Week 16.10

Tendring Topics……on line

‘Lies, dam’ Lies……and Percentages!’

William Connor, who, under the pseudonym Cassandra, wrote a perceptive and hard-hitting column in the Daily Mirror in the years before, and immediately after World War II, once illustrated the deceptiveness of percentages with the story of an elderly hen, which in the course of one year produced just one egg. The following year she excelled herself, producing two eggs. In a time of food shortages her owner was therefore able to boast that by careful husbandry and efficient fowl management, he had been able to increase egg production by no less than one hundred percent over a period of twelve months.

Cassandra was making the point that even a large percentage of what is very small isn’t very much, while quite a small percentage of a large amount is likely to be rather a lot.

I thought of that highly productive hen when I read the headline about Chief Executives of Hospital Trusts getting a pay increase twice as great as those of hospital nurses. Most of us probably have only the vaguest idea of what either chief executives or nurses earn except that we know instinctively that the former are, by ordinary people’s standards, very well off and that the latter are not. We may have imagined that the Chief Executives were getting an extra £1,000 a year and the nurses only £500, and that would have seemed clearly unfair.

Perhaps it would have been – but it would have been a model of justice and equity compared with what had actually happened. The pay increases both these groups received were, in fact, percentage increases. The Chief Executives had received an increase of over 6 percent of their very large salaries and the nurses only about 3 percent of their much smaller ones. The actual salaries of both these groups vary widely but a Chief Executive of a Hospital Trust would be unlikely to be in receipt of a salary of less than £150,000 a year. Six percent of this sum is about £9,500, a pretty hefty pay rise for anyone in a time of financial stringency. A fully qualified nurse with several years experience and a measure of seniority might expect to earn about £20,000 a year. Three percent of this amounts to £600 – a great deal less than half the rise of the Chief Executives.

Compared with many of our fellow countrymen and women, nurses are by no means ‘poor’. Nor, by the standards of the super-rich, are Hospital Chief Executives particularly wealthy. However the ever-widening gap between the pay of the two groups, both working within the same public service, typifies the yawning gap between the rich and the poor in Britain today.

It is a gap that must be closed if we are to mend the ‘broken society’ of which David Cameron, possibly our future Prime Minister, warns us.

Those Manifestos

The three major political parties have published, and publicised, their manifestos – what they would hope to do if they should win the election.



The New Labour manifesto was as one might expect from a party that has been in power for over a decade; solemn, dependable – just a little boring. Its message seemed to be; ‘These are difficult times. A steady hand is needed at the wheel. We haven’t done too badly so far. You’d be wise to give us another term in office. Yes – we know you are disillusioned with politicians – but better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Let ‘middle England’ note that we’re leaving income tax alone. There’s nothing remotely revolutionary about us’.

It could have been a Conservative manifesto in the pre-Thatcher years. I think that if the electorate wants conservative policies, as may well be the case, they’ll most likely vote Conservative. Nothing that New Labour can do or say will ever win the hearts and minds of the leader writers of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and The Daily Telegraph. Why bother to try?

I was pleased to hear Gordon Brown’s admission that as the financial crisis was developing he should have been less kind to the banks. Regular readers (I feel sure that there are a few!) of this blog may recall that I remarked a few weeks ago that just as Ramsey Macdonald had been ‘dazzled by duchesses’, so the leaders of New Labour had been ‘blinded by billionaires’. It was nice to receive confirmation of this.

The Conservative manifesto was quite different, anything but ‘conservative’ in fact. I wonder if the two main parties have ever considered exchanging their names? ‘Power to the people!’ really is a strong message. It reminded me eerily of Lenin’s clarion call when in 1917 he arrived in St. Petersburg, home from exile; ‘All power to the workers and soldiers councils – the dictatorship of the working people!’ We all know where that led.

Communities, David Cameron said, should be allowed to run their own schools and their own local services. There should be local referendums on controversial issues. They should be able to veto Council Tax rises and sack their local MP if he wasn’t performing to their satisfaction. How, I wonder, would communities do any of these things? We don’t live in the small Greek city-states of classical times where everybody (who wasn’t a slave) could have his say and be listened to. Our communities consist of thousands, often tens of thousands, of people. At least a thousand parents have a direct personal interest in the average comprehensive secondary school.

Such ‘communities’ are rarely, if ever, unanimous in either their likes or dislikes. They would surely have to select representatives to organise and carry out their wishes. It can hardly have escaped the notice of the leaders of the Conservative Party that there is already machinery in place to do just that. It is called local government – a local government that, since World War II has been systematically robbed of its powers of independent action by successive Labour and Conservative Governments. Nowadays, local authorities have become little more than local agents for carrying out central government’s policies.

Restore to local authorities just some of the powers that they had between the wars and, knowing that their votes could actually make a difference, many more people would bother to vote in local elections. Local Councils would become truly representative of the local communities that they serve, and David Cameron’s call for ‘power to the people’ could be realized.

Just as a footnote it must be added that the power that the Conservatives propose to give to ‘the people’ does have its limits. They’d be able to veto Council Tax rises and hold referendums on local issues – but there’s no word of their having power to veto VAT rises, or rises in alcohol, tobacco or petrol duties, or to hold a referendum on whether or not we need Trident submarines.

The Liberal Democrat Manifesto is, as I had expected, the one that I find most attractive. It promises reform of the tax system to narrow the yawning gap between rich and poor (something that this blog has urged since its advent), an improved education system (The other two parties haven’t been very successful. Perhaps the Lib’Dems. could do better) and generally ‘clean up’ politics (that certainly needs doing). The Lib.Dems. claim to have costed their proposals most meticulously. I would certainly pay less income tax if their proposal to make the first £10,000 of income free of tax were to be put into effect, but I am not totally convinced that it would be a good idea.

The Famous Debate

Did you ‘help to make history’ by watching on tv the first-ever pre-election debate by the leaders of the three main parties, one of whom is, of course, still the Prime Minister?

It wasn’t as formal and boring as I had feared it might be. Nor did any of the participants give an embarrassingly poor performance. David Cameron and Gordon Brown interrupted each other once or twice. The former was a little flushed at one stage and the latter once looked distinctly cross. Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat, stayed aloof from the squabbling and I thought that he came out the best, an opinion that seems to be shared by most relatively neutral observers.

He, of course, had an advantage in that his Party, not having been in Government, couldn’t be blamed for any of the catastrophic blunders made by the other parties in the past few decades. Had they held office they might well have made their own mistakes (I never was a fan of Paddy Ashdown!) but, since they didn’t, they enjoy the benefit of the doubt.

I can’t forget that the Conservatives, when in power, severed the link between pensions and the average wage, and gave council tenants the right to buy their homes at a fraction of their true value. ‘Buying votes with other people’s money’, as a cynical colleague of mine described it. They didn’t, of course, even consider giving a similar right to private tenants. They wouldn’t have wished to offend private landlords, many of who were their generous supporters.

New Labour, in power for 13 years, had redressed neither of those wrongs – and had deceived Parliament into voting for the illegal invasion of Iraq!

I am increasingly sorry that Tendring’s Liberal Democrats were apparently unable to find a well-known local candidate to contest the Clacton seat. This time, he or she really would surely have been ‘in with a chance’!

