Author Archives: Tim Lenton

One of the best pieces of advice given to me early in my “career” was to start what my editor at the time called a commonplace book. This was just a place to store any quotations that struck me as valuable for some reason – that reason varying from the profound to the funny, or even mysterious.

Obviously the idea was to make a note of who had originated the quote and in what context. This did not always work – as in this one, for instance. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s still memorable as far as I’m concerned:

“I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.”

This comes under the “funny” category, in case you were wondering. But at the same time, it always made me feel a little uneasy. How many things, especially in science, do we assume are settled?

And so I was intrigued to read the other day that gravity may not be a law or fundamental force after all, but possibly something that emerges from quantum electromagnetic interactions, potentially reshaping our view of spacetime itself. I’m sure you know what that means.

Science is a funny thing. We think it means establishing facts, but in fact it depends on doubt. The first thing a scientist should do when looking closely at a theory is try to prove it wrong. If this fails, he or she has something to work with. 

Unfortunately it seems to me that recently this truth has been forgotten. We collect data and come to conclusions, then forget that it is the data that (hopefully) are facts, and not the conclusions. Conclusions, or theories, are our attempts to knock the data into a shape that we understand. There is a huge capacity for error in there. 

People who are not scientists don’t really get this. They really want science to be the facts. Follow the science, they say. Well, that’s OK, as long as you realise that it might be leading you in the wrong direction. Test the science, or question the science, might be the more sensible option.

Unfortunately it seems to me that schools and universities look at things wrongly. They want consensus on a particular issue, but science is not democracy. They teach the consensus as if were the only option, and everything else as if it’s a conspiracy theory. 

Unfortunately, as I’ve said before – and here I delve into my commonplace collection again – the easiest and least stressful path to success is to adopt the status quo viewpoint without question. A guy called Fred Heffer wrote that five years ago.

So confusing consensus with certainty is a popular career move. It is also welcomed in the population at large, especially if you live in a democracy. And you don’t have to search far down the decades to find breakthrough theories that were resisted for years because those in charge preferred to deal with stuff they had been taught and had taught to others, whether it was right or not.

Science should be exciting, because it frequently does somersaults. But those in charge like straight lines. However, as R Buckminster Fuller pointed out, there are no straight lines in the universe. It’s a lot more interesting than that.

So maybe speed isn’t the main cause of accidents. Maybe theories of climate change are wrong. I’ll go further: they definitely are. I don’t know how, but I’d guess fundamentally. Really. That’s pretty obvious already. Take my word for it. One day everybody will say so.  

Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player in the world, turned up for a tournament in New York recently wearing jeans. Smart jeans (he’s a smart player), but jeans nevertheless. 

This offended the organisers, who had a dress code. Carlsen offered to pay a fine, but the organisers insisted he went back to his hotel and changed. Carlsen withdrew from the tournament. Checkmate. 

Who is at fault here? I should declare an interest in that I play chess and, more to the point, hate dress codes. I rarely wear a suit, almost never a tie, and have never trusted anyone who has a handkerchief in his (or her) breast pocket. 

This attitude has not served me well in life (except in telling me who not to trust). It has been stated that “the easiest and least stressful path to success is to adopt the status quo viewpoint without question”, and the status quo – apart from anything else – seems to be that looking smart means you can be promoted. 

This may be why so many idiots end up in charge of vital areas, where they see their role as preserving the status quo, particularly the system that has enabled them to reach the heights they are not really qualified to reach, and to get rewarded for failure. 

This is why the National Health Service is so hopeless, and why the scandal in the Post Office destroyed so many lives – though not the lives of the people “in charge” – the cover-up merchants who dress well and charge large fees. 

This sickness affects the whole of society, from the refusal to repair potholes to generally moronic management that can affect whole cities. Sadly, it affects the Church too – the very place that you would think ambition and status quo should have no role at all.

Thus, instead of focusing on preaching love and forgiveness, the Church is obsessed with looking good and making fatuous gestures, like promoting the idiocy of net zero, constructing columns of ineffective waffle on safeguarding, and earmarking money for meaningless slavery “reparations”.  

 I could go on, but I have to get dressed. I seem to have mislaid my jeans.

If you want to kill something, bring in management consultants. You may think this statement a little sweeping, but we live in a world where it seems almost routinely true. 

In fact the management class has taken over to such an extent that everything that makes life worth living, which expands our experience or promotes freedom, is at risk of being stamped out by people whose only real motivation is to promote their own wellbeing.

Amazingly, this is true even of the Church. 

Historian Peter Hennessy once said: “If management consultants had drafted the Sermon on the Mount, there would be no Christians anywhere.”

Happily, management was not consulted by Jesus at all, which is what makes the Kingdom of God so attractive. But the current leaders of the Church of England – with some notable exceptions – lean ever more towards solving problems by implementing management “solutions”, often combined with fashionable groupthink. 

Why does this happen? Well, managers as a whole – including lawyers, politicians, administrators and consultants – are grossly overpaid; so naturally they want to preserve the status quo. Therefore every solution they come up with aims to avoid disruption of any kind: in the words of Joseph Heller, they routinely “distort reality for the sake of neatness”. They want to smooth things over; keep things quiet. 

Which is why inquiries are largely a waste of time, unless they are conducted by an independent spirit who can not only see through the fog but withstand the pressure. Not many of those about.

Of course, the Church of England has never been perfect. Back in 1978 Canon John Collins was saying: “I can assure you, after nearly 50 years in its ministry, the Church of England is riddled with, if not obsessed by, questions of status and precedence.”

This is a very human trait – even the early disciples occasionally fell prey to it – but it is destructive, especially when those caught up in it have real power. And it has nothing in common with Christianity. Quite the opposite.

