day!!), he has received a lump sum payment of £3 million!

It certainly pays to be a top person! I have little doubt that if the irresponsibility or incompetence of any junior or middle ranking employees of the RBS had cost the bank even a few thousand pounds, they wouldn’t have been encouraged, urged or even bullied into resigning or taking early retirement. They’d have been summarily sacked!

Town Hall Jargon

I was both interested and pleased to see that the Local Government Association is campaigning to ban the use of ‘Town Hall jargon’ by local government officials. I hate it myself and hope that I never used it when I was a local government official. Words and phrases guaranteed to set my teeth on edge were ‘monies’ (instead of money), ‘human resources’ (instead of employees), ‘interface’, ‘multidisciplinary’, ‘scenario’ and ‘proactive’.

I also disliked people being asked on official forms not for their ‘sex’ but their ‘gender’. These days sexually explicit words that a generation or two ago would have resulted in the user being barred from any reputable pub, are heard daily on tv. Can we at the same time possibly have reached a stage in which ‘sex’ in its proper sense, ‘that which differentiates males from females’, has become a rude three-letter word that mustn’t on any account be used on official forms?

Among the Local Government Association’s pet hates are ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘can do culture’, ‘performance network’ and ‘lowlights’. Like me, they also include ‘interface’ among their dislikes.
‘Lowlights’, I have to say, is a word that I had never previously encountered. As the opposite of ‘highlights’ I can see that it could be quite effective. I can imagine myself using it sometime. Of the other phrases I share the LGA’s feelings but, like many of my own dislikes, I don’t think of them as being exclusively Town Hall jargon. Apart from ‘interface’ I heard none of them during my local government career and think that council officials who use them are imitating the go-ahead young men of the private sector. I can imagine them being part of the small-talk in an advertising agency, an insurance office or among ambitious young salesmen.

The late Sir John Betjeman lampooned this ‘new-speak’ in his poem The Executive, which clearly wasn’t referring to a Council official:

You ask me what it is I do. Well actually, you know
I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
Essentially I integrate the current export drive
And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five

For vital off-the-record work (that’s talking transport-wise)
I’ve a scarlet Aston-Martin …and does she go? She flies!…….

……..and so on, in Sir John’s own special style.

A leading article in the Daily Gazette (recently the Coast Gazette and earlier the Evening Gazette) applauds the Local Government Association’s campaign. Dwellers in glass houses really should think twice though before throwing stones. It isn’t for nothing that sloppy, inaccurate and exaggerated writing is called journalese!

Post Office Local Banks?

‘What do Post Offices know about banking?’ asked a Radio 4 listener scornfully, at the suggestion that Post Offices might serve a useful role as local banks. ‘Quite a lot’, would have been my answer.

My current account has, for over half a century, been with the Co-op Bank. The nearest branch is in Colchester. However from my local (or any) Post Office I can with my debit card, draw up to £200 cash from my account at any time. I can also pay cheques into my account there and, when paying a visit to mainland Europe, can change my pounds sterling into Euros. Unspent Euros can be changed back again into pounds on my return.

Last year when I made such a trip I returned with forty Polish Zlotys and sixty Czech Krone in my wallet. My local post office couldn’t help but Clacton’s main post office in High Street instantly changed them back into pounds and pence.

The Post Office also manages savings accounts and insurances. Those, with the others I have mentioned, are I think something like three quarters of the services that ordinary people expect from a bank.

If some or all of the other services that we may seek in commercial banks were available from Post Offices, I would be very surprised if they failed to provide them at least as efficiently (and probably a lot less expensively!) than did those who have landed us in our current economic crisis.

‘A host of golden daffodils!’

These daffodils, possibly because they are on the north side of the church, are less advanced than those shown at the beginning of this blog. But this enormous host of ‘Easter Lilies’ will be a spectacular sight by the time the members of the congregation of St. James’ Church, Clacton gather for worship and thanksgiving on Easter morning! ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,’ they will surely rival those in the Lake District that delighted and inspired William Wordsworth some two hundred years ago.

Week 12.09

Tendring Topics……on Line

A Second Career

My elder grandson Chris whom, a month or two ago, I announced with some pride had been designated ‘Teacher of the Year’ in Taipei, Taiwan, had never intended to be a teacher. He was an art graduate and had studied his subject in Boston, USA, and in London. After graduation he had hoped to obtain a post as an editorial illustrator. These were few and far between and he decided to fill in time and to see a bit more of the world by teaching English, first in main-land China and subsequently in Taiwan. It was just a ‘fill-in’ job; he didn’t for a moment expect that he would enjoy doing it.