Fed up with politics? Here’s something quite different.

Where do you suppose this photograph was taken? Somewhere in the Middle East? Or possibly in a mosque in one of the more multicultural parts of a big British city – London or Birmingham perhaps?

It is certainly in London, but it dates from the height of Victorian imperial power (long before the capital became multicultural) and is to be found in a palatial upper middle class home in Kensington.

It is, in fact, in Leighton House, the former home of the late Lord Frederic Leighton, whose life, from 1830 to 1896, spanned the greater part of Queen Victoria’s reign. The photograph was sent to me by Andy and Marilyn, my art-loving younger son and daughter-in-law, who visited Leighton House (now a museum) in connection with this interest.

Lord Frederic was himself a celebrated painter. He was once President of the Royal Academy, and was made first a knight, then a baronet and finally a baron by Queen Victoria. There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the decoration in the picture above and his own work. He was in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition and specialised in biblical and classical scenes, exhibiting special skill in his depiction of the human form. Two pictures of his that I have just seen thanks to Google, were familiar to me. They were Moses surveying the Promised Land and The Artist’s Honeymoon. I think that I may have seen reproductions of both as book illustrations but I had had no idea who had painted them.

I reckon that the Middle Eastern style of the decoration of part of his Lordship’s palatial home may have been intended to remind him of a happy holiday spent in Cairo or Damascus – the wealthy Victorian art connoisseur’s equivalent of the ‘holiday snaps’ of my generation, the ‘holiday video’ I suppose, of today.

Oh, one other piece of trivia about Lord Leighton, that might prove useful in a rather intellectual pub quiz, was that he occupied the most short-lived barony in British history. The day after Queen Victoria had made him Baron Leighton he died of a heart attack. He had no male heirs so the Barony died with him, having been in existence just twenty-four hours!

Thanks Andy and Marilyn, for giving us something else to think about!

Week 15.10

Tendring Topics……on Line

The General Election!

I suppose that we all look forward to the forthcoming General Election in different ways; some with eager anticipation, some with anxiety, some – I have little doubt – with boredom. I, for instance, have realized with very mixed feelings that it is likely to be the very last General Election in which I shall vote. Just twelve days after it takes place I shall celebrate my 89th birthday and will therefore enter my 90th year. No member of my family has, as far as I know, ever made it to 90 and I hardly expect to be the first to do so.

Since it is likely to be my last opportunity to influence the future of my fellow-countrymen and women, I had better get my comments, and my voting intentions, right! I certainly do intend to vote. I am now able to do so by post. It is unlikely therefore that any circumstances (other, of course, than a fatal accident) will prevent me.

Our sitting MP is Douglas Carswell, Conservative. At 38 he is the youngest of our five candidates and has the very slender majority of 920. However, since the last election, constituency boundary changes have removed Harwich from what used to be the ‘Harwich Constituency’. This is considered to have been to the Conservative advantage. According to the Daily Gazette, Ladbrokes, the bookmakers, give odds of 100 to 1 on his re-election.

Which is a pity, because although I’m not yet quite sure for whom I will vote, I am quite sure that my cross will not go against his name. This isn’t because he is a Tory (if Ken Clarke were standing in this constituency I would probably vote for him) but because he has made it clear that he is strongly opposed to my own views on issues that I believe transcend Party Politics.

I, for instance, have no doubt whatsoever that potentially catastrophic climate change is taking place, and that this is to a very large extent due to human activity. I have backed my conviction by having a solar water heating system installed in my home – and I am already experiencing the benefit in reduced fuel bills. On this issue I am on the same side as David Cameron, the Conservative Leader – but not on the same side as Douglas Carswell. He is convinced that any climatic change that may be taking place is a natural phenomenon and nothing to do with the actions of humankind. It follows that the development of alternative sources of energy is a waste of time and money.

Similarly, I believe that Britain’s best future lies within a more closely integrated, more democratically governed Europe in which British voters would have a powerful influence. I believe that together with our fellow-Europeans we could become a powerful economic and political force that could co-operate, or where necessary compete, on equal terms with the USA and the emerging powers of the Far East. Alone, we would be destined to become a non-voting protectorate of the USA. Douglas Carswell is described in the Daily Gazette as ‘fervently anti-Europe’. The fact that UKIP is not contesting his seat surely speaks for itself.

Anything else? Douglas Carswell was contemptuously critical of the Tendring First (‘anything but Conservative’) coalition that administered the Tendring District until last year, describing them as ‘incapable of running a bath’ at a time when, according to the Government’s Audit Commission, they were the best run council in Essex and among the best in Britain. This does rather suggest that he may allow his political convictions to cloud his judgement. Tendring First may find some consolation in that he is also a strong critic of the BBC! I expect he prefers the news and views of The Sun!

Oh yes, and he is very proud of having been a leader of the pack that brought down the former Speaker of the House of Commons in connection with the expenses scandal. That Speaker was, however ill advisedly, trying to preserve the honour of the House of Commons by concealing the cupidity and extravagance of its members. The expenses claims of Mr Carswell, one of those members, although unquestionably honest, were sufficiently extravagant to attract the somewhat amused attention of the press.

Who else quite certainly won’t be receiving my vote? Well, there’s Jim Taylor, the British National Party Candidate. I really didn’t spend seven years of my life in the army playing a tiny role in the destruction of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, to vote for their equivalent in England. I am tempted to say that at 72 (he’s the oldest candidate in the field) Jim Taylor is old enough to know better. However, he isn’t old enough to remember Hitler transforming a tiny, and apparently harmless, nationalist party into a threat to the whole world. I am.

Neither shall I be voting for Chris Southall, the Green Party Candidate. This isn’t because I don’t agree with most of his aims, but simply because he hasn’t the least chance of being elected. With our present electoral system a vote for him would be a wasted vote – and at my age I can’t afford to waste the miniscule fragment of political power that I possess.

That leaves me with Michael Green, the Lib. Dem. Candidate, and Ivan Henderson, the Labour Candidate and our former MP, who was narrowly ousted by Douglas Carswell at the last General Election. I am torn between them.

I certainly prefer the policies of the Lib.Dem. Party to those of New Labour. They have an uncompromisingly positive attitude toward the European Union. They accept the need for urgent action to combat climate change, they believe firmly in electoral reform and they hope to reduce the gap between the richest and poorest in our society. They opposed our involvement in the invasion of Iraq. These are all policies that I wholeheartedly support. Michael Green should surely be my preferred candidate.

And so he would be if I thought that he had the slightest chance of winning the parliamentary seat. But I really don’t think that he has. Those policies that attract me to the Lib.Dems. are by no means universally popular. Michael Green has no roots in our area and is virtually unknown. Ladbrokes assess his chances of winning at 100 to 1 against and I fear that they are probably right.

Ivan Henderson, on the other hand, was born and bred on the Tendring Peninsula. He was our MP for 13 years and I think that even his opponents would concede that he was a good MP, always seeking what was best for his constituency (it was, after all, his home!) and his constituents. If he doesn’t wholeheartedly support some of those policies that I think are important, at least he doesn’t actively oppose any of them.

He is the one candidate other than Douglas Carswell, whom Ladbrokes give a small chance of winning. They assess him at 16 to 1 against, but those odds could be greatly shortened if folk like myself, whose natural inclination is to vote Lib.Dem or Green, decided to support him.

