THE READER WRITES
Recently our Reader, Avril made an appearance on Radio Essex, so instead of a letter she has asked me to print a copy of her broadcast. Ed.
“Have you noticed that for a long time now the media has been feeding us a lot of gloom and doom. Everybody seems to be whingeing about something, most recently the snow; before that MPs claiming taxpayers money; then the credit crunch, tax, and now cctv and parking fines and on and on - talk about in the bleak midwinter! What happened to the stiff upper lip and all that stuff ? Don't get me wrong, a whinge or two here and there is perhaps good for us, but not so that it becomes a habit. It might be of course, that now I've reached the age of wisdom, I tend to notice these things more and a quick glance into the future at what might be in store for our children and grandchildren makes me even more miserable and fearful but, thinking back I do remember my Grandmother commenting one day, ‘I don't know what the world is coming to,’ so this could be an age thing. I should like to say this though, there are a lot of brilliant teenagers out there, doing great things, and there is an army of volunteers who are the mainstay of our society, so could we hear more about them? I'm sure it would cheer us up no end. And some good news from me is that on Christmas Eve, despite the ice and dodgy road conditions, we had approx nine hundred worshippers at our church and they gave seven hundred pounds for the Children's' Hospice.
Yes there are a lot of good people about; oh and I've decided not to worry too much about the future. There will be changes of course, some of them major, but after all there have been a lot of changes in my life time and I expect yours too,- and we coped didn't we? And, to be truthful, most of the time we hardly noticed them happening. Tell you something else too, that lady, Minnie Louise Haskins, knew a thing or two when she was inspired to write her poem 'The gate of the Year'; it begins:
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year. Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.
Thank you for listening: take care now,”
Avril Askew