But he did. And he found that he was very good at it. Before leaving England he had had a Taiwanese girl friend and had learnt a little Mandarin. He built on that and within a few months was speaking it fluently and making progress with the incredibly difficult Chinese written language. He teaches both little children (four years old upwards) and mature students and finds both groups responsive and eager to learn. He likes living in Taiwan, has a pleasant apartment, a very attractive girlfriend, and satisfaction in his work. How many people in their late twenties can say as much?

He hasn’t forgotten his art though and uses his skills as a teaching aid. After the death of my wife Heather, nearly three years ago now, I gathered together short passages of verse and prose that she had written down in half a dozen notebooks throughout the greater part of her adult lifetime, and had them printed and published as Heather’s Treasure. I needed a picture to go on the first page and asked him if he would prepare for me a line drawing of his Grandma, using a photo of her in her mid-sixties as a reference. He was happy to do so……see below:
I was very pleased indeed with it and used it as planned. Remembering how pleased I had been, he gave me, as a surprise present the following Christmas, another drawing that he had made of his Grandma as the fifteen year old schoolgirl she had been when I first met her on 3rd September 1939.

Once again he had used an old photograph as a reference and I found the result emotionally overwhelming. His drawing brought memories flooding back to me in a way that the photograph could never have done. Both the original drawings (A4 size) are now framed and proudly on display.

Three or four months ago, during the course of an email correspondence, I asked him if he might possibly find the time to do a companion drawing of myself to accompany them. I suggested as a reference a photo that had been taken in Wenceslas Square, Prague on my visit there with his Dad and brother the previous year.

Knowing how busy Chris always is I then pushed the matter to the back of my mind. I was therefore both surprised and delighted when, a fortnight ago at the family get-together in Brussels, he handed me the finished drawing. I can’t say how pleased I am with it. I’m no art expert (you probably knew that already from my comments about ‘modern art’!) but I feel that, if anything, his techniques have improved over the three drawings and that the last one is even better than its predecessors.

Perhaps in Chris’ experience there is a lesson for other graduates who are finding it difficult to get the job they want in the current economic climate. Don’t be too proud, or too diffident, to take work in another field if you can get it. You’ll gain experience and other skills. You may find that you’re enjoying the ‘stand-in’ job……..and you may still get opportunities to use your university studies to advantage.

A ‘Mayflower’ Replica for Harwich?

Would a full-size (110ft long and 25ft tall) replica of ‘The Mayflower’, that transported ‘the Pilgrim Fathers’ to North America in the early 17th Century attract sufficient visitors to Harwich to justify its estimated cost of £4 million (give or take a few hundred thousand!) A consortium of local businessmen thinks that it would. They are actively pursuing funding for the project that would, it is estimated, take between eighteen months and three years to complete. It would, they believe, bring throngs of visitors to the town and be good both for trade and for tourism.

My first thoughts were almost equally enthusiastic. In my mind I pictured the cloned ‘Mayflower’ moored in Harwich Harbour, looking just as the original vessel did when she took those 17th century emigrants across the Atlantic. Visitors would be invited to inspect the cramped living and sleeping quarters of the passengers and crew, and imagine themselves on board during a mid-Atlantic storm!

Access could be through a well-planned ‘visitors’ centre’ on the quay (I’m sure that room could be found for it) which would have a colourful display relating to the voyage of the ‘Mayflower’ and its passengers, and information about the other places of historical and cultural interest in Harwich and in the Stour Valley. Visitors from the USA’s northern states, for example, would have their attention drawn to Dedham, with its close links with Dedham Mass. and its splendid Sherman House, ancestral home of the celebrated Civil War general. Tickets of admission to the Mayflower, souvenirs, memorabilia and literature would, of course, be available for sale.

Second thoughts though have introduced doubts into my mind. Would it, in fact, attract throngs of visitors? It would certainly be of great interest to citizens of the USA and to many folk from other parts of Britain. I doubt though if many visitors from mainland Europe, from China or Japan or, indeed, from Latin America, would be very interested. While on holiday on the Continent would you go out of your way to visit the replica of a ship that took early Spanish emigrants to Mexico, Portuguese settlers to Brazil or French colonists to Canada? I hardly think so.

I wonder what percentage of visitors to Harwich does come from the USA? The replica of the ‘Mayflower’ would certainly increase that percentage but I wonder if the increase would be sufficient to justify the production of a replica. Other magnets for Trans-Atlantic tourists are Stratford-on-Avon and Plymouth, the latter being more closely associated in the public mind with the Pilgrim Fathers than Harwich is. Sadly, from a London base, Harwich is in the opposite direction!