Do you really want change, as David Cameron keeps insisting? If so, your best chance of getting it in this Clacton-on-Sea Constituency may well be to vote for Ivan Henderson. I haven’t yet fully made up my mind. Possibly I won’t do so until it is time for me to make that cross on the ballot paper and slip it into the post.

Too many deaths?

Only a few weeks ago I commented on the fact that despite a hard winter that could generally have been depended upon to carry off a reasonable number of us old folks, there hadn’t been sufficient deaths to keep Colchester’s cemetery and crematorium staff gainfully occupied. It had therefore proved necessary to raise the charges for cremations and interments. A member of the council’s staff had blamed this sad circumstance on the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance.

I recall that I counselled patience. Not even the toughest old pensioner lasts forever.

Now it seems, the reverse is happening. The number of deaths in Essex dealt with by the Coroner’s courts is proving more than the management can cope with. Dr Peter Dean, the county’s coroner, recently told BBC Radio 4’s Between ourselves’ programme, that because the process of arranging post mortem examinations and releasing bodies has slowed down, funerals have recently been delayed and family viewings of bodies cancelled. These circumstances have arisen only since the management of the Coroner’s services were transferred from the Police to Essex County Council in 2006. Dr Dean had warned at the time of the probable consequences of the change.

I found the response of John Jowers, the Essex County Councillor who is responsible for these matters, very disturbing. He is reported as saying that the new system, introduced by the County Council, was saving taxpayers money. ‘We have to do as good a job as we can within the financial constraints and if things are going wrong, we have to look very closely and see what we can do about it. It wasn’t an easy decision, but you need to make it as easy as possible for everyone in Essex to get to. We have to cut a coat according to the cloth really’.

That somewhat incoherent statement appears to mean: ‘Sorry, we simply haven’t had enough money to do the job properly. We’ll just have to see if we can do better within the present financial limits’.

This comes strangely from a leading member of a Council that spends tens of thousands of pounds on jetting leading councillors and top officials round the world (America, India, China) on the county’s business, has set up a branch in mainland China, launched a bank in the UK, subsidised a ‘members and officers’ canteen’, and bought expensive advertising space on tv assuring the viewing public that ‘Essex Works!’

You’d have thought they would have been able to find a few extra thousands to ensure that the county’s dead and their relatives were treated with efficiency, courtesy and respect.

A Tax Break for Married Couples?

It would be a bit tough on us widows and widowers – two may not be able to live as cheaply as one, but a couple’s cost-of-living isn’t twice as much as a single’s.

That isn’t really the point though. I reckon that any politician who promises that any group of people will be better off after the next budget (or the one after that) is either making false promises or proposing to rob the rest of us. The most that, in honesty and fairness, should be offered is that some groups – those who are already on the poverty line, for instance – can expect to suffer rather less extra pain than the rest of us.

Week 14.10

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?’ (John 20.15)

Easter was a very special occasion this year as, unusually, the Easter of the Eastern Orthodox Churches coincided with that of the Catholic and Reformed Churches of the West. Thus every Christian Church in the world remembered the cruel death of Jesus Christ – and celebrated his glorious rising from the dead, on the same weekend.

The picture, taken in St. James’ Church Clacton on Easter morning, depicts the empty tomb and the weeping Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Christ. It is decorated with Easter flowers and flanked by two votive candles

The turning world meant that throughout Easter there was never a moment when, in churches, chapels and cathedrals, somewhere or other in the world, Christ’s resurrection and its promise of eternal life were not being remembered and celebrated. ‘The voice of prayer is never silent, nor dies the song of praise away’.

Making a (small) profit from one’s convictions!

Did you realize that on 6th April (probably the day on which I shall post this blog) postal charges will be increased? There never seems to be much publicity of these regular upward changes and it is very easy to be caught out. The price of sending a ‘normal size’ letter under 100g by first-class post goes up from 39 to 41p and by second-class post from 30 to 32p. Large letters (that includes some large greetings cards) go up from 61p to 66p first-class and from 47 to 51p second-class.

The cost of mail sent abroad goes up correspondingly. Airmail letters under 10g to anywhere in Europe rise from 56p to 60p and to the rest of the world from 62p to 67p. Full details are set out clearly in a leaflet ‘pricing made easy’ obtainable from any post office.

The price of postage stamps designated simply ‘First Class’ and ‘Second Class’ is, as the economists say, ‘buoyant’. As postal charges increase, so do their values. A ‘First Class’ stamp purchased five years or longer ago is valid today, even though today’s first class postal charge will be a great deal higher than it was when the stamp was bought.

For the past two years I have suggested at Christmas time that buying sufficient 1st Class and 2nd Class ‘religious’ Christmas stamps for use on correspondence throughout the year, is an effective and non-aggressive way of affirming our Christian faith. I do it myself. It was made easier last year by the fact that, since all the special Christmas stamps were reproductions of church stained-glass windows, they could all have been considered to be ‘religious’.

Purchasing a supply of those first and second-class stamps was also a profitable thing to do! Those who have followed my suggestion will have made a worthwhile investment! Those stamps have gone up in value by 2 pence each. I have always been a long way short of brilliant at mathematics, but I think that that means a tax-free increase in value of about six percent in the four months since their purchase. These days it would be difficult to find another investment yielding a similar short-term profit!

Expensive Executives

A few months ago I commented on a report that Tendring Council’s three most highly paid officials were facing redundancy. Although this has still not been officially confirmed, there now seems little doubt that the report was correct.

The Daily Gazette is chiefly concerned about the size of the ‘golden handshakes’ that they will receive on their departure - £200,000 between them – but it seems to me that there are other, more important, issues involved. As a former (quite lowly paid!) council official, I am astonished at the three posts that are, so we learn, the highest paid on the Council’s staff.

There’s no surprise about the Chief Executive. His reported salary of ‘over £120,000 a year’ may seem enormous to most of us but it’s little more than petty cash to the Chief Executive of Essex County Council, whose income is reported by the Taxpayers’ Alliance as being about £200,000 – more than that of the Prime Minister! But then the County Council has loads of our money to spend, and they don’t even have to go to the trouble of collecting it. That’s Tendring Council’s job.


Clacton’s Town Hall. Nerve centre of Tendring
District Council

The second most highly paid post is that of Deputy Chief Executive. Now that does seem astonishing to me bearing in mind that the Council also employs experienced professional men and women – solicitors, financial experts, engineers, surveyors, architects, environmental health experts. Surely one or two of them must be both better qualified and of greater importance to the Council than a deputy – even of someone as important as a Chief Executive. That’s strange enough, but the third man is not the Chief, nor the Deputy but the Assistant Chief Executive. He and the Deputy are both said to have salaries of over £100,000 a year.

The other matter that perplexes me is the reason for their departure. Councillor Neil Stock, the Council’s Leader, attempts to brush it off as a fairly routine matter. He is reported as saying, ‘The report is all about succession planning. When you have three senior officers nearing retirement age, you need to manage their exit. That is why this report was drawn up’.

