Week 23.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Resign? Why not sack them?

I had thought that I was pretty angry about the way that our parliamentary representatives have been feathering their own nests at our expense. My anger though pales before that of my elder son Pete. He is particularly furious about the way in which MPs, once found out, have been able to get away with returning their ill-gotten gains and resigning when it best suits their own convenience…..and their bank balance! Here are extracts from an email that he sent to the Prime Minister on 30^th May.

I emailed you on 21^st May on the 10 Downing Street web site expressing my outrage at the manner in which Members of Parliament who were guilty of making false expenses claims, or have brought the House into disrepute, had been allowed to pay back money they should never have claimed, and resign in their own good time…..at the next election.

As a former Assistant Director of Housing at the London Borough of Hackney this is something which we would never have allowed, and I am sure the policy has not changed and is the same for every local authority in the country. I was involved in the dismissal of several members of staff and no-one was given the option of resigning, retiring or paying back money stolen. It was ensured that the guilty lost their pension rights and left without a favourable reference. Local authorities take adherence to standards in public service very seriously and I am appalled to find a different policy being adopted for Members of Parliament.

Your response, from Labour Party Headquarters was, I regret, a standard one showing that the main thrust of my email had been ignored. It sought to apologise that 'the system has let me down', share blame with other parties (references to 'the moat' scandal) and promote the policies and achievements of the Labour party. I have, in fact, always voted Labour and I do not need to be reminded of your achievements or persuaded of the benefits of your policies. This is for me, and millions of others an entirely separate, but very important issue of equality of treatment, integrity, and of upholding standards in public life, where I feel your government has so far failed lamentably.

I read in 'The Independent' today that 'Elliot Morley has become the 13^th expenses victim'. The report claims he said that stepping down was 'his decision'. I read further that he had claimed £18,000 mortgage payments for an incredible eighteen months after the mortgage had been repaid, that this was 'a genuine mistake' and it has since been repaid. 'The Independent' comments that as a result of continuing as an MP till the next election he will 'qualify for a pay-off equivalent to a year's salary'. Given that the next election may be a year away, he will in fact be about £120,000 better off than he would have been had he been summarily dismissed, as he most surely would have had he been a local government employee.

I fully appreciate that the employment situation of a Member of Parliament is unusual and probably lacking many normal provisions. However I see MPs being allowed or even encouraged simply to repay money. I hear no real anger from the Labour front benches about the illegal acts of some of their colleagues. I hear no talk of legal advice and of changing employment contracts, in order to achieve dismissal. I feel that blaming the problem on 'the system' as you did in your letter, a gross misjudgement on your part. It is not possible to have explicit rules to cover every scenario and you should not attempt to devise such rules for the future. The situation is not at all complex. It is absolutely clear that some, but not all, MPs have failed to behave with integrity. The system would be best served by ensuring that the strongest possible measures are taken against them, as an example to others and as a clear statement of your determination to enforce standards. I see no evidence that you are doing that.

The letter concludes with a request for confirmation or denial of the 'Independent's' statements that Mr Morley claimed money without cause for a period of eighteen months and that his defence was that this was a genuine mistake; that repayment of money by Mr Morley had been officially accepted, prior to any investigation as to whether fraud had been committed (thereby immeasurably weakening the legal position of the employer); that Mr Morley voluntarily decided not to stand at the next lection and that this position has also been accepted; that if Mr Morley continues as an MP till the next election he will be entitled to a severance payment of a year's salary; and that to date the only sanction that has been taken against Mr Morley is his suspension from the Labour Party.

It finally asks what contractual impediments currently exist to prevent normal disciplinary action against MPs who commit fraud or bring the House into disrepute, and what steps the Prime Minister is taking to ensure that those who have stolen from or dishonoured their employer can be dismissed without receiving any kind of leaving payment.

I think it most unlikely that Pete will receive a satisfying reply, but I am sure that he feels better for having sent that email! He is clearly takes after his dad in at least some respects!

Pete, in Switzerland, relaxing in 2007

Perhaps I may add that he wasn't and isn't just 'an Assistant Director of Housing' for Hackney. For many months, during an interregnum, he was the borough's Acting Director of Housing. Later when, after one of Hackney's political and administrative upheavals, he was made redundant, he founded his own Computer Software Consultancy specialising in problems of public administration. He is currently Founder and Managing Director of Hub Solutions Ltd. with bases in London and Glasgow, serving local authorities, police authorities and other public bodies throughout Great Britain. (see: www.hubsolutions.co.uk )

Voting Day – Tomorrow!

Well, it is 'tomorrow' if you are reading this blog on Wednesday 3^rd June, the day that the blog should have been posted on the internet (it was posted two days early in error!). Like many other no-longer-young or disabled people I voted by post, a week ago. I had something of a shock when I received my voting papers. On the voting paper for the County Council election there were just five candidates, all representing political parties with which I am at least familiar but for the European election there were no less than fifteen parties, of several of which I, and I have little doubt most other electors, had never heard.

On the County Council ballot paper we are asked to put our cross against the name of our preferred candidate though the political party that he or she represents is indicated. In the past there was an official pretence that we all voted for the individual rather than the party. As anyone who was involved in the conduct of elections in those days will remember, polling station peace was often disturbed by loud whispers of, 'Which one is the Conservative (or Labour) candidate?'

For the European election there is a system of proportional representation. We vote for the political party and seats are allocated in proportion to the votes cast for each party. The seats, if any, that each party gains are allocated to the party nominees whose names also appear on the ballot paper, in the order in which they are listed.