I still very much like the idea of a replica ‘Mayflower’ being permanently on display in Harwich and wish the project all success. I am just a little doubtful though as to whether or not it could prove to be a commercial success.

Charitable Giving

If I had responded positively to every appeal from thoroughly deserving charities that I have received during the past few months, either my largesse would have had to have been spread so thinly that it would have hardly covered the postage costs of sending me each appeal, or I would have been so impoverished that I would now need to send out begging letters myself!
No, these nine appeals, all from thoroughly deserving charities, didn't all arrive on my doormat at the same time. They were delivered over a period of ten days. There's no delivery on Sunday so that was an average of one appeal a day!

I am sure that I am not alone in being unable to respond to every appeal that comes through my post box. I do give regularly, and as generously as I can, to three or four national and local charities. I also have a ‘Quaker Peace and Service' collecting box into which I put a few coins from time to time. They add up to a worthwhile sum by the end of the year.

Charities have been hit even harder than the rest of us by the current economic depression and seem to have redoubled their appeals in recent weeks. Some of them employ tactics that antagonise and may, I think, in the long run do them more harm than good.

I don’t like the ones that try to hold our attention by including a somewhat spurious questionnaire with their appeal, together with a ball-point pen for its completion. Worse are those who include a small gift; a bracelet, a few greetings cards, address labels, or a shopping bag; sprats aimed at catching mackerel!

These gifts I either use or pass on to a friend, feeling a little guilty as I do so. Very occasionally, when it seems to be for a particularly worthy cause, their sprat does net a very small mackerel from me, even though I know that this will result in my receiving regular heart-rending appeals from that charity for evermore!

Then there are the Charities which tape two or three small coins to their letters of appeal, calculating that even the most Scrooge-like of us would feel guilty about pocketing a few coppers from an obviously hard-up charity. They’re quite right too. I couldn’t do it. However I don’t feel any guilt about putting those few coins into my Quaker Peace and Service collection box, telling myself as I do so, that it is just a case of one very worthy charity helping out another equally worthy one!

Week 11.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Yet another Supermarket




I would have thought that Clacton was pretty well served with Supermarkets. There is what is now Sainsbury’s in the High Street, Morrison’s in the Waterglade Business Park off Old Road and Lidl just a few hundred yards away from Morrison’s, extending between Old Road and St. Osyth Road. Further from the centre is the Co-op Fiveways Supermarket at the end of Oxford Road, and Somerfield’s in North Road, Great Clacton. Further out still is the new Tesco off the Little Clacton bypass and another Morrison’s on the edge of the village.

Now it seems likely that we shall have an Aldi Supermarket on what is currently the outdoor market site off the landward end of Pier Avenue. Aldi have purchased the site and will be submitting their plans to the council shortly. Reported remarks by influential councillors suggest that their application will be successful. In the current economic climate I have little doubt that any financial investment in the town is likely to be welcomed. Clacton's present out-door market, off Old Road

I am less surprised at the advent of another supermarket than at its proposed position. Is there really customer demand for another similar retailer within a few hundred yards of both Morrisons and Lidl? It doesn’t seem likely, but who can tell? No doubt ‘market forces’ (the economic equivalent of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest') will decide that for us. I don’t really share the fears of a correspondent to the Clacton Gazette that yet another town centre supermarket will strike a deathblow to small traders in the area. That deathblow has already been struck. The only independent traders left are those whose activities are outside the supermarkets’ range, and ‘convenience stores’ surviving on the custom of those unable or unwilling to make more than a very short journey to purchase their household needs.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago (to me at any rate!) that Clacton’s only supermarket was what now seems to have been that ridiculously small Tesco store in Station Road. It didn’t even have car-parking facilities!

Existing market traders seem resigned to losing their site to Aldi. Apparently sales have slumped in recent months and they are looking for another site. A possible solution both to that problem, and to the problem of a huge gap in Clacton’s town centre, was suggested by my former colleague Bob Young in the readers’ letters page of the Clacton Gazette of 26th February. He pointed out that at the same time that market traders were looking for a new venue for their market, Woolworths, in Clacton’s busiest holiday and shopping area, was looking for a new occupier. Why not use the Woolworth site as an indoor market?

The more that I think about it, the more attractive the idea becomes. It would be an ideal situation, within easy walking distance of the pier and the busiest part of the beach. It is on a bus route and there is access from both Pier Avenue and West Avenue. Many pedestrians would be inclined to use it as a short cut from one highway to the other and would have the opportunity to look at the stalls as they did so. Holiday makers and day trippers driven from the beach by a sudden (and we hope brief) shower, would find it a convenient spot to take shelter and, once again, would find the stalls of interest. It would be ‘something different’ in the centre of our town.