Really? If they’re ‘nearing retirement age’ why not plan their replacement and wait till they retire before worrying about how much they are then to be paid? There will be no need for ‘negotiations’. Their ‘lump sum retirement payment’ and annual pension is laid down by national agreement. The picture of Chief Executive John Hawkins, Chief Executive, in the Gazette doesn’t suggest to me that he’ll be drawing his state pension and getting his bus pass and free tv licence in the very near future. But perhaps he’s older than he looks.

It can hardly be said that the three of them have been incompetent or disappointing in their performance in office. They were steering Tendring Council’s course during the year that the Government’s Audit Commission declared it to be the best performing Council in Essex and in the top flight of well performing Councils in England.

Could it be that that is why they have now lost favour? Were they too closely associated with the recent Tendring First administration and therefore the present rulers of Tendring (with their majority of one) wish to replace them with a person or persons more sympathetic to their philosophy?

It will be a sad day for local government when councils are not prepared to accept that their professional officers will give of their very best to their employing authority, whatever its political orientation may be. It will be an even sadder day when professional officers give them reason to believe that such doubts are justified.

‘Not from my bank account!’

Everybody knows that our country is in a financial mess. Everyone agrees that it is a mess from which we can escape only by cutting government services and/or increasing taxes. There is almost complete unanimity within the national press, the general public and politicians of all parties about this. Disagreement is about which services should suffer from the inevitable cuts, and who should bear the burden of the increased taxes. Sadly, most of us seem to think that the services on which we have come to depend should be sacrosanct and that we, and the group to which we happen to belong, should be exempt from increased taxation.

Pensioners have been among the first to complain about their ‘derisory’ pension increase this year and about the perceived threat to their winter fuel allowance. This is understandable because those pensioners who have no other source of income beyond the state pension manage to survive only with the help of the other benefits available to them.

Working people too, see their jobs and their incomes threatened. Many have had to choose between a pay cut and redundancy. Some have not had that option and have lost their jobs. Will job seekers allowances and other social security benefits be cut in the economy drive? I have no doubt that the strikes affecting rail and air travel, and threatening to spread to other fields, are less about existing pay and conditions of work than about the reorganisation, rationalisation and down-sizing that threatens all their jobs in the future.

Increases in VAT affect disproportionately those on the lowest incomes. They increase prices, fuelling inflation and holding back recovery from recession.

There has been agreement between many employers and employees about halting the planned national insurance contributions increase. The money that would have been raised by this increase could be recouped by ‘efficiency savings’ says Mr David Cameron. I’ve heard that before from other political leaders, only though, when in opposition! In any event, isn’t the current crisis one that demands both efficiency savings and increased national insurance payments?

Then there are those, usually in the upper income brackets, who see the threat of rises in income tax rates as heralding a red revolution! I was amused to see the higher rate of income tax that is being introduced this year described in a popular newspaper as ‘a direct attack on middle England’. It will require those whose incomes exceed £150,000 a year to pay in income tax 50 percent of income above that sum. ‘Middle England’ indeed! I wonder how many readers of that newspaper have incomes even approaching that?

We are continually being told that if we try to tax the seriously wealthy proportionately to the rest of us, we’ll be driving the best brains and the wealth creators out of the country. Do they mean the scientists and engineers whose work keeps our industries competitive; perhaps the surgeons who save lives daily; perhaps even the top politicians and top public servants, whose decisions and competence affect us all?

Hardly! Few of those buy national football teams, have palatial villas on the shores of the Mediterranean or entertain influential politicians in their luxury yachts! Those who might be driven away are foreign expatriates who have made millions fleecing their fellow countrymen and have come to Britain to spend them, and our own home-grown successful gamblers and money-lenders. Isn’t gambling and money-lending what the stock market and the merchant banks (whose greed and incompetence triggered this crisis in the first place) are all about?

Disillusion with politicians, a yawning gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest in our society, a perception that the wealthy and privileged are escaping the worst effects of a financial situation that is impoverishing the rest of us; these are dangerous ingredients, possibly presaging a political fundamentalism even more deadly than the religious fundamentalism by which many feel threatened today.

Week 13.10

Tendring Topics……..on Line

'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh my help?'

It was in the summer of 1975 that I took the photograph below, while on a camping holiday with my family in the lovely Aosta Valley in the Italian Alps. We were camped high in the mountains not far from the ancient city of Aosta. One day we drove the length of the valley to its beginning at the foot of Monte Bianco (most of us probably know it better by its French name, Mont Blanc).

Spotting a cable car station we decided we would do some Alpine mountaineering the easy way. At the cable car terminus near the summit there was a covered walkway, over and across the upper slopes of the mountain' to a French terminus on the other side. We though, looked in another direction at this breath-taking depiction of the Crucifixion carved among the snow-covered peaks.

My knowledge of any language other than English is strictly limited. I think though that the small notice at the statue’s feet says ‘Christ, Lord of the Cords’ and on either side is the message, in Italian and in French, ‘If only all the people in the world would give me their hand’.

It was a striking message on a very striking monument ‘on the roof of the Europe’. I felt that it was one that readers of this blog would appreciate during Holy Week, the last week of Lent. It is the week that ends with Good Friday, when Christians world-wide remember the cruel judicial murder of Jesus Christ some two thousand years ago. It is followed ‘on the third day’ by Easter Sunday, when we celebrate Christ’s glorious resurrection, God’s demonstration of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, then, now, and always.

The words on the monument remind me of the message of the inner voice that seventeenth century George Fox heard when he was in despair at what he saw as the failure of both the established and the dissenting churches of his day:

‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition’.

They were words that, as he recorded in his journal, made his heart ‘leap with joy!’ He went on to found the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) as a vehicle by means of which that message could be made known to all humankind. That message is as true, and as badly needed, today as it was three hundred years ago.

Rewards and Punishments

We have certainly come a long way from the world of Charles Dickens’ Mr Squeers, and that of Dr Arnold of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, at Rugby. By comparison with that world, my own secondary-school schooldays nearly eighty years ago were positively benign. We were though expected to turn up at school every day on time, to behave ourselves in class and on school premises, to do our set homework and apply ourselves diligently to our lessons.

Those who broke any of those basic rules could expect to be punished. This usually involved ‘detention’ for an hour or so after school or the imposition of extra homework, the writing of a page or more of tedious ‘lines’ to be presented at school the following morning. Trips to the Headmaster’s study for three stroke of the cane were comparatively rare and generally awarded only to persistent or defiant offenders.

The ‘reward’ for those who obeyed the rules was the teacher’s approbation and possibly a few appreciative words in the school’s report to their parents. No one expected more that that.

Now, according to a report in the Daily Gazette, pupils in years ten and eleven at Clacton’s new Coastal Academy are being offered material rewards, not for outstanding progress or effort but simply for turning up at school each day and behaving themselves in a way that earlier generations of school children took for granted. There’s no word of any punishments for truancy or misbehaviour. The pupils involved are those who previously attended truancy-afflicted Bishops Gate College and Colbayns High School. I suppose it is feared that if punishments were even mentioned, they’d just walk out of the school and disappear forever!

Rewards for punctuality and good behaviour are given by means of the ‘Vivo’ system. All members of the staff have a number of points that they can distribute and pupils collect these points, save them up, and select their own rewards from a catalogue that includes mobile phone vouchers, hair straighteners, iPods, computer consoles and so on.