For the European election I cast my vote for the Green Party. They are a truly all-European Party whose leaders really believe that climatic change is the biggest threat facing humanity today and that it is a threat that demands drastic and immediate action. There are a number of 'Green' members of the European Parliament but none from Britain as yet. Proportional Representation offers the best possibility of putting that right.

For the County Council election I voted tactically. I have no confidence in the present Conservative Administration and little more in any New Labour Administration that might replace it. I would like to play a small part in keeping UKIP and the BNP out of the County Council Chamber and I don't see at present the least hope of a 'Green' County Council. The Lib. Dems. did oppose our involvement in Iraq, an illegal enterprise that proved to be a recruitment inducement for terrorists. The Lib.Dems. do support proportional representation and closer ties with Europe. Above all, as far as I am concerned, they are neither Conservative nor New Labour. So…….their candidate received my vote.

Finally – a much more savoury subject!

Do you remember, months ago now, my writing about Jodie Barnes (almost a neighbour of mine in Clacton's Dudley Road) the teenage archer who had vowed to her terminally ill father, that she would compete in the 2012 London Olympics? Perhaps you thought that this was just a flash in the pan, a pleasantly sentimental story about a local girl with hopes far beyond her capacity.

I am now able to record that Jodie has been making solid progress toward realizing her Olympic ambitions, and has justified every penny donated by generous sponsors to meet her travelling and other expenses. After a string of successes throughout the UK representing our local archery club, the Priory Bowmen, she has just recently returned in triumph to Clacton from her first sortie abroad. Representing Great Britain in an unofficial European Archery shoot in Malta she won top position in the UK team. Jodie shot on Saturday 24^th and Sunday 25^th April winning the highest score on both days and breaking an old Essex County record that had been unchallenged for thirty years! In this international contest she was competing with experienced archers from Malta, Italy, France, Spain and Germany. The bowmen of Agincourt would have been proud of her.

Jodie isn't, it must be said, the only promising young archer among the Priory Bowmen. The Priory team recently won, for the first time in many years, the prestigious Clophill junior indoor trophy match at Ampthill, Bedfordshire. Members of the team were Jodie, Dan Atkinson and not-yet-sixteen Alice Hall (not a relative of mine I'm afraid). Jodie again created a new county record at this event.

Jodie Barnes, The Gazette under 18 sportswoman of the year.

Modern archery, particularly for those aspiring to international competition, can be an expensive sport. Jodie is still seeking financial sponsors to support her progress towards those 2012 Olympics. Potential sponsors, and those seeking more information about the Priory Bowmen should get in touch with Mr R.S. Hogben, 349 St. John's Road, Clacton-on-Sea, CO16 8DS. Phone 012455 474652. Email: hogbrob@btinternet.com

Week 22.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

An undignified exit

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

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

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

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

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


Using your vote ‘responsibly’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eighty-eight is Great…….so far

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

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

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

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

Eye'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 21.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

A Snake to the Rescue?

Interest in alternative sources of energy began long before anybody thought seriously about global warming. The great smog of 1952/1953 gave us a salutary warning about the perils of ‘dirty fuels’. Smoke from tens of thousands of coal fires and furnaces belching from domestic and industrial chimneys in the London area, combined with unusual (but not unique) atmospheric conditions, to produce smog that enveloped the capital from December till March. It has been estimated that it caused or hastened the deaths of at least 10,000 people.

At that time my young wife Heather, heavily pregnant with our first son, had only one lung fully operational. The other had been surgically permanently collapsed to eradicate tuberculosis. Our home was in rural Suffolk. Just a few years earlier we had been living in furnished rooms in South London, barely half a mile from the then-fully-operational Battersea Power Station. Had we still been there it is likely that she and our unborn son would have been among the smog’s victims.

‘Broomside, The Crescent, Barham, near Ipswich, our first real home, where we lived from 1948 till 1955 and where our elder son Peter was born in 1953.

The Clean Air Act helped to solve that particular problem. Heating oil, another popular fuel, came principally from the unstable Middle East. Both it, and natural gas, were finite sources and would be used up eventually, perhaps within decades. It was only very gradually that the danger of global warming became apparent…..at first as a distant danger, taken seriously only by a few ‘cranks and scaremongers’. Today practically everybody recognises it as an imminent global catastrophe.

Some thought that nuclear energy would solve all our problems. The Windscale and Chernobyl disasters demonstrated its potential dangers, and even the very safest nuclear plant produces wastes that remain lethal not just for decades or centuries, but for millennia!

I am glad that wind and solar power are being increasingly exploited. Visiting Clacton’s seafront early in May it was good to note that three or four of the turbines of our off-shore wind farm have been completed. I look forward to many more windfarms, both offshore and on-shore. But the wind doesn’t always blow. Nor, as my recently installed solar panels will testify, does the sun always shine!

However, the ocean is never completely still and it is necessary only to stand on Clacton beach to appreciate the potential power of the waves. I have long felt that it is in harnessing their power, and that of the tides, that our salvation may come. Several means of doing this have been attempted but none have been wholly satisfactory.

An experimental system recently demonstrated on the BBC tv Breakfast programme seemed to me to have tremendous promise. Called ‘The Anaconda’ after the giant snake of that name, it consists of a number of rubber tubes 200 metres or more long and 7 metres in diameter. Filled with water these would be anchored, end-on to the direction of the waves, beneath the surface of the sea. Electricity would be created from the constantly moving undulation of ‘the snake’ and would be transmitted to the shore.

Clacton Pier (note the new helter-skelter!) and the sea on a calm day. Wave movement would be sufficient to generate electricity.