The only disadvantage that I can see about the idea is that the site wouldn’t be suitable for the car-boot sales that also currently take place on the market site. I think though that an alternative suitable site could be found for these and they are, in any case, of less importance than the market.


Essex jobs for Essex Men and Women?

A few weeks ago Lord Hanningfield, Essex County Council’s leader, was telling us about his determination that all County Council contracts should go to Essex firms. While I questioned the legality of this I could not do other than applaud his Lordship’s intentions.

He must surely have had a change of heart though. Essex County Council would now, it seems, be quite happy to award contracts for running virtually all its local government services (for a period of eight years and for up to £5.4 billion) not only to non-Essex firms but to non-British ones!

Lord Hanningfied is reported to have pursued this idea while chatting to representatives of the Mumbai based Tata Group when he visited India last year ‘on a trade mission’*. Tata was one of the companies short-listed for those council contracts but they have since been eliminated. Among others still on the list though is New York based IBM, London based Trillium, and Vertex from near Liverpool.



The winners of the contracts are to be announced at a full council meeting on April 21st; a pity the announcement can’t be brought forward a few weeks. 1st April might have been a more appropriate date!

UNISON (of which, thanks to the lifetime NALGO membership given me by my colleagues on retirement, I am a life member) is campaigning against this privatisation and is considering litigation to stop it. They point out the Audit Commission’s finding that between 60 and 70 percent of similar outsourcing processes end in failure. Remember what happened when an enormous American enterprise was entrusted with the relatively straightforward task of marking GCSE exam papers. Remember too the all-too-recent failure of the privately owned Banks and Financial Institutions in a field in which private enterprise might have been expected to have reigned supreme

I have just received my Council Tax Demand from Tendring District Council. The total annual charge for my modest bungalow is £1,103.67. I pay by direct debit and my monthly payments (for ten months of the year) will go up by about £2, not a shattering amount The £105.48 of this that goes to Tendring District Council, I pay willingly, as I do the much smaller amounts that go to the Essex Fire and Police Authorities.



I wish that I could feel equally confident about the prudent spending of the much larger sum of £829.50 of my money that is entrusted to the care of Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues at Chelmsford.

* in its commendable attempts to economise on the spending of our money has the County Council considered limiting its members' jaunts overseas?

Donkeys to return to Clacton’s seafront!

Donkey rides on the sands and motor-boat trips ‘round the bay. are as traditional to the English seaside holiday as Punch and Judy shows. We used to have all three in Clacton.

I think that motorboat trips from Clacton beach (remember the ‘Viking Saga’?) were discontinued sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s, and donkey rides on the greensward near Butlins ended in the early 1990s when Mrs Norah Cleghorn, owner of the donkeys retired after having provided a much-loved service for over 40 years.

I doubt if it will be long after the completion of our off-shore wind farm that some enterprising Clactonian will reintroduce motor boat trips ‘round the wind farm’ from one or other of Clacton’s beaches, or perhaps from the pier. As for donkey rides, it is hoped that these will be reinstated this coming season.

Mrs Jayne Johns of Rayleigh owns four very sociable donkeys. Tendring Council have given her a licence to operate rides from Martello Beach, again quite near the former site of Butlins Holiday Camp, and now one of Clacton-on-Sea’s most popular beaches. She hopes to bring her donkeys from Rayleigh every Sunday from 5th April (that’s the Sunday before Easter), and more often than that during the school holidays. The charge will be £2 a ride that I think most people will consider to be pretty reasonable.

I have a distinct memory of at least one of my two sons having a ride on one of Mrs Cleghorn’s donkeys in their 1950s’ infancy but I have searched in vain through my very considerable collection of old photographs for a pictorial record of the event. The best that I have been able to come up with is this picture of a little girl, about seven years old, astride not a donkey but a pony and on the sands, not of Clacton-on-Sea but of Dovercourt. The photo dates from 1930 or ’31. The little girl was Heather Gilbert of Manor Park, spending the summer holiday with her Dovercourt cousins. She was destined, some fifteen years later, to become Heather Hall!

Take a closer look at the snap-shot and you’ll see that seven year old Heather isn’t wearing any kind of protective headgear or clothing, or indeed anything at all, even on her feet, except for what was known in those long-ago days as ‘a bathing costume’. What is more, there is neither a safety harness nor a responsible adult holding the pony’s bridle in case it should suddenly buck, rear or bolt.

What carefree, unrestrained, and adventurous lives we children enjoyed in the 1920s and ‘30s! Perhaps in those days there were dreadful accidents that could have been avoided. Perhaps little children were molested, abducted and murdered. I can only say that I never heard of any.