Ms. Sandy Tate, the Academy’s Vice-Principal, is reported as saying that certificates for good behaviour work well enough as incentives in the lower school but by the time students are in the higher school, they lose their impact. By that time, I suppose, the children are a bit more worldly wise and conscious of their own ‘pupil power’!

Unsurprisingly, the pupils concerned are enthusiastic. The Daily Gazette quotes one fifteen-year-old as saying, ‘It makes a lot of students think about getting on with their work. People do go to more lessons, as they can really see that they are getting something out of it – it’s a brilliant idea’

The ‘people do go to more lessons’, fascinated me. Can it possibly be true that in a third millennial British Academy (claimed to be a pinnacle of twenty-first century secondary educational excellence) pupils decide for themselves whether or not they will bother to attend lessons, and only turn up if ‘they can really see that they are getting something out of it'? Something that is, in addition to an education and, in the case of Clacton’s Coastal Academy, a free school uniform and set of sports gear!

How shaming to think that while, in many parts of the world, children are so eager to get an education that they will trudge barefoot for miles to sit on mud floors in primitive schoolrooms, in Clacton-on-Sea, England, kids offered every educational advantage have to be bribed to turn up at school on time, to attend lessons and to behave themselves in a civilised manner!

‘O Brave New World!’

‘Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring’

So wrote Shelley in his poem The Question. How appropriate it is that the most important festival in the Christian year, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, with its promise of eternal life, should take place in the springtime when nature is coming out of its winter hibernation and new life is springing up all around us.
My daffodils - there were many more until two years ago when an over-enthusiastic gardener cut them back too early after blooming.

The view from my kitchen window of the flowering of the daffodils around the apple tree in my garden assures me that spring is here at last. For many years Heather, my wife, watched with pleasure from that window as the daffodils emerged from the soil and burst into flower. When her life on earth came to an end nearly four years ago, I scattered her ashes where those daffodils flourish

I believe that her spirit lives on in another better world, and I like to think that every spring her ashes are transformed into those lovely golden flowers. Sometime, in the not-too-distant future, I hope that my spirit will rejoin hers and that my ashes too will be scattered where the daffodils dance in the spring breeze.

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose, as where some dying Caesar bled,
And every hyacinth the garden wears,
Leapt to its couch from some once-lovely head.

Omar Khayyam

week 12/10

Tendring Topics……on Line

An Easter Message – from Network Rail

The Government, so it is said, is urging us to get out of our cars (no, not me personally; I haven’t got one!) and onto public transport. By so doing we’ll be easing traffic congestion on the roads, reducing petrol consumption and doing our bit to ‘save the planet’.

Occasions in the year when large numbers of us are inclined to travel at the same time, are our public holidays. We don’t have as many as most of our fellow Europeans. Perhaps because of that, we tend to make the most of them – to get away from our town or suburban homes, see friends or relatives and perhaps visit the sea or the countryside.

Two of these holidays are really special – Christmas and Easter. For one thing, both have more than one day of holiday. Both are major Christian Festivals though sadly the ‘Christian’ dimension is now only a minority interest. At Christmas time families of every faith and of none like to get together – and families are much more far-flung than once they were. Easter is the first holiday of the spring. It is a time to get out into the country and enjoy nature as it wakes from its winter sleep, or perhaps to visit the seaside for the first time in the year.

It might have been thought that our railways would have seized the opportunities these universal breaks present. It was, after all, the railways that first made travel possible for ordinary people. I am sure that there was a time when that was precisely what the railways did. In the past the LNER (remember them? The London and North-Eastern Railway) put on extra trains into London and other big cities at Christmas to facilitate family reunions, and provided ‘special offer’ excursion trains at Easter, Whitsun and the August Bank Holiday to take passengers on day trips or for the weekend to holiday resorts like Clacton, Frinton and Walton. I have lived in Clacton long enough to remember crowded trains pulling into Clacton Station on Saturdays, and the local children with their home-made barrows supplementing their pocket money by transporting holiday-makers’ luggage to their boarding houses or perhaps to Butlins Holiday Camp.

Is that what Network Rail and the various railway companies created by privatisation, do today? Not a bit of it. The closure of Liverpool Street Station from Christmas Eve till after the New Year has become as much part of Christmas as Santa Claus, roast turkey and Christmas crackers. We count ourselves lucky if ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ the closure doesn’t extend days into the New Year.

This year the coming of Easter was welcomed in the Daily Gazette with the headline Easter closures and strike threat spell rail chaos. ‘Work to replace overhead power lines between Liverpool Street and Romford on Easter weekend will cause disruption across the whole of Essex’. There is also a strike threat over plans by Network Rail to axe up to 1,500 jobs and change working practices! Private enterprise and ‘throwing the railway service out to healthy competition’ has certainly made a difference!

We can look forward to the usual Bank Holiday chaos as special buses replacing disrupted rail services join the thousands of motorists taking to the roads over the East Holiday.

Remember the slogan 'Let the train, take the strain?' Perhaps it’s time to add 'But the road must carry the load!'

Essex County Council – an unwieldy and extravagant giant

I have just received my Council Tax Bill for the coming year. I expect that everyone resident in the Tendring District will get theirs during the next day or two. I really can’t complain. I pay my Council Tax by direct debit, in ten instalments. During the next financial year, after the first payment the remaining nine will be just £1 more each month than I have been paying during 2008/2009.

I note that of my total annual charge of £1123.66, Essex County Council gets £845.25, Tendring District Council £105.38, Special Expenses (I’ve no idea what that means) £18.61, the Essex Fire Authority £51.66 and the Essex Police Authority £102.76. On the whole I think that we get value for money from Tendring’s share and I don’t complain about the needs of the Fire and Police Authorities.

I do question the County Council’s £845.25 though – nearly three times as much as the sum of the requirements of the other authorities. I heard Lord Hanningfield, the County Council’s former leader, claim (as he was leaving court where he had been charged with fiddling his expenses) that he had given 40 years of his life to the public service and had saved the County Council ‘millions of pounds’.

If that claim is anywhere near the truth it makes one wonder what the County’s cash demands would have been like without his Lordship’s hand on the tiller!

A ‘Freedom of Information’ request by The Daily Gazette has produced some interesting statistics about the County Council’s staffing and expenditure over the past few years. I knew, of course, that Essex County Council was a gargantuan organisation and, I suppose, the biggest employer in the county. I was nevertheless surprised to learn that in 2005/2006 they employed no less than 38,589 staff either full-time or part-time. The majority of these were in the field of education but there were still 11,669 non-school staff. By 2008/2009 though, the total number had fallen to 37,764 and non-school staff to 10,0069.

You may think this kind of downsizing explains the millions of pounds Lord Hanningfield claims that he and his colleagues have saved. You would be wrong. During the same period, total spending on staff – in schools, at the County Hall and in other offices – rose from £880 million to £997 million.

But that is not the end of the story.

In addition to paying almost a billion pounds to their own employees, the County Council also paid £25.3 million to outside ‘consultants’ last year. This compares with the £14.4 million that they had paid out in this way in 2005/2006.


