Author Archives: Tim Lenton

I am now locked down, though I don’t feel any different. Yesterday I took the car for an MOT, not because I was panicking but because that was the day I booked it in, about a month ago. I went for a walk while it was being done. Later I bought some toilet rolls.

Again, I was not feeling particularly panicky, but I was in the shop – a local convenience store – to buy something completely different, and this pack of toilet rolls was on the floor, saying “Please buy me” – or words to that effect. So I did.

It was at that point that a couple who live three doors down happened to come in the shop, and the husband eyed me suspiciously. I felt a slight amount of panic then, but not much. On the way home, another neighbour crossed over and caught me with my casual package of toilet rolls. I acted nonchalant, and pretended they were not there. But of course they were. As far as I’m concerned, it means nothing.

Another neighbour has a cupboard full of toilet rolls. He volunteered the information when six of us were having a drink in the street to mark the last day we could be seen together. Apparently he has 37 toilet rolls, although he says he’s not worried because he could always step into the shower instead. I felt this was too much detail.

I had to cancel a visit to my friend in Hickling today, because of the lockdown, but I phoned her instead. We did not mention toilet rolls at all. I don’t know if she was avoiding the subject. She did not mention the American elections either. But then I tend to agree with Richard Holloway, who used to be a bishop, that you can prove nothing from something that is not mentioned.

The man who gets my groceries tells me the supermarket has sold out of salted potato sticks. I should have bought a box of them last week. Perhaps you can get them online.

I don’t get out much nowadays. I don’t even write letters to Private Eye, though I have been tempted. I don’t actually subscribe to Private Eye: our neighbour, a very kind man, lets me read his copy when he’s finished it, and in return I’ve taken to giving him our used copies of the Eastern Daily Press. Admittedly it is not so funny, but there’s more of it.

Anyway, reading anything is more fun than going out, because the world out there is becoming increasingly unrecognisable. Yes, there are people moving around as always, and for some reason there seems to be just as much traffic, but something is missing.

I conducted a number of studies on this, involving a variety of research groups at distinguished universities, and got a number of different results. This is not unusual, because no research group wants to be the same as other research groups, and whatever research group is most recent is inevitably right. Unless, of course, it isn’t.

This is the same basis that is used for creating Covid regulations. The result is that Covid regulations are universally ridiculous – or as some would have it, locally ridiculous. They are so ridiculous that only politicians could take them seriously – and of course the BBC. I am not going to explain why they are ridiculous, because if you don’t know, it is already too late.

My own research, undertaken entirely independently of universities, scientists, the NHS and Highways England, has uncovered something remarkable. The real threat to each and all of us is not a virus of any kind, but the removal of joy from daily life.

When was the last time you saw anyone smiling? Admittedly the lack of smileyness is partly because the imposition of masks prevents you from seeing whether someone is smiling or not, but is is also because they really aren’t. There is no longer any fun in popping into the city or going to a restaurant, or driving to the coast, because wherever you go there will be a lot of dreary people either carefully obeying the Covid regulations, or wishing they were in Benidorm.

What makes the human race human is our capacity for love. In most cases demonstrating love requires contact with other people, if only in the form of a handshake or a hand on the shoulder (thank you, Sergio Aguero). In extreme cases, it calls for a more thorough bodily contact, and it is no accident that more and more people are ending communications with the words “Hugs and Kisses” nowadays.

In the street, giving people a couple of metres space – apart from being impossible – gives the impression of avoiding them, or not wanting to risk contact. It is the kind of thing people used to do when they considered themselves superior to another race, or sex, or class.

One of the myriad “recent surveys” revealed the frightening suggestion that even when Covid goes away, 48% of those responding will continue to keep distance from people where possible. What sort of people have we become?

Separating people from their loved ones in care homes and elsewhere is not a solution: it is a move that should never be considered.

Covid is not the plague. It occasionally kills people, but so does the flu, and so do cancer and many, many other illnesses and accidents. Death statistics generally are no worse this October than they were last October. Covid may kill me: I am 75 and have been in hospital this year. But it probably won’t.

Whatever happens to me, the real measurement of death from this pandemic (if that’s the right word) can be found in the absence of love, the dearth of merriment, the artificial avoidance of physical signs of affection, and the care-worn eyes behind the pesky masks.

Although I have many doubts about the Government’s approach to Covid, since the outbreak started I have avoided travelling to my second home in Scotland.

This is partly because I don’t have a second home in Scotland, but there is a place in Aberdeenshire that does feel enough like home for me to want to go there. It’s called Ballater, and we have been there almost every year since about 1990.

We started going because our next-door neighbour in Norwich came from Aberdeenshire, and once we had got attuned to his accent – it took a couple of years – we found that he had a sister who owned a cottage in Ballater, and she might be willing to rent it out to us.

She was, and she became a close friend. She introduced us to several different Highland Games – no, that’s not a euphemism – and introduced us to her friends. She fishes for salmon, and she knows the top people along the River Dee – not just the ghillies, but the landowners. She is well connected.

The “wee house” we stayed in was a former school house, with plenty of ground and strategically placed. More recently it has been sold, and we have stayed at other cottages in the town.

During Storm Frank at the end of 2015 much of the town was flooded, when the Dee burst its banks to the south and west of its centre – the water inundating the golf course and hurtling into shops in the High Street and buildings elsewhere. It has taken some time to recover.