I wish Mrs Johns every success with her venture and very much hope that today’s obsession with ‘Health and Safety’ won’t take all the fun out of donkey riding.

Week 10.09

Tendring Topics………….on Line

The Financial Crisis

Being a prophet of doom, as I have tended to be throughout the past year is a pretty thankless role. Either you’re discredited because your warnings of disaster have proved to be false alarms, or your prophecies have turned out to be all too true and you yourself may well be caught up in the disasters that you have foreseen.

As I had suggested was likely, 40,000 families, who had imagined that they were ‘home owners’,were dispossessed last year, and the number of unemployed is about 2 million and rising. This time too, the unemployed seem to include many people at lower and middle management level, much where I had been during my years of local government service, rather than largely unskilled manual workers. I haven’t yet been seriously affected but I take no pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. I can imagine all too well how awful it must be to be without a job. To lose a home as well, on which all your future hopes had been pinned and on which you had already spent every bit as much as (perhaps rather more than!) you could afford, must surely be the final straw!

I feel particularly sorry for some folk who hadn’t attempted to get on the home ownership ladder but had been content to rent their homes and had paid their rent regularly when it became due. To their dismay they find themselves having to get out because their landlords were not actually owners but tenants or investment-home-buyers themselves who had failed to keep up their payments! I hadn’t even thought of that happening.

Way back in 1956 Heather and I did manage to take our first step towards home ownership. With a guarantee from Clacton Urban District Council we succeeded in getting a ninety-five percent mortgage to buy our bungalow in Dudley Road. One hundred percent mortgages were unheard of in those days and raising that last five percent (plus the inevitable expenses of moving into a new unfurnished home!) was a real struggle. We had been married for ten years and, although we had no debts, neither had we any worthwhile savings. In the end we sold Heather’s engagement ring to make up the sum. It was a single diamond in a square setting that I had bought with a substantial chunk of my saved-up army pay when I returned from German captivity in 1945.

I find it less than inspiring when I hear spokesmen for the New Labour Government and for the Conservative Opposition being wise after the event and urging ‘responsible’ lending on the banks and the end of mortgages of one hundred percent or more. They were the very people who vied with each other to remove restrictions on borrowing and free capitalist entrepreneurs for the ‘courageous risk taking’ that would make themselves and the nation wealthy. Nobody mentioned that it was with our money, not their own, that they were taking those risks!

How can the crisis be ended?

Your answer to this question is probably as good as mine, and mine is almost certainly as good as that of the financial experts who are responsible for the present situation. I wasn’t particularly surprised to find that one of the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisers on dealing with the financial crisis had been among the top executives of HBOS. They, of course, have been revealed as among the most irresponsible of a group of financial institutions remarkable for their irresponsibility!

Measures taken by the government don’t seem to have had a great deal of effect so far. We are told that it may be months, or even a year or so, before they take effect. That long-term view is of little interest to those who lost their jobs last week and who, with their families, are facing eviction next week from what they had fondly imagined was their home.

Can the wheels of industry and commerce really be made to turn again only by lubricating them with public money…our money? If so, how should this lubricant be applied? Not, I think, by pouring it into the bottomless pit of the banks; nor is it by handing vast sums to the motor manufacturers to enable them to continue producing even more cars that no one wants to buy.

In the 1930s President Roosevelt began to pull the USA out of its slump with his ‘New Deal’; spending vast sums of money on badly needed public works. President Obama now seems to be following a very similar course. That may well be our way forward too. Here in Britain there is an obvious need for lots of affordable housing. Let’s build those houses and the infrastructure that is need for their support, not in the vain pursuit of the chimera of home ownership for all, but for letting at affordable rents by Local Authorities and Housing Associations.

Then again, we should direct large sums towards the production of clean and renewable energy, and research into new and improved ways of exploiting wind, wave, tidal and solar power. Bring the insulation and draught proofing of our homes up to the best North European standards. Improve our woeful public transport systems. All these measures would provide employment both directly and in ancillary industries and services.

Finally, the government must find some way of reducing the enormous gap in wealth that that exists between Britain’s poor and our super-rich. It is difficult to believe that the plight of the unemployed and the homeless is being taken seriously in a society in which professional footballers are bought and sold (don’t they find that a demeaning process?) for millions of pounds; where the head of a bank whose spectacular failure makes other banks’ losses look like mislaid petty cash, has retired at fifty on an annual pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds* (his victims, of course, struggle along on job seekers’ allowance!); and where leading members both of the government and of the opposition are prepared to be guests on the luxury yacht of a multi-billionaire. What actually happened while they were on that yacht is less important than the fact that they had accepted its owner’s lavish hospitality. Those who sup with the Devil (or with Mammon) need a very long spoon indeed. There is, as we are frequently being told, ‘no such thing as a free lunch’.