There are, of course, occasions when any local authority may have to spend a few thousand, perhaps a few tens of thousands, on outside consultants with the expertise to deal with one-off problems beyond the capacity of its own staff. With an authority the size and population of Essex, I suppose that the reasonable expenditure on such expertise might run to a few hundred thousands.

But £25 million spent in a year by an authority that is already spending almost a billion a year on the wages and salaries its own staff? I’d have thought that the £14.4 million paid to consultants in 2005/2006 was well over the top. I’m lost for words (which doesn’t often happen!) to describe last year’s £25 million!

The County Council has clearly become a huge, unwieldy and extravagant tier of administration that should be dismembered and replaced by smaller more local local authorities. I wish Colchester’s MP, Bob Russell, every success in his campaign to secure unitary status for Colchester. I’d like to see similar campaigns in the Tendring District and every other district and borough council in our county.

A Thought for the Thoughtless

In last week’s blog I mentioned motorists who park their cars over dropped kerbs or partly on footpaths, as being among the problems faced by mobility scooterists and by those who push prams or wheelchairs. Scarcely had I posted it on the web when I learned of Brightlingsea’s Considerate Parking Initiative that appears to be dealing with that particular problem. What’s more it is doing so without the kind of heavy-handed officiousness that can be guaranteed to create resentment and antagonism.

Recognising that those who park badly do so from thoughtlessness rather than from malice, drivers of badly parked vehicles are given written notice that they are causing a problem. Ian Taylor, a Tendring Council parking services official involved with the scheme, is quoted in the Clacton Gazette as saying, ‘We are specifically looking at anti-social parking, which doesn’t necessarily contravene any regulations but annoys and upsets people………We want drivers to stop and think about where they are leaving their vehicles and what effect it can have on those around them’.

It especially targets parking in front of dropped kerbs, at junctions and on pavements and grass verges. Street wardens and some council officers issue the notices. These may be followed up by a visit to the offender’s home. Photos are also taken so that persistent offenders can be identified. The scheme has worked in Brightlingsea and is to be introduced in Harwich and Manningtree next month. I hope that the needs of Clacton haven’t been overlooked!

At the risk of seeming preachy, I cannot do other than to point out that the real answer to this, as it is to so many other problems arising from human behaviour, lies in advice given some two thousand years ago, when road transport consisted largely of ox-carts, pack horses, and chariots: ‘Treat other people as you would like them to treat you

How much indignation and anger would be averted if all of us – motorists, cyclists, mobility scooterists and pedestrians always tried to obey that rule.

There are Six of them – and all of them are Great!

I was an ‘only child’, with neither brother nor sister. However an unexpected blessing resulting from my sixty-year long marriage to Heather was the acquisition of a sister-in-law, a fine nephew, and four lovely nieces – all much kinder and nicer to me than a mere ‘uncle-by-marriage’ has any right to expect.

They in their turn have given me five great-nieces and a great-nephew in whom I take pride and interest – and whose birthdays I make every effort never to forget!

Here they are – all together to celebrate two important ones.



Nicola (‘Nikki’) first on the left, had just celebrated her 18th birthday and her cousin Catherine (‘Cat’), fourth from the left, her 16th. Clinging to Nikki is her five year old cousin Rosie. Between Rosie and Cat, is Cat’s twelve year old brother Adam. On the right of the picture, Rosie’s seven-year-old sister Millie is in the arms of Nikki’s sister Tania. Tania, of whom we’re all very proud, is a second year medical student. It astonishes me to realize that she will be twenty-one later this year. It seems such a little while ago that her Mum and Dad brought her to Clacton as a tiny baby to introduce Heather and I to our very first great niece!

They are five great nieces and a great nephew!

Week 11.10

Tendring Topics…….on line

We Mobility-Scooterists are in trouble again!

Ought mobility scooter users face a test before being allowed out onto the pavements on their iron steeds? Ought our mobility scooters to be – like cars – compulsorily registered and insured against third party injuries? These are said to be measures that the government is considering. We in the Tendring District have particular reason to be interested in this since we are said to have the highest proportion of disabled people in Essex. Also, according to the Daily Gazette, our district ‘has witnessed a growing number of accidents involving motor scooters in recent years’.

Have we though? The only evidence the Gazette produces to support this claim is that in 2005 a woman scooter user suffered fatal injuries when her scooter was in collision with a car in Clacton’s Marine Parade East, and in 2006 an 80 year old woman from Walton called for a change in the law after she was hit by a scooter and a Walton toddler ‘was dragged under the wheels of one’ (considering the size of scooter wheels that takes a bit of imagining!). Also in 2006, Tendring Council considered banning scooters from cliff paths and seafront promenades, after a woman on a scooter suffered fatal injuries when she accidentally drove her vehicle off the prom.

If one swallow doesn’t make a summer, four accidents involving mobility scooters that took place between four and five years ago, hardly make a cause for serious public concern today. How many accidents involving cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles and pushbikes have taken place in our area since 2005? Considerably more, I fancy, than the four in which mobility scooters were involved. We don’t even know in how many, if any, of those four accidents the user of the mobility scooter was to blame.

Having said that, I can’t bring myself to go all the way with Gordon Beare of the Tendring Pensioners’ Action Group who claims that the idea of the test is ‘an outrageous suggestion……..I’m certainly against having to take a test. I’m sure there would be a charge for it, which many elderly people can’t afford’.

I have been a scooter user rather longer than Gordon Beare, and I am not quite so sure. Driving a mobility scooter, crossing busy roads with it and behaving correctly towards other road and pavement users isn’t quite as simple as those who have never tried it might think. Mobility scooters go faster than the average pedestrian (not many people can walk at 4 mph) and they have very powerful motors. It was at least a fortnight after purchase before I felt sufficiently confident on mine to venture into the town centre. I think that some kind of a test might be a good idea. It is unlikely that the test would be free but then mobility scooters aren’t exactly cheap either. Surely most people who could afford to buy one would also manage to find the extra pound or two for the test.

As for registration and third party insurance; registration needn’t cost anything and most responsible scooter users already have third party insurance. I certainly wouldn’t be happy without mine. The low premiums charged testify to the small number of claims that are actually made.

I am fully in agreement with Gordon Beare on one point – the unpredictable and thoughtless behaviour of some other road users can present mobility scooter users with problems. I am particularly wary of pedestrians walking down the middle of the pavement towards me, engrossed in conversation on a mobile phone. They’re clearly not looking where they are going and depend on pedestrians coming towards them stepping aside at the last moment. That is something a scooter user can’t do! I have even seen someone tapping in a text message while striding blindly along the footpath.

Other ‘hates’ that one develops when driving (or should it be ‘riding’) a mobility scooter are the motorists who leave their cars right across the dropped kerbs that we rely on when crossing a road, and those (commercial vehicle drivers are major offenders) who park partly on the footpath, leaving just sufficient room for a fairly slim pedestrian to squeeze through. Motor scooters and, I imagine, those pushing prams or wheel chairs simply can’t get past.

These are a minority though. I have found most motorists, and most pedestrians, to be courteous and considerate. We scooter users must remember that we take up rather more room, and move faster, than pedestrians. It is up to us to cause as little inconvenience as possible to others, to give way on narrow or partially obstructed footpaths, and never to forget to smile, to say please or thank you, and to apologise whenever an apology is due.

