Author Archives: Tim Lenton

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.

I’m not sure if I should admit to this, but just over 50 years ago I was in the United States illegally. For a fortnight – and I hope that will confuse the authorities enough to let me get away with it, because Americans have no idea what a fortnight is.

It happened when I worked, fairly briefly, for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. They had just bought a very old British newspaper called The Christian, and by an amazing coincidence, the previous summer I had been on holiday at a guest house in Minehead, Somerset.

Not an obvious coincidence, unless you know that a Scottish journalist with four theology degrees was staying at the same guest house. I don’t know why. Somehow, he and I got talking, and he discovered that I enjoyed writing. I showed him some short pieces I had written, and the following autumn he gave me a ring at my home in Norwich.

He had just been appointed editor of The Christian and was looking for writers. At the time I was training to be an accountant. I don’t think I would have been a very good one. Dr J D Douglas (for it was he) asked me if I would like a job in London, and I – or whoever was inhabiting my body at the time – said yes. I soon found myself in a bedsit with shared toilet and bathroom in North London. I was on my own.

It was the start of my journalistic career. I made my way each morning to Bush House in central London and reported on various meetings and events. The first press conference I went to was in French. Fortunately there was a translator.

J D eventually decided that it might be a good idea if I went to a writing school. The one he decided on was in Minneapolis, headquarters of the BGEA. It was my first flight. I had been outside the UK before, but only on school trips.

And there was some kind of strike. Instead of flying straight to Minneapolis, I had to travel via Prestwick to Toronto. From there I had to find myself a flight to Winnipeg – also in Canada – and from there a train to Minneapolis. It was not straightforward.

I did however manage to get a flight on a rather shaky old propeller-driven job from Toronto to Winnipeg. It went via Thunder Bay, which was appropriate, because there was a lot of lightning around at one point. Quite spectacular, if I remember.

It was about midnight when I arrived. I found a taxi and asked the driver, who came originally from Horsham in Sussex, to take me to a hotel near the station. I didn’t have change; so we had to into the hotel to get it. To my young and cynical eye, the hotel seemed rather less than trustworthy; so once in my room I propped a chair against the doorknob and put my passport under the pillow.

You may wonder where all this is leading. But no, I was not robbed – not at that point, anyway. The next morning I trotted over the station and bought a ticket to Minneapolis, which was pretty much due south, across a very large number of wheatfields. Just over 450 miles. The cost? Ten dollars. I was deeply shocked, and very pleased.

And of course during the rail journey I passed from Canada into the United States. I don’t know exactly when, because there was nothing to indicate it. But eventually the conductor came round, looked at my ticket, and I explained I would be here for a fortnight. There was a long conversation, and eventually I twigged that in the US, two weeks do not make a fortnight.

Probably confused by all this, he said I needed to sign some kind of form, and he would come back with it. But he never did.

So when I came to leave the United States, a fortnight or two weeks later, it could have been tricky. I did not have the paperwork. Thankfully, someone was looking after me. I met a man who knew a travel agent, and she sorted it out.

I have been to the Unites States since then, once via Canada to Florida, and twice directly there. I can recommend Captiva Island. It was all perfectly legal.

“All of humanity’s problems,” wrote Blaise Pascal, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” 

He was probably not thinking of coronavirus when he wrote it, but it seems a useful observation in the current crisis, and one that Boris Johnson might find helpful as a variation on “Stay alert. Stay at home unless you go out. Wear a mask”, which lacks something in depth and subtlety. 

I’m sure it would help if more of us could sit quietly in a room alone and not rush off to the nearest beach in a panic because the package planes are grounded. Now that there are so many more things you can do in a room on your own – television, radio, video games, recorded music – it’s bit surprising that the urge to get out is so strong. 

I have always been attracted by Corey Ford’s dictum, “I’d go away if it wasn’t so far.” Perhaps we could adopt is as a kind of subliminal slogan popping up between programmes.