This surely has the simplicity of genius. If it can be made to work, what a tremendous energy advantage it would give Britain, where, so I once read, nowhere is more than fifty miles from salt water!

It could, so they said, be up and running within five years. A pity…. as Monday of this week (18th May) was my 88th birthday is it is highly unlikely that I shall ever see it in operation!

Keeping the Blue Flag flying high!

Until a few years ago, if we had a succession of warm and sunny summer days, I would cycle from my home in Clacton’s Dudley Road down to the Martello Beach (where Butlins Holiday Camp used to be) for a refreshing swim. There was a wide expanse of gently shelving sandy beach and no hidden snags or dangerous currents in the sea. I was very pleased in 2006 when the beach received the recognition that I felt it had long deserved, with the award of the prestigious European Blue Flag.

Very shortly afterwards it lost it; not because of any factor over which Tendring District Council had control but because the bacterial quality of the sea water failed to reach the very high standard required. I suspect that this was due to some shortcoming in the fairly recently completed Jaywick Sewage Treatment Plant, the responsibility of the Anglian Water Authority, possibly coupled with exceptionally heavy rainfall affecting water quality.

My cycling and swimming days are over I fear. Nevertheless I am delighted to learn that the Blue Flag has been restored. This year (a year in which we are hoping for more holiday visitors from other parts of Britain and from overseas) this international symbol of excellence will again be flying over the Martello beach.

It will also be flying, as it did last year, over beaches in Brightlingsea and Dovercourt Bay.

Quality Coast awards, which go to beaches not quite reaching the high standard demanded for the Blue Flag have been awarded to Clacton’s West Beach, Frinton Beach, Harwich Beach and Walton’s Albion and Naze Beaches.

Those Frinton residents who live ‘on the right side of the tracks’ have recently been rendered apoplectic by the replacement of their traditional level crossing gates by automatic remotely controlled barriers. One Connaught Avenue Estate Agent complained that he would no longer be able to describe desirable properties in Frinton’s leafy avenues as being ‘within the gates’. (How refreshing to encounter an estate agent with such a devotion to the exact truth!).

I think that if I were one of those Frintonians I’d be rather more concerned about the fact that the town’s wide expanses of tide-washed golden sand are officially considered to be inferior to those of common old Clacton, Brightlingsea and Dovercourt Bay!

Campervan Ban

The ban on campervans parking overnight on Clacton’s sea front recently attracted the interest of the national news media. Images on BBC tv’s Look East of parked vans and their occupants on Marine Parade brought back to me vivid images of my motor caravanning days. During the 1980s and early ‘90s my wife Heather and I spent many happy holidays with our Toyota Van, touring widely in mainland Europe as well as England’s south coast and west country.

We would never, under any circumstances, have parked overnight on any public highway. This was not out of consideration for local residents but simply because we enjoyed peace and tranquillity on our holidays. We wouldn’t have appreciated having to listen during the night to passing traffic and late-night revellers.

In fact, when holidaying in England we usually sought out well-appointed official camping sites (we were members of both the Camping Club and the Caravan Club). Sometimes though it could be difficult to find one suitable for just one or two nights’ stay in the area we wished to visit. In most mainland European countries there was no shortage of official camping sites……but there were also many more unpopulated areas in the wild where the touring camper or caravanner could make an unofficial overnight stay without encountering any problems. I have very happy memories of brief stays on a beach, just yards from the Adriatic, in pre-Civil War Yugoslavia, in a glade in Germany’s Black Forest and in an abandoned stone quarry in the Italian Alps.

Summer 1980 – Heather, with our motor-caravan in the shade of an olive tree just a few yards from the Adriatic shoreline in then-peaceful Yugoslavia

Nowadays I suppose, even if such ‘wild sites’ could be found in largely urbanised and overcrowded England, touring campers would hesitate to use them for fear of being the victims of assault and robbery during the night. A quarter of a century ago neither in England nor on the Continent, did we give that possibility a moment’s thought. Has human nature and regard for law and order really changed so radically in the past twenty-five years?

A Family Event

Unusual circumstances recently resulted in my being able to see grandsons Chris (living and working in Taiwan), and Nick (living and working in Brussels), and their girl-friends within a week of each other. Chris and Ariel flew to England on the sad mission of seeing and bidding farewell to the family pet dog Zoe. She is a well-loved twelve-year-old Boxer whose life is probably drawing to a close.

However it did mean that, with son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, they were able to pay a flying visit to Clacton. It was a joy for me to see them again.

.
Here I am demonstrating ‘how it works’

Ariel, who could speak virtually no English when I first met her nearly a year ago, is now a fairly confident speaker. She was, as you can see, fascinated by my ‘iron horse’ and took it for a brief canter!

How did I happen to see Nick again? I’ll tell you about that in next week’s blog!

Here is Ariel taking off for a brief trip along Clacton's Dudley Road.

Week 20.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Another Transformation

A fortnight ago I wrote in this blog about the way in which my friends Janet and Rodney Thomas had transformed a small corner of Jaywick into a horticultural work of art. Last week I commented on plans to convert parts of Manchester’s public parks into orchards and herb gardens, humming with honeybees.

Then, on the Saturday of the Mayday Bank Holiday weekend, with my younger son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, I visited the Beth Chatto Gardens, off the A133 Clacton to Colchester Road about a quarter of a mile on the Clacton side of Elmstead Market. Since 1960 (which seems just a short while ago to me!) what was an overgrown wasteland has been transformed into the heart of gardens that attract thousands of visitors every year. They have earned Beth Chatto, their creator, an OBE for services to horticulture, an honorary doctorate at Essex University and a number of prestigious horticultural awards.

