In the summer of 1952 a fine woman of my acquaintance came home from school in East Berlin…and woke up the next day in Dusseldorf. Six months later she was joined by her parents and her elder brother. She had been smuggled out of East Germany. How this was done she will never know. I met her 18-months ago. She drove me back from a Ryesingers Rehearsal and accepted my invitation to take coffee on Vemara. Conversation was animated.

Then a strange thing happened. As I looked across the cabin table her appearance changed. For about 15 seconds I saw her as a Young Pioneer about 12-years of age…pigtails, red kerchief and the look of fervour associated with Soviet and East European posters of the 1950s. It was a vivid impression. Even today I can still capture its vividness in my mind’s eye. In 1966…14-years after she had left the city…I crossed into East Berlin…twice.

The first was a day-trip. I passed through Checkpoint Charlie, sent some postcards and returned to West Berlin. The following day I passed through Checkpoint Charlie again and carried on walking for 3-hours until I reached a railway station on the city outskirts. I bought a ticket to the end of the line…two miles from the Polish Border. I walked across a bridge into Poland. Ten days later I was sitting in my one-man tent on the beach at Mamaia on the Black Sea…with hundreds of other East European tourists. I was bemused. I had expected to be turned back at the station.

I returned to the Eastern Bloc twice…to Romania for my honeymoon and to Russia in a Hillman Imp with my brother and a college friend. We were in Red Square when the Red Army marched into Prague and followed them.

This time we were turned back at the Czech Border…and told to head for Poland and The West…like fast. We did. My general impression of the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s was of drabness. All the buildings were grey and there was no colour in the few shops. Paint was a luxury and Plastics and Packaging were preserves of The West. I breathed a sigh of relief when returning to Western Europe. An acute sense of claustrophobia set in a few days before being free.

As I walked through the Park Meadow Shopping Centre in Hastings on Thursday I was bemused to find a shop devoted just to Calendars and another…called The Name Shop…with nothing but Personalised Products…for Teresa, Tracy, Samuel and Sean. The sheer flamboyance of it all, the exuberance and the bright colours.

The Emma Maersk is 1270 feet long and 251 feet high…the largest ship in the world. Eleven sister ships are planned. She docked at Felixstowe two weeks ago after a 63-day Maiden Voyage from China…with a crew of thirteen. Cruising speed was 25 knots and it used a tiny fraction of the fuel cargo jets would have burnt air-freighting similar quantities of goods. Emma Maersk was launched in Aarhus and got to China via Rotterdam, Suez and Singapore.

On board were 11 000 metal containers…each the size of a large lorry. Inside the containers were shoes, shorts, jeans, skirts, bras, socks, bibs, pyjamas, spectacle frames and handbags; Christmas decorations, hair curlers, toasters, microwave ovens, digital cameras, cocktail shakers, fizzy bath bombs, sofas, lampshades, carpets and kitchenware; 10 tons of mussels, 150 tons of New Zealand lamb, 138 000 tins of cat food, 63 tons of frozen pumpkins, 82 tons of rice noodles and 1548 pieces of frozen chicken. There were 1236 crates of calendars too.

And then there were the toys…dozens and dozens of containers of toys. China manufactures 80% of the world’s toys employing a million people in 5 000 factories…halls with barred windows locking workers in for 18-hour shifts and paying them less than £50 per month. The madness does not stop here.

In the world of Shipping Agents and Merchant Adventurers no hold is ever left empty. The Hanseatic League collapsed when there was no herring for their holds. For several hundred years Dutch Shipping had a Ships Monopoly in Northern Europe based on full holds other nation failed to match. The British Empire invented triangular trade to keep its holds filled. The media has shown no interest in the loading of the Emma Maersk in Felixstowe.

Rye Chamber of Commerce has received a Green Action Award for its Cardboard Recycling Project. Businesses deliver on Thursdays and Smurfit Kappa Recycling UK collects and disposes. We are being told of a 10% fall in the amount of municipal waste going to landfill in the UK…municipal waste accounts for 7% of the total…and 27% of UK rubbish being recycled last year. So that’s all right then. Or is it? What do Smurfit Kappa and Biffa and the others do with their increasing share of the 10 million tons of packaging waste? You are there before me.

On Guy Fawkes Day the Emma Maersk lifted her 29-ton anchor from our territorial waters for the return voyage to China…gathering up scrap and waste from around Europe en route. Having unloaded thousands of containers of in less than 24 hours the Emma Maersk left Felixstowe reloaded with crates of waste plastic, paper and steel.

In 1998 115 000 tons of waste was exported from the UK to China, India and other Asian countries. This year it will be over two million tons. It ends up in vast unregulated dumps with horrifying environmental conditions. So the next time Government and Local Authorities start crowing about their progress towards their EU Recycling Targets and Landfill Directives ask for a breakdown of where the waste is going…final destination. Lies, damn lies and statistics are the order of the day. Oh…and keep upwind of the Emma Maersk on her return voyage to China.