The suggested measures might not only bring the present economic depression to an end but could also lay the foundations of a truly ‘great’ Britain that could proudly lead a politically and economically united Europe along the road to prosperity. Yes, it would result in a national debt that future generations would have to pay….but it should at least ensure that they have a future in which to pay it!

*The government, realizing the extent of public anger at this particular incident is currently making desperate efforts to persuade the gentleman in question to forgo at least part of his enormous pension. They haven’t, so far, succeeded!

A welcome break!

Everyone needs an occasional break from the daily routine…. and I had a wonderful one last weekend, from 26th February to 1st March. My elder grandson Chris, living and working in Taiwan, had decided to spend a week with his younger brother Nick, living and working in Brussels!

Their Dad my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, invited me to accompany them on a weekend visit to Brussels so that, for a couple of days, we could all be together. Needless to say I was delighted to accept their invitation.

We took Zoe (their elderly boxer dog who now has her own ‘pet passport’) with us and crossed the Channel via the Tunnel’s shuttle service. This was another new experience for me. Cars are driven, nose to tail, onto the shuttle that consists of a series of open-ended freight wagons linked closely together to produce, in effect, a very long mobile garage. Drivers and passengers stay with their vehicles throughout the journey, which in our case was totally uneventful and lasted just half an hour. It is certainly the quickest and simplest way of taking a car to the Continent but, of course, there are no sea views or refreshing breezes. Nor, of course, is there any risk of being sea-sick.

Chris and Zoe the dog renew their friendship in Nick's Brussels' apartment

We spent the afternoon companionably in Nick’s Brussels apartment catching up with family news, and went out to a restaurant for an evening meal.

Dining out in Brussels. Clockwise, grandsons Nick and Chris,myself, Arlene and Pete

Brussels is a city with a multitude of restaurants and they seem always to be well filled. Eating out is taken very seriously indeed and is a leisurely activity about as far removed as you can get from sandwiches in front of the telly, or a ‘burger and fries’ at a MacDonalds! Me? I prefer something somewhere between the two extremes.

Here I am relaxing in my apartment in the Raddison Hotel

Pete, Arlene and I spent two nights at Brussels’ Raddison Hotel where I really discovered how the other half live! My luxurious suite (with comprehensively appointed en suite bathroom) had, among other amenities, a huge ‘built in’ tv set, the screen of which carried a message of personal welcome to me as I entered!

On the Saturday we drove into the Ardennes mountains, the starting point for the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ at the end of 1944 when the German army made its last desperate counter-offensive against the allies. We lunched in a picturesque village high in the mountains and then went on into Luxembourg. In the Grand Duchy’s capital we met and dined with a former colleague and business associate of Nick, and her boy-friend. Once again I was very favourably impressed with the absence of frontiers in today’s mainland Europe. We had no idea when we were in Belgium and when in Luxembourg though, in past times, the defence of those frontiers had cost untold numbers of young lives.

We were reminded of this on the following day when we visited the battlefield of Waterloo, just a few miles outside Brussels. This was an excursion that should be on the programme of everyone visiting Belgium’s capital. It can be enjoyed as much by those with a serious interest in history as by those who have been enthralled by the exploits of Richard (Rifleman to Colonel!) Sharpe on tv, or who have enjoyed Bernard Cornwell’s novels of the fictional hero on which the tv dramas were based!

A unique feature of this battlefield is that it has been strictly conserved by the Belgian government’s veto on any new development within the area. This means that visitors, travelling round the field of battle in a tourist bus are able to see it much as it was on that fateful day in late June 1815; the points from which Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to direct the course of the battle; the area where defensive ‘British squares’ withstood attack after attack of French cavalry, the 'sunken roads' in which the infantry awaited the order to attack, and the woods from which the Prussian army under Marshal Blucher advanced to engage the French flank late in the day. A commentary in English and French is accompanied by the realistic ‘noises off’ of bugle calls, the roar of artillery fire, the thunder of horses hooves and the shouts of their riders and – of course, the screams and moans of the wounded and dying.

Dozens of visitors of all nationalities throng the tourist centre. There were British, French, German and, of course, Belgians. There were film shows and presentations and dozens of books and souvenirs, all relating to the Battle of Waterloo. I bought a facsimile of the edition of ‘The Times’ newspaper which carried a report of ‘Our Glorious Victory over the tyrant Bonaparte!’