This was the raw material; I quote from the official guide book; ‘In a shallow depression of some three or four acres there was a totally overgrown wilderness tucked between two farms. A few fine oaks and hollies rose above a tangle of willow, blackthorn and bramble, while buried in the centre was a spring-fed ditch. The surrounding land provided arid gravel facing south-west while the opposite north-east facing slope had a cool water-retaining silt shaded by a few ancient boundary oaks'.

Part of the Water Gardens, once the overgrown wilderness described above

This former wilderness now comprises the Water Gardens, with three lakes and surrounding trees and shrubs, situated in a sheltered valley reminiscent of the fictional Shangri La. Now there is also the Gravel Garden, never irrigated and rendered colourful with plants that can survive in near-desert conditions, a Scree Garden, a Reservoir Garden, an area of woodland, and a nursery and garden centre. Yes – and there’s a welcoming café there too!


















A close-up and a 'landscape' in the gardens

There's a roomy car park with ample grassy area for family picnics. Admission to the gardens costs £5. They are open to the public from 9 a.m. till 5 p.m. from March till October and from 9 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. from November till February. The Gardens have been closed on Sundays in the past but are currently open to the public on Sundays from 10a.m till 5p.m.

Beth Chatto’s gardens, often featuring in tv gardening programmes, are a horticultural treat that no Tendring resident and no visitor to the Essex holiday coast should miss.

Two forthcoming elections

Local elections (for parish, district and county councils) are usually held early in May of the year in which they are due. This year’s County Council elections are an exception. The European Parliamentary elections, also due, are to be held Europe-wide in June. It is obviously sensible to hold both elections on the same day, so on 4th June Essex voters will decide who is to represent them both at the Council Chamber in Chelmsford and at the European Parliament.

Westleigh House, Carnarvon Road, Clacton-on-Sea was once (when I was Housing Manager) the home of Clactons’s Housing Department. Now it is the Headquarters of Tendring District’s legal services, which include electoral registration and the conduct of elections.

You will only be able to vote if your name is included on the electoral register. If you have only recently moved to your present home, it may not be. Check at your local Council Offices. Tendring residents should call at Westleigh House, Carnarvon Road, Clacton, or phone the helpline 01255 686586 to check that they are registered. Citizens of other EU countries resident in Britain are also entitled to vote in these elections. I know that there are a number of Poles resident and working in the Clacton area. They too, and any other EU nationals living and working in the area should check that they are registered in the same way, at the earliest possible opportunity.

Some local residents may well be taking early holidays from the beginning of June. If because of that, or for any other reason, you expect to be unable to vote in person on 4th June you can apply for a postal vote by contacting the electoral registration office of your local district or borough council, in the Tendring area at Westleigh House, also as soon as possible!

Incidentally if, because of age, infirmity, business commitments, or any other reason, you might always find it difficult or impossible to get to the polling station on voting day, you can arrange permanently to vote by post. I did this myself three or four years ago and have found that I always receive my ballot papers in plenty of time to record and post off my vote.

Possibly, of course, you are disillusioned with the main political parties and don’t intend to vote at either of these elections. That is your privilege, but it is a privilege that if you exercise too often could end with your not being able to vote at all. It was out of disillusionment with existing parties that Hitler and his Nazis were able to seize power in Germany in the 1930s.

If there is no-one that you feel you can vote for, perhaps there will be candidates that you would like to vote against. I haven’t yet decided which political party I shall vote for on 4th June. However, as my politics are certainly not of the far right, and I believe that Britain’s best future lies within a politically and economically united Europe, I may decide to vote tactically in order to keep BNP and UKIP representatives out of both the Council Chamber in Chelmsford and the Parliament in Brussels.

I told you so!

It is very satisfying to find that a conviction that has been held for many years, for no other reason than the instinctive feeling that it is right, is held firmly by other people for strong, and easily understood, reasons.

I have long believed that a wide gap between the very richest and the very poorest people in a civilised Christian country is a thoroughly bad and shameful thing, and that a primary duty of every government with the well-being of the whole nation at heart should be to narrow that gap. I have expressed that belief many times in Tendring Topics both on Line and in Print, most recently in my comments on the Government’s Budget.

Perhaps I first picked up the idea as a little Anglican choirboy when, on every Sunday evening I sang the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s song of triumph and thanksgiving, at ‘Evensong’:

‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away’.

All of that sounded a very good idea to me. Later, when I read Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village I felt that he was expressing a similar idea in his couplet:

Ill fares the land, to hastening woes a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Now, in a book review in The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, I have discovered kindred spirits who have the same conviction as myself but, unlike me, have found solid, practical reasons for holding it.

The book is The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, published by Allen Lane at £20.00.

The reviewer, Richard Wilkinson, a member of central Manchester Quaker Meeting, writes that the authors have written a book that is lucid, approachable and wonderfully timely. It cries out for a coalition of supporters to persuade government to put its thesis into practice. He goes on to say:

The principal thesis is extraordinarily simple: as national income increases beyond the level of general sufficiency it ceases to increase human well-being. What does affect well-being in wealthier countries is the degree in which they are more or less equal. What is astonishing is the closeness of the fit.

The authors are able to demonstrate that the most unequal countries (generally the USA, the UK and Portugal) have a higher percentage of teenage births, worse life expectancy, higher incidence of drug misuse, mental health problems, obesity, more violence and much higher rates of imprisonment. To cap it all the most unequal countries have lower levels of trust in people and much less sense of community…………
……….The authors write with restraint and without much overt emotion. Perhaps that allows the revolutionary implications of their work to develop progressively and emerge with great power.