This was a major change to the town, of course. But other changes happened too. The station, which had been redesigned as a museum commemorating the visits of the Royal Family (Balmoral is just up the road), burnt down. Again it has risen from the ashes, and the Prince of Wales – or the Duke of Rothesay, as he is known in those parts – has opened a swish new restaurant to assist in the revival of the town. We’ve eaten there. It was superb.

Still we can’t help hankering over the Green Inn, which was in the early days probably our favourite restaurant in the world, but was sold and became an Indian. A very good Indian, it has to be said, but not the same thing.

We also miss the Glen Lui Hotel – or will, because it too was hit by fire earlier this year, and the last we heard it was due to be demolished. We stayed there on a couple of occasions, but always ate there when we were in Ballater, because the food and service were so good.

Storm Frank didn’t just flood the town; it demolished roads outside the town (the main A93 was washed away at one point between Ballater and Balmoral: it took only 19 days to replace it, partly because Norfolk County Council had nothing to do with it) and bridges  went down too. A beautiful footbridge at Cambus O’May on the way to Aboyne was badly damaged and has been hit again in recent days by another storm.

One of our favourite spots, the Linn of Quoich, had its road bridge completely destroyed, meaning that walking to the Linn became much more of a challenge.

We still love it all, of course, but we are becoming wary. Other restaurants and shops have changed hands, and when we arrive in Ballater nowadays the first thing we do is look round anxiously to see if our favourite places are still there. It’s the same everywhere, no doubt, but when it’s your second home, the changes hit you harder. 

Yesterday I took a brief trip back to my childhood – to those warm and sunny days before the climate changed and someone invented speed cameras and drink-driving, and when you could motor down all the streets in my home town without worrying whether someone had closed them overnight.

Prompted by a photo feature in my local paper – yes, we still take a local paper – my wife and I travelled out into the Norfolk countryside, using only a map to guide us. It was as if satnavs did not exist. Happily we took a wrong turn at an early stage and went a different way instead. But we got there and parked by the church at Tunstall, which you may not have heard of.

It lies on the brink of the marshes that cluster round the River Yare as it wends its unhurried way from Cantley to Great Yarmouth. To reach Tunstall you have to travel through Halvergate – a village from which some of the marshes take their name – and venture up a lane that leads to nowhere, other than Tunstall. It is not on the way to anywhere, and to get back home you have to turn round and come back. Some people find this alarming.

The church was open to visitors. The ruins are open to the heavens, atmospheric and – like the former chancel that has been converted into a simple place of worship by bricking in the arch and inserting a solid door – without much adornment. To a simple soul like me, this is very much back-to-childhood. I was brought up in a free church which did not even permit flowers in case they were distracting.

I loved Tunstall Church, or St Peter and St Paul, to give it its full title. But I loved the countryside around it even more. This is quite surprising, in that my first love is mountains, and the countryside around Tunstall and for miles around has been described as flat. It is not quite flat: if it were sea, it might be described as gently rolling, but mountains or even small hills are conspicuous by their absence.

We walked on a path across a dry, ploughed field, then on a country lane that ended in – well, nothing really. It just stopped. You could park and try one of two paths, neither of which really seemed to go anywhere. It was the edge of the Broads National Park. The outer edge. The path I tried was soon overgrown. If I had gone far enough I might have found a stream, or a staithe. Or maybe that was somewhere else. We picked small blackberries, and ate them for supper.

We drove back across open country. There was no direct route: we followed the edges of the fields, turning left, right, left. I wanted to stop, just to look at the patterns of the sun, but I resisted the temptation. Eventually we hit civilisation. The only good thing about civilisation is that there are toilets. In this case there was also a hold-up, because they were digging up the road. Again.

Bob Dylan once said: “I accept chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me.” He wasn’t speaking about the COVID regulations at the time, but his comment seems particularly appropriate as the virus-plagued summer of 2020 turns to mysterious autumn. 

Unlike Mr Dylan (né Zimmerman), I have never been happy with chaos, except as an artistic tool. In real life, I like to know what’s going on; that’s why I react so strongly against a bunch of anarchists stopping the newspapers being printed – among other things. 

It’s not just anarchists, though. No-one really has any idea what the Government will do next, because the coronavirus is as unpredictable as Boris. And vice versa. In looking for solid ground, one feels tempted to echo author Neil Gaiman’s words in his novel The Kindly Ones: “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.”

Admittedly, gravity is not the issue here. Indeed, scientific laws are not really the issue, because although we are supposed to be following the “science”, what we really see is a number of scientists holding different views. Indeed, that is what science is about. That is why taking what “most scientists” say as gospel is a particularly dangerous thing to do. All those conflicting studies and all that contrasting research. 

What effect is all this chaos having on us? The three major constraints imposed on us at the time of writing are to wear masks in shops, in church and on public transport (plus a number of other places that I don’t remember at the moment); to not meet in groups of more than six – a pretty random figure; and to keep two metres (another pretty random figure) away from people you don’t know.

You can’t hug, you can’t smile (or be seen to smile), and you can’t sing. Is this sensible restraint, or is it taking away from us a large proportion of what it means to be human? To be human means to move towards other people; following COVID regulations is to erect barriers between us, like the Mexican border wall.

You can see your friends or colleagues on Zoom, but you can’t touch them. Is this really what we want? To be in their presence but not in the same place? Not able to read their body language?

I’m not suggesting ignoring the regulations, because that would be chaos. What I do suggest is that whoever is responsible for dreaming them up gives it some serious thought, because making us less than human is as destructive of life as any illness. Simply surviving is just not good enough.