I found myself wondering what on earth was the purpose of all the carnage. Was Napoleon really such a cruel tyrant compared with some we have seen more recently? In any case, were the regimes of the nations allied against Napoleon any better? Russia in particular was a cruel autocracy of which a considerable proportion of the population were serfs (in effect slaves, bound to the estate on which they were born). In Britain, offenders, including young children, could be hanged for crimes that today would be considered trivial, and it was to be decades before there was even the pretence of democratic rule. Austria and Prussia were certainly no better. I was reminded of some lines from G.K.Chesterton’s poem The Rolling English Road:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte (and plenty of the Squire!)
And for to kill the Frenchmen I did not much aspire,
But I did bash their bayonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the rolling road an English drunkard made!

The visit reinforced my conviction that warfare, in the early nineteenth century as in the twentieth and the twenty-first, produced no winners.…….only some who lose more than others.

Week 9.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

Relative Risks

I was delighted to discover that Magnox Electric, the nuclear power organisation, is to pay a massive £400,000 in a fine and costs, for having allowed there to be a leak of radio-active waste from one of their sumps at the Bradwell Nuclear Power Plant over a period of fourteen years! The leakage was discovered only when a member of their staff, during a tea break, noticed that the level of liquid in the sump was just a little lower than it had been.

A spokesman for Magnox, interviewed on tv, made much of the fact that there had never been any risk to the public from this leakage. He clearly couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. If there has been no risk to the public this has obviously been simply due to good luck and was in no way to the credit of Magnox. The evidence produced in this case of negligence and disregard for public safety doesn’t give the public a great deal of confidence in the care that is taken when handling and storing highly dangerous radioactive materials.

Magnox should be getting used to this kind of thing. On 1st June 2001 they were fined £100,000 and ordered to pay £28,000 in costs after pleading guilty to six offences relating to unauthorised discharges of radioactive waste from their nuclear power stations at Bradwell and at Bridgewater in Devon.

Now we are told that there are proposals to reactivate the nuclear power stations at both Bradwell and Sizewell, just a few miles to the north of us on the Suffolk coast. I am astonished that a proposal to construct half a dozen totally innocuous wind turbines almost a mile from residential properties should have produced so much public outrage, and the construction of a potentially highly dangerous (remember Chernolbyl?) nuclear energy plant a few miles to the windward of the Essex holiday Coast and its many residents and visitors, so little.

I suppose that it is a case of out of sight (though across the Colne estuary from Jaywick, Bradwell Power Station is clearly in view) out of mind.

More Power to Local People

I am always pleased, if a little sceptical, when I hear politicians proposing to give ‘local communities’ more power and make them less dependent on instructions from Whitehall. It is, I have observed, the kind of promise that is much more often made by politicians in opposition than by those actually in power.

Perhaps this time the Conservative Party has a whole raft of proposals that will achieve this very desirable aim. I can’t say though that I am deeply impressed with the two proposals that have caught the attention of the news media.

One is that larger authorities at least should, like London, have directly elected mayors with considerable executive power. I don’t quite see how putting more power into the hands of one man can possibly be giving ‘more power to the community’ than giving it to an elected council representing every shade of political opinion in the area. It may well produce a more efficient authority, perhaps (since only one person will need to be persuaded) an authority more compliant with the will of the national government. It will certainly be less democratic though, just as the present administration in London is less democratic than the previous Greater London Council or the old London County Council.

If the government, or the opposition, really wants to put more power into the hands of local people they could try restoring to local authorities some of the powers that they once had and that have been taken away from them. One such measure might be to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation* and permit local councils (every bit as democratically elected as members of the House of Commons) to decide whether or not to sell their council houses to sitting tenants. ‘Right to buy’ with its false promise of ‘home ownership for all’, bears at least some responsibility for the feverish rush to get onto the property ladder that triggered the present economic crisis.

The other proposal that has received the attention of the media? That’s the idea that local residents who decide that their council tax demand is too high should be empowered to hold a referendum on the subject, the result of which would, presumably be binding on the local authority.

Goodness me! Don’t we all always think that the Council Tax (not to mention VAT, fuel, alcohol and tobacco duties and income tax) is too high? This idea would lead to a referendum at the beginning of every financial year and to municipal services reducing year by year until they disappeared altogether! Perhaps that is precisely what some national politicians would like.

Mind you, the idea of a referendum on unnecessary or undesirable public spending has its attractions. Could we perhaps have one on whether we really need to spend millions of pounds keeping nuclear powered and nuclear-armed submarines prowling the world’s oceans?

* I am glad to see that Bob Russell, Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP is currently calling for the repeal of ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and the restoration of local authorities’ right to build houses for letting. I had thought that I was a lone voice crying in a wilderness created by the Conservatives and perpetuated by New Labour.

Custodians of our Money.