Lessons that are to be learned are, First, that the best thing governments in the UK can do to combat our many social ills is to diminish income inequality. Secondly, that the greater sense of community and trust in more equal societies makes them better fitted to facing up to the challenges of climate change and the move to steady-state economy.

This is a book that should surely be read by all politicians. It provides an explanation of the causes of the ‘broken society’ to which David Cameron has referred, and offers a means of healing that society, and cleansing it of its many ills.

It is a long time since I have spent £20 on a new book! I certainly intend to buy this one though. Blog readers can expect some more quotes from it in the future.

Week 19.09

Tendring Topics…..on Line

A Word about Photographs

It is only relatively recently that I have learned how to include illustrations in my weekly Tendring Topics….on Line. Since then (like a child with a new toy!) I have tried to include one or two at least, in every posting.

Mostly they are photos that I have taken myself (the two included this week for example) but at other times they are pictures that have been taken by a friend or relative. A friendly waitress took a recent family picture of a celebratory meal in a Brussels restaurant.

Mostly too, they are just included to illustrate a point that I have made in the typescript. Last week’s item about the reclamation of a piece of wasteland in Jaywick was an exception. In this case it was the pictures that were of greater importance and my words did no more than put them into context. It was therefore particularly remiss of me to fail to mention that they were taken not by me, but by my friend, Rodney Thomas. Rodney is the very competent amateur photographer who, with his wife Janet, had produced the transformation that was the subject of the article.

Rodney isn’t complaining. He says that everyone knows that the author of a blog hasn’t necessarily taken the pictures that illustrate it. As for me? I have to confess that I hadn’t given it a thought until the blog was copied, at my instigation, into our area Quaker Newsletter. There, to my consternation, I found that I was credited with the creation of those three colourful photographic illustrations! Mea culpa …my fault entirely!

Rodney and Janet insist that no apology is called for. However, I felt that I owed them, and blog readers, a word of explanation. In the future I’ll try to remember to give credit where credit is due.

Manchester in Blossom!

Manchester is the hometown of one of my daughters-in-law and of one of my best friends. I hope that neither of them will be offended if I say that it is not a city that is immediately associated with orchards fragrant with apple and cherry blossom and ‘the humming of innumerable bees’.

That though, may be about to change. My last week’s blog about the transformation of a noisome piece of waste land in Jaywick into a horticultural work of art, has inspired another of my friends to present me with a news cutting about a forthcoming similar transformation, though on a much larger scale, that is to take place in Manchester.

There the Council, prompted by the discovery that lots of little Mancunians had no idea where fruit and vegetables come from, is spending £200,000 on planting fruit and nut trees, as well as beds of herbs such as mint, parsley, thyme and sage, in all of its public parks. Together with such obvious trees as apples, pears and cherries, they intend to introduce less common fruits such as mulberries, damsons and greengages.

The trees will have signs giving their names and the right time of the year in which to harvest them.
Fruit trees blossoming in my back garden in Dudley Road, Clacton. On the left is an eating apple tree and on the right a Bramley cooking apple tree. Behind the Bramley, and obscured by it, is a damson tree. All three are very fruitful Behind them is a Japanese winter-flowering cherry and at the very back of the garden can just be seen two of four silver birches.

Also to be introduced at a number of sites are beehives for honeybees, each with a capacity of 80lbs of honey a year. If the experiment proves to be successful, hives will be provided in all parks, the council eventually producing its own honey and beeswax.

Mr Chaz Garghaly, in charge of Manchester’s Parks and Leisure Services, is reported as saying, ‘These parks are public areas and there is no reason why people shouldn’t help themselves to the produce grown’.

Manchester Council seems to me to have amazing (and very refreshing) trust in human nature. The Mancunians whom I know are charming people of unquestionable honesty and integrity. Surely though, not all of Manchester’s inhabitants are paragons. If a similar scheme were to be introduced in our area I would expect that the growing trees, shrubs and herbs would first have to face the onslaught of mindless vandals who delight in destroying or defacing anything that is of use or gives pleasure to other people. Those that escaped or survived the vandal attacks would very likely be stripped (probably prematurely) of their fruit by budding entrepreneurs intent on selling it and taking the first step towards becoming home-grown millionaires!

Is Manchester really devoid of vandals, and of unscrupulous future captains of industry and commerce? I do hope that the dreams of the City Fathers aren’t destined to turn into nightmares!

Mobile Phones

It is amazing how quickly mobile phones have become an essential part of everyday life. One of the regular hazards of negotiating a mobility scooter on Clacton’s pavements these days is dodging folk, sometimes pushing prams and with toddlers in tow, oblivious to any other user of the footpath as they stride along, deep in conversation on their ‘mobiles’.

For by far the greater part of my life mobile phones were the stuff of science fiction. The first one that I personally possessed (an eightieth birthday present!) was large and clumsy by today’s standards and had only very basic functions. Nowadays these phones will take and send photographs, send and receive emails, access the internet and probably do other exciting things of which I am not even aware. My own phone is now a compact Sony Ericsson that I use only very occasionally for phone conversations and much more frequently for text messages. How very convenient it is to be able to send a text to let someone you are visiting know your estimated time of arrival or the fact that you have been unexpectedly delayed! How useful too if you become separated from a companion when on a shopping or similar expedition, to be able to let them know your exact location!

I had recently found that the battery of my mobile phone needed recharging at ever-decreasing intervals. Simple, I thought, it needs a new battery. I’ll pop into the Clacton retail shop of my network provider (where I had bought the phone four or five years earlier) and get one. To my total astonishment I was told, ‘Sorry sir. We don’t stock batteries. You might be able to get one at the new Tesco store. Can I interest you in a new and updated model?’ No, they couldn’t. To get a new phone because the battery needed to be replaced seemed to me like getting a new car because the ashtray was full!