Could do better……much better!

What on earth has happened to Clacton’s secondary schools?

Only last week in this blog I commented on the fact that Bishops Gate College and Colbayns High School during 2008/2009, the last academic year of their existence, had the highest truancy rates of any school in Essex! Their general progress showed much to be desired and they have been amalgamated as The Coastal Academy in an attempt to save them from failure. Only time will tell whether or not this move will prove to have been successful.

Two ‘likely lads’! Pete and Andy, the Hall brothers in 1966. Both were pupils at Clacton County High School in the ‘60s and early '70s

At least, I thought, Clacton County High School remains a centre of secondary educational excellence. I hadn’t realized how much that school has changed since the 1970s! Then both my sons were pupils. They were among many who were a credit to the school, and have since
pursued profitable and socially useful careers. In his final year, my elder son was one of four sixth form students who were offered and took up places at Cambridge University. Many others went to other Universities.

Now it seems that Clacton County High School is also in trouble. Following an Ofsted inspection last November, the school was criticised for having inadequate teaching and falling GCSE grades. The report said that its leadership team had not recognised significant weaknesses in the way that it dealt with bad behaviour, and with pupils having learning difficulties. Student attendance was too low and GCSE maths results were consistently below average. Some pupils and parents had also complained that the school’s disciplinary policy was unfair. The Governors were criticised for not questioning high exclusion figures.

I must say that I have some sympathy with the Head-teacher Mr Jeff Brindle in connection with the exclusion of pupils whose behaviour disrupts the education of others. What other effective disciplinary measures are available to head teachers these days? I wonder to which schools Mr Brindle is referring when he claims that his exclusion figures were still ‘lower than other local schools’. Could it be Colbayns and Bishops Gate?

It is amazing how eager those in public office (whether they are MPs referring to their expenses claims or school governors discussing adverse Ofsted reports) are to put unpleasant facts behind them and ‘look to the future!’ My former colleague Bert Foster, now Chairman of the CCHS Governors, says, ‘What is important now is the interests of our students. We intend to move forward, put this report behind us, and build on the many strengths the school has’.

I think that the Governors and Head Teacher should not put that report behind them, but keep it in front of them – as a reminder that they must do a great deal better in the future. I don’t envy Clacton parents with ten-year old sons and daughters about to begin their secondary education.

Another, ‘Modest proposal……..’

Those readers of The Times who are well past the first flush of youth may have been shocked to read an article in which novelist Martin Amis (son of Sir Kingsley Amis) shared with readers his solution to the ‘problem’ presented by our ageing population.

He suggested that we deal with this ‘ticking demographic timebomb’ by providing euthanasia booths on every street corner. If we fail to do this, he suggests, ‘There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants, cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years time’.

Possession of a very fertile and active imagination is, I am sure, on the CV of every successful author. The article was surely a satirical one, in the same vein (and as deliberately tasteless!) as the famous ‘Modest proposal…’ of Dean Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels. In it he appeared to suggest infanticide and cannibalism as a solution to many of society’s problems. Some of his contemporaries imagined that he actually meant it!

It is to be hoped that Martin Amis’ intention was satirical, because a search on Google Chrome reveals that he is himself 60 years old. If there were to be a civil war between young and old in fifteen or twenty years time he could expect to be in the front line – and on what he would now consider to be ‘the wrong side!

A few months ago we were celebrating the life and work of Charles Darwin. Martin Amis’ article is of value in that it graphically illustrates what I think of as ‘Fundamentalist Darwinism’; the conviction that the survival of the fittest is the primary law of nature and that the sole purpose on earth of every living creature (including every man and woman) is the perpetuation of its species. The old, the disabled, the infertile and the impotent have no evolutionary purpose. Therefore they have no place in Darwinism’s ultimate Brave New World. ‘Away with them, to the guillotine, the gas chambers, or the euthanasia booths!’

The Fateful 6th May

It is now almost certain (if not entirely ‘beyond reasonable doubt’) that the General Election will be held on Thursday 6th May. What is even more certain is that its highlight will be a carefully staged and televised debate between the leaders of the three main political parties.

The way in which the debate is to be held and the propaganda that is already preceding it make it even clearer to me that on polling day we will not be expected to choose between different sets of policies (there is not a great deal of real difference between them anyway) or even between political parties, but between three individuals; which one ‘comes over’ best on the small screen! If his party has a substantial majority the winner can expect to be able to exercise dictatorial power for the next five years, since all the rewards (for party loyalty) and all the penalties (for what would be seen as disloyalty) will be in his hands.

It seems to be assumed that a ‘hung parliament’ in which neither of the two largest parties have an overall majority, would be a national disaster. It would mean we couldn’t have a strong government. My experience of strong governments suggests to me that it would be the best possible outcome of the election.

If we hadn’t had a strong government in the 1980s and early ‘90s, we wouldn’t have had the almost universally detested Poll Tax (They really should have known better. An attempt to impose a similar tax in the 14th century had triggered the Peasants Revolt!) If we hadn’t had a strong government in the first decade of the third millennium, we wouldn’t have embarked on a bloody and illegal war in Iraq.

Were there good things that happened under those two governments that wouldn’t have happened if we had had a hung parliament? I suppose that there must have been. Off hand, I can’t think of any though!

Week 10.10

Tendring Topics……on line

The Coastal Academy

Last summer, as all Clactonians know, Colbayns High School and Bishops Park College were transformed into The Coastal Academy, which opened with the new school year in September 2009. The outward and visible sign of this was the appearance on our streets of lots of eleven-to-eighteen year olds wearing the blazer and tie of the new academy. All the pupils, both new and existing, of the former schools were supplied with a free school uniform and free sports gear. This new academy was clearly going to be better funded than either of the two schools from which it sprang! If money had anything to do with it, it would surely do very well indeed.

Has it? The Academy blazers are still in evidence, some as pristine as they were in September, others looking distinctly weather-beaten or battle-worn.

We should have a preliminary idea of the Academy’s academic achievements in a few months’ time when the school-leaving exam results are known. It will be a couple of years though before it will be possible to make a balanced assessment of the academy’s progress. An indication of the steepness of the road ahead is indicated by the recently published ‘truancy league tables’ showing the percentages of truancies (unauthorised absences from school) in 31 Essex secondary schools. The figures relate to the 2008/2009 academic year, the last before the advent of the Coastal Academy.

This is, of course, one of those league tables where the worst are at the top and the very best at the bottom. Leading, and far ahead of every other school in Essex, is Clacton’s former Bishops’ Park College with a truancy rate of 6 percent. Well behind Bishops’ Park but still ahead of every other school, is Colbayns High School with 2.7 percent truancy. Next down the table is Maltings Academy, Witham, with 2.5 percent and so on down to Colchester Royal Grammar School, at the bottom with no truancy at all.

The presence of Witham’s Maltings Academy in the ‘top three’ makes it clear that Academy status doesn’t provide a magic remedy for truancy. Why should it? I am sure that the causes of truancy lie in the home and the out-of-school environment and that it is there that it needs to be tackled. A close friend of mine assures me that the great divide in British society isn’t between the well off and the hard-up, the North and the South, the aristocracy and the rest of us, but between the parents or guardians who believe in the value of education for their child - and those who don’t. There can be no greater handicap for potentially gifted children than parents who take no interest in their education, put other considerations before giving them space and time for their homework, and let them know that the sooner they ‘get away from all that book learning’ and start bringing in some money, the better.