But there are many comments from the past that could be adapted to current circumstances. For instance, if you’re feeling the urge to travel unnecessarily, you might be influenced by this philosophy, which I believe came from the Peanuts comic strip, one of the world’s great sources of wisdom: “Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. It might not be necessary.”

I wonder what motto is hanging on the wall of those who make decisions about our behaviour in Covid times. I feel folk singer Tom Paxton’s comment many years ago would be appropriate: “If I’m absolutely sure of anything, I probably forgot what it was.”

Or maybe this from Mark Twain: “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”

Super-scientist Albert Einstein felt that when explaining complex problems you should “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. In the years since he said it, almost everyone in authority has routinely forgotten the vital last three words, and this has continued during the critical last six months, resulting in such conflicting idiotic instructions as “Go to pubs and restaurants, but not church, because that’s obviously much more dangerous, especially if you sing.”

But how do we – the locked in, masked and socially distanced – feel about the way the world is going? Poet Philip Larkin comes into his own with “Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives”

Or maybe another poet, Stevie Smith:
“I was much too far out all my life.
And not waving but drowning.”

The effect on us all is really one of disorientation. Before March this year we were comfortable, in the sense that we sort of understood the world and how it worked. We may or may not have liked it, but the familiarity of it made it bearable at worst and wonderful at best. The bits in between were understandable. 

But all that was just a delusion. Most of us didn’t really know what was going on – and as Donald Rumsfeld would say, we didn’t know that we didn’t know. Now we do.

Life, we now see, is unpredictable, and that must affect the way we approach it. Two vastly different writers saw this clearly. First, the singer Leonard Cohen, who described someone as “starving in some deep mystery, like a man who is sure what is true”.

And the writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge: “Some see that life’s a mystery. Others think it can be grasped.”

As we step wonderingly into the second half of 2020, the others must surely be shrinking in number. 

Twelve years ago, when I was in hospital recovering from a radical prostatectomy (removal of prostate and accompanying cancer), I had a peculiar experience. More than one, actually – but one in particular.

I woke in the night, and I could see the clock clearly. Everything was wrong. For some reason, I was no longer in Norwich but in King’s Lynn, and this was quite frightening, because there was no reason for it. I tried to get back to where I knew I should be, but I couldn’t, because I was not connected. It was as if I had been shifted very slightly out of sync with reality.

A long sequence of bizarre events ensued, during which I seemed to wander round the ward, looking for a way back. The two nurses ignored me. At last, exhausted, I sank back into my Norwich bed, closed my eyes for a while and then opened them again. According to the clock, the whole tortuous episode had lasted no more than a minute – and that in itself was terrifying, because it was impossible.

I was reminded of this when I was in hospital again last week, on antibiotics for a problem with my gall bladder, and a stone stuck somewhere near my pancreas. Again, I woke in the night – one of many, many times – and had trouble recognising where I was. The curtains seemed familiar (or did they?), people moved backwards and forwards, and so did the room. I was struggling to connect. Was it real?

Eventually my brain slid into sync and I walked hesitantly to the toilet. But the impression I retain is one of confusion: was I slightly out of sync with reality again? What was going on?

The only other time I have felt anything like this was in the weeks following a serious car accident in which I broke my arm – less than a year ago. On at least one or two occasions while walking by the river afterwards I felt I was in some other reality. Had I died in the crash, or was I really here? Was the real me walking just behind me, catching me up?

OK – all this is weird. Most of the time, I think I have a fairly good grip on reality, as most people do. It is hard to express how frightening it is when this is called into question.

In hospital time itself distorts. Most of the time nothing happens, and happens very slowly. Without meaningful contact (especially in these coronavirus times) none of it seems to make much sense.

I’ve been here all day. How can it be 10am?

All I can say is that my wife’s daily visits just about kept me sane. Or did they? I’ll let you be the judge.