Nor was I inclined to go to Tesco. I didn’t fancy tackling that busy bypass on my mobility scooter, and the chance of finding the battery I needed there hardly seemed worth a taxi fare. In London over the Easter weekend, enquiries were made at a number of supermarkets and electronic retailers – no joy! I almost reconciled myself to the fact that I would have to buy a new phone.
The FunnyFone Shop, 21/23 West Avenue, Clacton-on-Sea (Tel. 01255 434664)

Then, riding my mobility scooter along Clacton’s West Avenue I noticed for the first time (I’m really not a very observant person!) a tiny shop with an odd name sandwiched between a large mobility appliance retailer and a tattoo establishment. It was the ‘FunnyFone Shop’ and, as well as selling mobile phones, it offered mobile phone repairs and accessories. I went inside, without much hope, to enquire. How could this little shop possibly help me when much larger and apparently better-stocked retailers had been unable (or unwilling) to? My enquiry met an immediate smiling reply; ‘Of course sir …….I’ll have to order it, but I should get it within two or three days. If you’ll give me your phone number I’ll let you know when it arrives’.

In fact, it arrived within twenty-four hours. My old battery was quickly replaced by the new one (another job I’d have probably ham-handedly bungled had I been left to do it myself!) and my mobile phone is as good as new. I know where I shall go in the future with mobile phone problems or when, eventually, I do decide that I need a new phone.

Swine ‘Flu…..A Pandemic?

The Mexican Swine ‘Flu epidemic which, thanks to air travel, has spread world-wide in a matter of days, succeeded in driving the continuing economic crisis and the Government’s problems, off the front pages of the newspapers, at least for day or two. From some of the press reports it might be imagined that its threat to humanity is comparable with the Medieval Black Death or with the ‘Flu Pandemic at the end of World War I that killed more people than had been the victims of four years of carnage on Europe’s battlefields and the world’s oceans.

Tabloid headlines about ‘the killer virus’ feed public anxiety. The fact is that it clearly is a highly infectious form of ‘flu but could, so far, hardly be described world-wide as a deadly one. By the end of April, although cases were being reported throughout Europe and as far afield as New Zealand, there had been only one recorded death outside Mexico, a very young child in the USA. What is more, we appear to have ample stocks of an anti-viral drug that has proved successful in combating the disease. In Europe at least it seems to be rather less of a threat to human life than the winter ‘flu with which we are all familiar.

If we find ourselves with ‘flu-like symptoms we have been advised not to go to our doctor’s surgery but to phone up and ask advice. That, I suspect, will already have resulted in the phone lines to medical centres and surgeries throughout the country being clogged with unnecessary calls, possibly blocking other more urgent ones. It is worth remembering that ‘flu is almost always distinguished from, for instance a feverish cold, by its sudden onset. You’re OK one minute and the next you’re shivery, with a blinding headache and aches and pains and pains in every limb. If the condition has gradually developed over several days then, whatever else it may be, it is unlikely to be ‘flu.

If there should be cases near your home, it would be wise to stay away from places where people are crowded together. ‘Flu is a droplet infection spread primarily by viruses in the expired breath of folk suffering from or carrying the infection. Younger people, unusually, are said to be particularly at risk. I have never, even in my younger days, been in a night club or attended ‘a rave’ but if, as they are always portrayed on tv, they are seething with excited young people, they are ideal venues for passing on ‘flu or indeed any other infection.

I had a great deal of sympathy with the British holidaymaker in Mexico who, interviewed on an almost deserted beach, said that she wasn’t catching an early plane home. She felt that she had a lot less chance of catching ‘flu where she was than on a plane crammed with fearful epidemic refugees.

week 18.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A different glimpse of Jaywick

Where do you suppose these photographs were taken? Somewhere among Frinton’s leafy avenues perhaps…….in one of the posher parts of Clacton, possibly near the seafront in the Gardens Area ……or perhaps in some rural commuter haven near Colchester

Not a bit of it. They were taken in less-than-posh Jaywick, described as one of England’s most deprived areas, better known for squalor and ugliness than for beauty, where even a work of art, commissioned for £40,000, turns out to be at best a joke and at worst an insult. Mind you, this plot hasn’t always looked as it does on these pictures. It was a piece of waste land, adjacent to the home of my friends Rodney and Janet Thomas of Jaywick’s Crossley Avenue, which encapsulated the popular view of Jaywick! It was a depository for broken down furniture and every kind of odorous and unsavoury rubbish! It was when their pet cat proudly brought home the bodies of two adult and six baby rats that Janet and Rodney decided to do something about it.
The result is as you can see……a work of horticultural art, not produced on commission, for a large cash prize, or even for honour and glory, but simply out of the goodness of their hearts to improve the environment in which they live. Janet, as a Quaker and Clerk of our Clacton Quaker Meeting, would possibly say that it was in response to the leading of the Inward Light that is the heritage of every man, woman and child in the world. Still unmistakeably Jaywick - but not Jaywick as it exists in the popular imagination

Nobody’s Darling!

On Budget Days I always remember my mother’s contention: Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he will not be disappointed. Mr Darling’s (what a very inappropriate name for a Chancellor!) Budget was just a little different. This time nobody was expecting any good news. The world financial crisis made sure of that. It was really just a case of who would suffer most and how soon?

