Thanksgiving

Last week was Thanksgiving in the USA where they have a holiday to celebrate the first harvest of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1621. And of course the President pardons a turkey, turkey being the centrepiece of the Thanksgiving Day meal.

It made me think what a remarkable thing to have a holiday which has its roots in thankfulness.

I must confess when I look around me and become engaged in thinking of the people I love and care for there is often an overwhelming sense of the burdens they carry and the struggles they face. And I do not easily walk past the young man in the underpass asking for money or dismiss the scenes from Cumbria of flooding and homes and businesses shattered. So thanksgiving is pushed into the background. Other harsher noises drown it out.

Consequently a day to celebrate celebrating pulled me up short. I am sure those first settlers had plenty of stuff they'd had to overcome and no doubt a good few did not make it to the first harvest. There was the uncertainty, and may be a little fear, of the first winter coming. That would be me for sure. But they took time to be thankful.

And I have some wonderful things and people to be thankful about, never mind the God who sent his Son to save me. It's the beginning of Advent, the coming of Jesus for the first time, and according to the prophet Isaiah:

"This is what the Sovereign Lord says.......those who hope in me will not be disappointed"

There is plenty to be thankful about.

So may be I need to go find some turkeys to pardon!

Ice Cream Vans and the 4 second warning

I am grateful to that bastion of journalism the Rossendale Free Press for drawing my attention to a singular and pernicious evil which is sweeping the country.

Since 1974 it has been offence for ice cream vans to play their chimes before noon and after 7pm or in such a way which gives reasonable cause of annoyance.

Of course one man's annoyance is another man's Beethoven symphony so a code of practice was born to help us understand when we are annoyed.

We are annoyed according to the code if the chimes sound out for more than 4 seconds, or more than once every 3 minutes, or within 50 metres of a school during school hours and so on and so on.

This code of practice has now been adopted for the Rossendale Valley but I discover that it holds sway far and wide in all sorts of places up and down the country. No doubt there are companies specialising in training armies of town hall staff in the finer points of enforcing all of this. New equipment for recording chimes and detecting their individual DNA has been ordered in thousands. Vans are followed in unmarked vehicles by plainclothes inspectors ready to seize and confiscate them for persistent transgressions, no doubt after siphoning off the load to the town hall freezers for safe keeping.

I can tell you readers of this blog that I need no code of practice to tell me when my threshold of annoyance has been reached.

It is reached and enters the stratosphere when I think of the time and money spent on codes of practice for chiming ice cream vans when our government sinks ever deeper under a tide of debt and cannot find the money to equip properly our troops in Afghanistan.