I can’t really see what even the most supportive school or academy can do about such a parental attitude but I am sure that the staff of the Coastal Academy are doing their best. I wish them all success.

A Soup Kitchen for Jaywick?

Just before the end of February, the local Daily Gazette’s front page bore the bold headline SCHOOL SOUP KITCHEN PLAN. The school concerned was the Frobisher School in Jaywick and the news story below the headline revealed that teachers there are so concerned about poor nutrition affecting children’s schoolwork that they have decided to do something about it.

Tracey Caffull, one of the school’s two head teachers was reported as saying that diet was a serious issue for the school as it had a massive effect on pupils’ learning. She said that the children were living ‘in massive deprivation’ and that she had been talking to the Salvation Army about setting up a soup kitchen on the lines of ‘the ones that the Salvation Army runs for homeless and hard-up people in poor areas’. I think she may have been referring to the Soup Run provided in Clacton’s town centre by Churches Together in Clacton, with which the Salvation Army plays an important part. If this charity were to be unable to help, she said that the school would set up its own kitchen.

Keith Bodsworth, the school’s business manager confirmed that, ‘The aim is to improve the nutritional standard of the food our children are getting, but we will not close the door to other people. We are really targeting the community as a whole, and it will be there to support people if they need it. We are a community school and if we can help those around, then we will'. He added that the kitchen would probably not be based in the school in Frobisher Drive but somewhere in the Brooklands area of Jaywick, where many of the pupils live.

I think that there is a big difference between providing soup or whatever for homeless people and those in squats or bed-sits with no cooking facilities as Churches Together does at present, and providing it for a community in which where there are cooking facilities, however basic, and the problem is that its members lack the money, or the skills, or the inclination, to use them.

I am not one of those who claim that ‘there is no poverty in England today’. I know that there is. I don’t believe though that there is any family in our area so poor that its child members are inevitably reduced to ‘massive deprivation’ and semi-starvation. I believe that in the Brooklands area of Jaywick and possibly other areas, there is a need for child-care social workers to investigate thoroughly, to advise, to support, to cajole and – if no other remedy is successful – to take whatever legal action may be available to prevent child neglect.

I can see great opportunities for the Tabloid Press here! Either there could be headlines about a tragic case of child neglect that could have been averted ‘if only the Health Visitors and/or Social Workers had done their job properly’ or equally bold headlines denouncing ‘Council snoopers who invade the privacy of Englishmen’s homes, probably to enforce some pettifogging regulation dreamed up by a bureaucrat in Brussels!’

They might even manage both!

Farewell ‘Readers Digest’

So the Readers Digest has proved to be one of the victims of the great recession and is no more! What on earth, I wonder, will doctors, dentists, solicitors and the like find to put on the magazine racks of their waiting rooms?

Those, I have to say, are the only places in which I ever read a copy. They were ideal for that purpose; filled with brief, always ‘wholesome’ articles, usually shortened and well written, culled from other publications. They were perfect for whiling away the time while waiting to have a tooth filled or blood-pressure taken, though rarely so gripping that there was a pang of regret at putting them down when your name was called by the receptionist.

I found them a little too ‘homespun and American’ for my personal taste, a little too ‘heart-warming’ in fact. What’s more, during the period of the Cold War (I don’t think I have actually seen a copy since) there was never an issue that didn’t contain a ‘reds under the bed’ attack on anything that could be considered to bear the taint of socialism. I did quite a lot of work for them in the 1970s and ‘80s and would tease the very friendly sub editor to whom I sent my work by suggesting that she was, of course, a CIA agent. She took it in good part and wanted to know whether my pay rates with the KGB were better!

The work that I did for them? I never contributed to the magazine, but I did make substantial contributions to some of the manuals that were, I suppose, spin-offs from the magazine sales. On my bookshelves as I write, I can see the ‘Readers Digest Complete DIY Manual’, ‘The Readers Digest, How to Fix Just About Anything’ and the ‘Readers Digest, Know your Rights’. To the first two of these I contributed the very substantial sections on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage and to the third, a popular manual about the law as it affects the householder and the individual, I contributed a short section about the law relating to ‘combined drains and private sewers’ – not really the most fascinating of subjects! There were one or two earlier manuals that I have lost and the names of which I have forgotten, but for which I wrote the ‘plumbing’ contents.

They paid generously but always bought the copyright of the material outright. With Readers Digest’s mammoth advertising campaigns and pushy (to say the least!) sales techniques, we authors would have done even better had our payment been a share of the royalties!

Commenting on Readers Digest’s demise in the Guardian, a columnist criticises the magazine for much the same reasons that I have, but has a word of praise for their manuals, conceding that ‘I’d never have tried to fix a tap without the guidance of the Readers Digest Book of Household Maintenance’. I think that the writer may have remembered wrongly the title of the manual but I have no doubt at all that the guidance had been mine!

Money well spent!

In September 1980, six months after I had retired from the Council’s service, and after I had assured myself of an adequate income from freelance writing, Heather and I spent a wonderful fortnight touring the then peaceful and united country of Jugoslavia in our motor-caravan.

The next year we decided to forego an overseas holiday and to dip into our savings to bring our bungalow up to late-twentieth century standards. We had an extension built at the rear, to house a fridge, freezer and spin-dryer and to provide some badly needed extra cupboard and storage space. It cost as much to build as it had to buy the bungalow thirty years earlier! We had already had our cavity walls infilled (by Rentokil) and I had installed fibreglass blanket insulation in the roof space. Now we disposed of the two Courtier solid fuel stoves (one with back boiler) sometimes supplemented by oil-filled electric radiators, that had been our means of space and water heating. We had gas fired central heating installed, thus eliminating the chilly ‘no go’ areas of the bungalow during every winter. We got rid of our old and dated bathroom suite and had a new suite installed. We had our windows double-glazed and wall-to-wall carpets fitted in our sitting room and hall.

Had we waited a few years we might well have obtained government or council grants towards much of that work. However, we had done it when we could afford to, for our own comfort and convenience, without any thought of ‘saving the planet’. We certainly never regretted what we did and when we did it.

Fixing my solar panels. March 2009

Last year (nearly thirty years later!) I decided to have solar panels fitted on my roof as part of a solar water heating system to supplement my existing gas boiler. It was expensive and I certainly won’t live long enough for its savings to equal the cost of installation. I was confident though that the savings it would make would be greater than the interest the money was earning in my savings account - and that it would add to the value of my home. There have been ‘teething problems’ but the system has fulfilled my expectations. I pay my combined gas and electricity bill by direct debit. A year ago this amounted to £125 a month (£1,500 a year). It is now £70 a month (£840 a year), a tax-free saving well worth having. What is more, my meters were read in mid-January and revealed that, despite December and early January’s bitter weather; I was £140 in credit. Possibly my monthly payments will be further reduced.

Let no one tell me that the call to insulate our homes and to supplement our present energy sources with wind and solar power, is all a big confidence trick. I have demonstrated that, as the tv adverts claim in quite another context, ‘It works for me!’