I judge Budgets as good or bad by whether they narrow or broaden the gap between the wealthy and the poor. It follows that it has been many years since we had what I consider to be a ‘good’ one. For as long as New Labour honoured its absurd promise never to raise the upper band of income tax, and continued with the previous government’s policy of reducing direct taxation (income, capital gains and inheritance tax) and increasing indirect taxation such as VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco, there was no hope of the situation changing for the better.

My spirits were raised, very slightly, when I heard that the top rate of income tax was to be raised from a maximum of 40 percent, to 50 percent for incomes over £150 thousand a year. This seemed to be a move in the right direction. However its impact is reduced by the fact that it will not come into force until April of next year. The lawyers, accountants and financial advisers of the seriously rich therefore have plenty of time in which to work out clever schemes of tax avoidance. These are of course, quite different from the illegal tax evasion, sometimes practised by lesser folk.

It must be remembered too that that 50 percent isn’t half a millionaire’s income. It is only a half of that part of his or her income above £150 thousand a year. The new tax isn’t going to send anyone to the bread line or the soup kitchen!

I heard a financial ‘expert’ on tv claim that raising the income tax of the better off was simply removing the incentive that kept them working hard for us all. How strange that the wealthy have to be persuaded to work with cash incentives whereas the poor are compelled to work by threatening to cut their benefits!

Anyway, unlike the small minority affected by the new upper rate of income tax, motorists, smokers and drinkers won’t have a year’s grace to stock up with their supplies at the former lower rate. They’re going to have to make their contribution to national recovery right away.

Is offering £2,000 toward the cost of a new car to those prepared to have their old bangers crushed, a good idea? It is claimed to work in Germany but, as so often happens, our scheme is half-hearted by comparison with theirs and therefore that much less likely to succeed. In any case, brought up as I was in an environment in which very penny counted and we had no alternative but ‘to make do and mend’, I view with deep distrust the idea of deliberately scrapping an old car that may be perfectly serviceable for a shiny new one.

The staggering burden of national debt? The figures involved are so enormous as to be beyond my comprehension. In this blog I have consistently warned against incurring personal and family debt beyond the capacity to repay. I don’t believe, as a former prime minister claimed to, that managing the national finances is just the same as managing the household ones but on a larger scale. Neither can I believe though that a course of action that has proved to be disastrous to tens of thousands of individuals and households, can possibly be beneficial to a community or a nation.

Late News

The Post-Budget headlines of one national newspaper warned us that the new tax on the small minority of us whose taxable income exceeds £150,000 a year will drive many brilliant entrepreneurs from the City of London to other lands where they can accumulate wealth without having to contribute some of it to the communities in which they live and work.

Since these ‘economic refugees’ will undoubtedly include some of those whose greed and irresponsibility triggered the current economic situation I’m not quite sure whether that is a threat or a promise!

‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’

Thus, according to Shakespeare in his play Henry V, the eponymous hero ended the rallying speech in which he urged his possibly less-than-enthusiastic troops ‘once more into the breach’ at the siege of Harfleur. It is sad that in England, St. George, our patron saint, receives nothing like the regard that is accorded to his counterparts in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, particularly since he shares 23rd April with the birthday of William Shakespeare, our greatest national poet, whose work is revered world-wide. Imagine the celebration there would be in Glasgow if St. Andrew’s Day and Burns Night coincided!

23rd April 2009. St. George’s Red Cross Flag flies from the flagpole outside Clacton Town Hall and two miniature versions fly from the Tendring Helpline car parked opposite on the left.

A possible reason for English lack of enthusiasm for our patron saint is that we know so little for certain about him. Tradition suggests that he was a very appropriate patron for a multi-ethnic country like ours. He was probably of Greek origin, born in what is now Turkey. He was a legionary in the Imperial Roman Army and was martyred in Palestine early in the fourth century A.D. during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. His legendary slaying of a ferocious dragon and the rescue of a fair maiden from its clutches is said to have taken place in Libya. He had certainly never heard of England (there was no country of that name in the fourth century) though he may well have heard of Britain as a damp, windy and inhospitable island on the extreme edge of the Empire.

There must have been something very special about him though, since he is the patron saint of Portugal as well as of England and is also much revered in eastern Christendom, particularly in Greece and Russia. He was an early Christian martyr and has inspired thousands of Englishmen and women over the centuries. Even the mythical image of St. George as a knight in shining armour slaying the dragon has its value as a metaphor of the courageous soldier of Christ struggling against, and overcoming, the forces of evil.

A New Renal Unit for Clacton

I didn’t think that the former Eastern Electricity site in Clacton’s Kennedy Road was at all a good idea as the proposed site of an up-to-the-minute comprehensive Medical Centre replacing existing doctors’ surgeries in both Great Clacton and Holland-on-Sea. It may well though be eminently suitable for a badly needed haemodialysis unit to meet the needs of the many Tendring District patients with kidney problems who currently have to travel three times a week to Colchester for their dialysis treatment.

It is a development that will certainly interest my granddaughter, who has recently been appointed as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital.

As well as helping Clactonian renal sufferers, an eleven-station unit in Clacton with the capacity to treat up to sixty-six patients will help to take the pressure off the Colchester renal unit. Seventy percent of those treated at this twenty-station unit, opened in June 2006, come from the Tendring District, in or around Clacton.

If planning permission is granted, as it surely will be, and all goes according to plan (which is perhaps a little less certain!) the new unit, with a convenient ambulance drop-off point and ample parking, should be operational by next spring.

I have seen it suggested that it might make Clacton a more attractive holiday destination for kidney sufferers from elsewhere, offering ‘Sun, Sea, Sand and Dialysis’!