Of course the Church at a local level contains many people who actually believe, who are self-effacing and want to do good. So against all the odds, I am optimistic. After all, individuals make a difference in the real world. 

And then there’s Piers Brandon, who summed it up rather well: “Anything is possible in the C of E,” he said. “Even  Christianity.” 

At some point in your childhood you and your friends went out to play together for the last time, and none of you knew it.

I read this sentence out of the blue recently and found it profoundly sad, without knowing quite why.

I suspect that this supposed event – I don’t know when or where it might have occurred, or who the other characters were – had been given some previously unthought-of significance by being commented on. And since it now had significance, I wish I had been aware of it. It obviously must have happened.

In fact it would have happened several times, with different characters in different places. After all, I moved house at the ages of five, seven and ten, and two of those moves were to different cities.

We often do not know when something is going to happen for the last time. Some things happen like a bolt from the blue; most things creep up on us. 

Those of us fortunate enough to live in a relatively comfortable part of the world at a relatively comfortable time proceed through life often in an unthinking way: no-one is going to drop a bomb on us, probably, and if we had fish and chips last Friday, we will doubtless have it again next Friday. 

Then something happens that changes everything. My father died when I was ten. Obviously I did not know this was going to happen. It wasn’t my fault. 

But should I have been aware that some of my friends would soon disappear out of my life? Did I blink and miss it? Was that my fault? 

It should go without saying that those living in a war zone like Sudan, Ukraine or Gaza  will be all too aware that any day could be the last time they see their friends, their family or their house. I can hardly envy those people, or see them as morally superior. 

We all live in our own worlds. I have to deal with the world I have been placed in, but maybe I should be more aware that those tiny regrets sneaking from the distant past into the present are too trivial to be significant.

Maybe. But that sentence still hit me in the heart.

I met a guy in a wheelchair yesterday. We were at a funeral, and he had driven down from up north to Norfolk on his own, in his specially adapted van. I attempted to give him my place in the refreshments queue, but he would not permit it. He was, he said gently, perfectly capable of looking after himself.

He was right, too. Despite his disability (legs and lower back), he was cheerful and positive. He spoke about the place where he lived, and how more people were coming to worship with the community there. It was a tonic speaking to him.

Obviously I am going to make the point that most people pursue the negative in their conversations. If it’s not the weather (it’s turned cold; winter is here and the nights are drawing in), then it’s road conditions. Or technology. Or the Government. You see? It rolls off the tongue.

In my part of the world, roads are a special problem. Potholes? Yes, of course. But more irritating even than that are the constant road closures, where work takes months to finish, and the result is often worse than the road was to start with. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the council is given money for special projects that really don’t need doing – and they aren’t allowed to use the money for anything else. They certainly don’t want to give it back; so…

I don’t think it’s malice – just incompetence. 

I give a friend a lift home after church. The route goes along Angel Road, which you would think would get preferential treatment at Michaelmas. But no: it has been closed for weeks and weeks, together with adjoining roads (you have to guess which), and you find yourself bumping along excessively road-humped residential streets lined on both sides with cars until you reach another street that has been closed.

Some of these streets have 20mph limits. Obviously this is wonderful. Twenty is plenty: coin that phrase and you get an award. Except of course it’s not plenty: in many places it’s not enough, and often where it is plenty, you would be hard put to drive faster even if you wanted to, which you wouldn’t.

Who decides these things? People like the gentleman I drove past the other day, who shook his fist at me and made slow-down signals. At the time I was certainly doing less than 15mph round a tight corner, and he was walking in the road. 

Any kind of accident brings demands to lower the speed limit, but in fact slowness itself is dangerous. Dithering motorists are a risk. If people didn’t drive too slowly, overtaking would be hugely reduced. I would like to see 30mph raised to 35mph and 20mph raised to 25mph, where you can drive much more easily without losing concentration. Twenty-five keeps you alive. How about that? A knighthood at least, surely? 

All very negative, I hear you say. What would the man in the wheelchair say? Well, surprisingly, he said roughly the same thing. In a very positive way. With a smile on his face. 

Generations come, and generations go. I am now in the last generation – my family’s last, anyway. It is a strange feeling, looking down.

I emerged into this state a couple of weeks ago, when my last aunt died at the age of 95. If my calculations are correct, I have had 12 aunts, though not all at once. My mother had four sisters, and my father had two sisters and five brothers. All the brothers married at least once, and all but one had children. 

The aunt who has recently died is Thelma, my mother’s youngest sister. I can’t say I knew her well, though she never lived far away from me (except when I lived in London). She was not a great one for socialising, especially after her husband – to my eyes, a bit of a ringer for Robert Mitchum – died. For many years I doorstepped her at Christmas, and more recently still have been visiting her at a care home.

She was looked after pre-care home by a neighbour, and then by the neighbour’s daughter, to whom I’m extremely grateful. We will be two of probably fewer than half a dozen at her cremation this week. 

So who am I left with in my own generation? I’m pretty sure that this varied collection of aunts and uncles produced 14 cousins for me, and I had two younger brothers. Of that 16, I believe nine survive. The next generation is thinning already. 

It is at this point that I lose track. Although I have tried my hand at a digging up the family tree, I have trouble with the offspring of two uncles, one of whom lived most of his life and died in Africa, while the other moved to the south coast of England, where his children multiplied. In each case I know one cousin. Oddly the African-born one now lives in Liverpool. 

It is said that everyone now alive in England is descended from Charlemagne. You can see how that could happen. My wife has just discovered – quite accidentally – a branch of her own tree that runs to many pages in the North Walsham area of Norfolk. Her parents are Norfolk born and bred, but she was born in Glasgow. Someone, somewhere, will be trying to work that out one day. If you do work it out, please let me know – but you’ll have to make it soon. If you’re too late, tell my son. He lives in Canada.