I am not ashamed of the fact that since I first started writing Tendring Topics…in print in 1980, I have changed my mind radically on several major issues. Twenty-nine years ago I was a great believer in ‘first-past-the-post’ parliamentary and local elections. They ensured a strong government I thought. Now I’m an enthusiast for proportional representation. It may not produce such a strong government but it does produce one that is more representative of the electorate. Having lived through a couple of strong governments (of different political complexions!) I no longer believe that strength in a government is quite as desirable as I had once imagined?

Similarly, believing as I did then, that the Commonwealth could be welded into some kind of political and economic unit, I was a convinced Euro-sceptic. Now, I have no doubt at all that the United Kingdom’s best future is within a Europe that is closely united, both politically and economically.

Of one thing though I feel even more strongly convinced today than I did nearly three decades ago; that is that imprudent lending and borrowing is a path to both personal and public disaster. I have made this abundantly clear on many occasions in Tendring Topics both on line an in print. Today I have no doubt at all that it was irresponsible borrowing, only made possible by even more irresponsible lending, that has led to the current financial crisis.

The Clacton-on-Sea Branch of HBOS, in the town's Station Road. It was here that Heather and I obtained a mortgage in 1956 to purchase our bungalow in Dudley Road. Thanks to my spare-time freelance writing, it was paid off by 1971, only fifteen years later.

That being so, it came as something of a shock to find that HBOS (Halifax, Bank of Scotland) had been one of the most imprudent of those imprudent lenders. It was from what was then the Halifax Building Society that in 1956 Heather and I obtained a mortgage to purchase our home. I currently hold a few hundred shares in HBOS (my only stock-holding) and it is to an HBOS savings account that my savings ‘against a rainy day’ are entrusted. I therefore have made a tiny contribution to the stupid and irresponsible behaviour that precipitated the circumstances from which we are all suffering today.

HBOS is now, of course, part of the Lloyds TSB Group, the culmination of a series of mergers that make nonsense of the claims of politicians that we have a greater freedom of choice than ever before. Just a few years ago, those seeking a mortgage or a safe investment could choose between the rival claims of The Halifax Building Society, the Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and the Trustee Savings Bank; four then-thoroughly-dependable financial institutions. Now they are all just one, and one that is surviving only thanks to Government help!

Practising what I preach!

Another enthusiasm which I have held since the 1980s and to which I have returned again and again in Tendring Topics both in print and on line has been for clean and renewable sources of energy to reduce and ultimately replace our reliance on coal, oil and gas. I don’t think that nuclear energy, with its lethal and indestructible residues, provides a safe and satisfactory answer and have always felt that our salvation lies in wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

The only one of which most of us as individuals can conveniently take advantage is solar power. I have always been heartened when, as in Clacton’s Old Road for instance, I have spotted one or two houses with solar panels on their roofs. These catch the sun’s energy and use it to heat the domestic hot water supply, reducing an otherwise steadily increasing annual expense, and making a small contribution towards ‘saving the planet’. It is, I am convinced, only by millions of such small contributions, as well as the large ones that can only be made regionally or nationally, that our planet can be saved from the effects of global warming.

I have been pleased to see others have solar water heating installations in their homes ……but have never done anything about it myself. ‘It’s still experimental’, I said, and, ‘If I were only twenty years younger, but at my age I could never hope to make sufficient annual saving to repay the cost of installation’.

Now I am taking the plunge. A few decades ago solar was still experimental in this country, but now it has been tried, tested and found effective and economical. It was the financial crisis that really made me change my mind though. It’s true that, at 87, I’ll never recover, from reduced fuel bills, the cost of installation. However, that reduction will certainly amount to more than the pitiful amount that this cost would have currently earned me in interest, and it will, I hope, be adding to the value of my home.

Last Monday morning (16th February) I phoned SunMaster Solar Energy Systems Ltd of Braintree, an Essex firm (that would please Lord Hanningfield!) with branches in Norwich and Kent. That very day their representative called to see me, largely I think to make sure that I was a serious enquirer and not a time-waster. Today (19th February), their surveyor made a thorough inspection and prepared a specification. He confirmed my own opinion (I am, after all, author of several books on domestic plumbing, hot water supply and drainage) that it would be a perfectly straightforward job. Installation will take two days, and I can expect the job to be done to my complete satisfaction some time in the next three or four weeks.

My bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. The right hand slope of the roof faces almost due south. It is there, just below the chimney stacks, that the two solar panel are to be sited.

I have been very impressed with the speed and efficiency with which SunMaster dealt with my enquiry and the technical survey. I hope that that augurs well for the future. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves. I intend to record progress and results on this blog.