Perhaps; but without wishing to be too locally xenophobic, I hope that we’ll make sure that it meets local needs before offering its services nationwide.
,

Week 17.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

An Expensive Fence…..for an Expensive Fountain!

Those of us who had thought that Clacton’s town centre water feature would eventually prove to have been worthwhile had a nasty shock when it was revealed that it would be operating again this summer but with a £20,000 fence round it to keep the children out! During the very occasional warm and sunny days that we have had during which the feature was operating, the children have loved running through it and many of us adults have enjoyed watching them enjoying themselves!

I think that that water feature would make this area even more attractive.

It seems though that the children whose ‘health and safety’ is supposed to be threatened by the less-then-sterile water in the fountain are also claimed to be a major cause of its alleged pollution. Other polluting agents are said to be seagulls, pigeons and stray dogs. There’s not much that can be done about seagulls and pigeons, though I don’t think that either are very keen on being drenched. All dogs in a town centre should, in their own interest, be on a lead and under their owners’ control. Strays should be, and I think probably are, impounded.

What is there about our water feature that is so different from apparently identical ones in the centre of Sheffield and in many other British towns? Could it be that their councils had the foresight to provide them with adequate filtration and purification equipment or are they simply less obsessed with ‘health and safety’?

Sheffield’s water feature outside the Town Hall. Don’t tell me that kids never plunge through those fountains in the summer!

Has anyone thought that perhaps the sea should be fenced off in the interest of health and safety? That, after all is subject to pollution every summer from thousands of children and adults, not to mention from seagulls and fish!

Even in ‘sunny Clacton’ there are only a limited number of weeks during the year when the weather is sufficiently warm to tempt children or anyone else to plunge through that town centre water feature. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to drain off and change the water, say once a week or once a fortnight, during that period? A dilute bactericide added to the replacement water would surely keep it adequately free from harmful bacteria until the next change was due.

We’d get quite a few changes of water for that £20,000.

A Party Political Leaflet


Above is a leaflet from a prospective County Council election candidate for my part of Clacton. I hope that included in the ‘best education’ that he hopes our children will receive will be the time-honoured rule, ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’.

On the Pier

When my elder grandson Chris brought his Taiwanese girlfriend on a visit to England last year, one of the ‘thoroughly English’ things that she wanted to see was a seaside pier. Clacton Pier in early autumn, on a grey and rainy day with a brisk on-shore breeze was, I thought, thoroughly uninviting. She enjoyed herself though and, with Chris, sampled the dodgems and other rides that were in operation.

Ariel (her English name, the same as that of ‘the good fairy’ in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’) with me on Clacton Pier

The Pier is in new ownership and if she were to pay us a visit now I think that she would find it a lot more exciting. Just a week ago the new owners (Billy and Elliot Ball) installed a 500 ft. tall helter-skelter (formerly used in a Marks and Spencer advert) which can be seen from far away along the promenade. There hasn’t been one on the pier for at least twenty years and my abiding memory of a former helter-skelter is of it having been blown into the sea during a ferocious gale in July 1956!

Messrs Ball are introducing a new policy of having a changing programme of ‘guest rides’ which will give visitors something new to try out every time they come onto the pier. Currently there is a fifty-two-seater ‘wave swinger’ situated on the very edge of the pier and swinging users out over the sea. That sounds ‘white-knuckle’ enough for me but, according to Billy Ball, it is nothing compared with one that he is currently trying to book as its successor. It is proving very popular though and is expected to stay on the pier until well into May.

The new owners have also, so far, brought in some more fairground stalls and some smaller rides for children. They are also keeping the pier open later in the evenings.

I wish Billy and Elliot Ball every success but I think that their constantly changing programme of rides may be less popular with children than with their parents. The young can be very conservative. A child who has been looking forward for a week or more to another go on a ride that he has thoroughly enjoyed, is unlikely to be very pleased to find that it has been replaced by something else!

Letting ‘the train take the strain’!

It astonishes me how often I write something that I think on reflection was probably something of an exaggeration; only too find that it was, in fact, an understatement!

Coming back from London a few days ago on an uncrowded train that had departed from Liverpool Street dead on time and promised to arrive equally punctually at Clacton Station, I wondered if perhaps I had been guilty of hyperbole in referring in this blog a few weeks earlier to ‘Britain’s abysmal public transport system’.

My feeling of guilt disappeared completely when I read a letter from Tony Baxter of the Outrack Rail Users’ Association in a recent Clacton Gazette. I quote:

Buses will replace trains between Clacton, Walton and Colchester over the weekends of April 18 - 19th, April 25 – 26th and May 2nd – 4th. Furthermore on the first two of these weekends there will be no train services south of Colchester and buses will operate from Colchester to Billericay for train connections.

Over the May Day weekend, the line will be closed between Ilford and Liverpool Street, and buses will operate between Ingatestone and Liverpool Street and between Romford and Newbury Park Underground (on the Central Line).

Please note that further weekend engineering work is planned for subsequent weekends.

Mr Baxter’s letter also tells of even more closures of the whole section of line between Walton and Thorpe-le-Soken from 18th April until 4th May inclusive, with trains being replaced by buses.

Just imagine (or perhaps you’d be wiser not to!) the congestion on the roads leading to and from London that will be created on those spring weekends, as passengers who have paid for a rail journey have to travel by bus. The inevitable discomforts and delays will be particularly bitter for us pensioners who, under other circumstances, could have made those journeys free with our bus passes.

It makes those tv adverts about the delights of a day spent in London, courtesy of National Express ring a little hollow. Perhaps we should add ‘Don’t make a fuss, there’s always a bus’, to that advertising slogan about letting the train take the strain!