Author Archives: Tim Lenton

Family trees are awkward customers: they can lead you badly astray. For many moons, thanks to sloppy detective work and a series of guesses, I was under the impression that my mother’s family – the Browns – came from Cambridge, probably en route from Brighton.

This was based mainly on the fact that my grandfather was a gardener, and maybe he came from a long line of gardeners. I found a gardening Brown in Cambridge, and another in Brighton. Other things seemed to fit.

Brown of course is not a helpful name. It’s right up there with Smith on the unhelpfulness level where family trees are concerned, with the additional complication that you can spell it with an additional e if the fancy takes you.

To say I was confused would be an understatement. I was completely deceived. And I might have gone on with my self-deception for ever, if I had not had a shocking message from a woman called Nicola.

She had been dabbling in DNA and had discovered that she was my second cousin. Her grandmother was my mother’s cousin. Great! New relatives: what’s not to like?

In this case, nothing at all. Both Nicola and her mum, Jill, were delightful, and Jill turned out to be something of a Miss Marple (her daughter’s phrase). She had done some proper detective work, found that her grandfather was my grandfather’s brother, but almost 20 years younger. It was a big family.

What’s more, it was about as solidly Norfolk as you could get. Not a trace of Cambridge or Brighton. More Cringleford, Hethersett, Thurton and Bawburgh – among others. And many of them living in Norwich, just down the road, as it were, from my grandparents’ house on Hall Road, next to the butcher’s and now demolished.

I don’t know why my mother never mentioned them. Maybe she did, and I wasn’t listening. I am now returning to look at the maternal tree with more diligence and intelligence, and hope I can add to Miss Marple’s already impressive investigations. Relatively speaking, that is.

(Incidentally Nicola and Jill are not their real names. We don’t want to make this too easy, do we?)

Little did I think at the beginning of 2019 that I would end it being angry at the abuse of football by technology. I mean, really. Football is only a game, and there are one or two more important things going on.

But I am a bit concerned now that someone is going to get killed – probably a referee.

Referees are used to being disliked, and I’m sure they enjoy the amusing little ditties sung to them by peeved spectators – ditties of which “You don’t know what you’re doing” is the most common, and probably the only one quotable on a family website like this.

So what’s the problem? Decisions are being made about games in the Premiership by a monster called VAR, probably from the planet ZOG. Or as some would have it, “the morons inside Stockley Park”, which, in case you were wondering, is in Middlesex, not far from ZOG.

Good goals are being disallowed by machines that have no concept of the spirit of the game. And if you’re going to argue that the decisions are actually made by referees, those are the machines I’m talking about.

So we have technology that can draw lines on a screen fed by a multitude of camera angles, which enables referees miles away from the action and atmosphere of the actual game to pronounce that a scorer’s elbow or eyebrow is offside, and therefore a memorable goal cannot stand.

This is not the only example of technology enabling people to make incompetent judgements. Speed cameras: I say no more. But if you give someone technology that enables spooky action at a distance (to quote Einstein) the odds are that those in charge are going to want to demonstrate its wonderful accuracy, even if it isn’t accurate or wonderful.

Give a linesman (or assistant referee) a flag, and he will be inclined to wave it, even if he isn’t sure. Give the same official a complicated bit of technology and he will want to wave that too.

It’s not the technology that’s so bad: it’s the people using it. Why is there an offside rule in the first place? To stop players lingering upfield waiting for a long ball and forcing the opposing team to cover them – to the detriment of the game as a spectacle. It is not there to mention distances in inches, or millimetres, or toes.

If someone is not obviously offside, he should be judged onside. It’s as simple as that. More goals, more satisfaction, happier spectators.

A moderate and kindly friend who attended a recent game at which VAR reared its ugly head – and messed up yet again – told me they were so frustrated that they were on the verge of rushing on to the pitch, and so were many others. One day soon, it’s going to happen.

Don’t wait till the end of the season. Get rid of this monster now, before it’s too late.

In this coming Christmas season St Augustine’s Church, Norwich, will be holding an Alternative Carol Service, as it has for the last 20 years or so. Part of this event will be a series of dramatic interludes, taking place this year mainly in Bohemia. (Don’t ask.) Obviously I would like to give you a detailed preview, but this is prevented by the Official Secrets Act. So here instead is another secret document, which has featured in previous years:

Enter angel:

Report of the Angelic Health and Safety Committee.

Star date – oh, I’ll skip that bit. Actually, I’ll just read the summary. Then you can tell me what you think.

OK. It is the unanimous decision of the committee that Project Incarnation should be abandoned as unsafe. We have done a thorough risk assessment and survey of the area that was targeted, and a number of extreme hazards presented themselves. 

First, the planet itself is unstable. It is subject to unpredictable events like floods, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and warms up and cools down all the time.

Second, the country chosen is in turmoil. It is occupied and full of people who may turn violent at the slightest provocation. Armed soldiers are everywhere, and relations between different parts of society are strained.

Third, the time chosen adds significantly to the risks. They’re organising some kind of census, or election, which means people will be travelling around, which means more crime, more chaos, more risk of illness, injury or even death.

Fourth, the people targeted for inclusion in the project are unreliable. They could fail completely to carry out the roles allotted to them. They could do almost anything.

In conclusion, we feel that Project Incarnation is doomed to failure. We feel it will not be welcomed; it may even be rejected out of hand. And there is a real risk that someone could get killed.

What do you think? I just hope he sees sense and abandons the whole thing.

Enter Second Angel: I think you may find it’s too late.

Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.

I did not say that. I wish I had, but I didn’t. It’s rather like Christianity, in that you wish everyone would “get it”, because if they did, the world would be a better place.

It’s probably something to bear in mind when approaching the General Election. Does your candidate have a sense of humour? It’s probably a more important question than most we’ve heard so far.

The person who did say it was Clive James, who has just died. One day in the late 20th century I met him as I walked across the Barbican in London. I wanted to stop him and tell him what a huge inspiration he had been to me, in the way I wrote and what I wrote about.

But of course I didn’t. I thought, Why should he care? He looked worried enough already.

Some of you may be puzzled about my being inspired by a TV personality, but of course to me he was always a writer – more specifically, a television reviewer. His witty, beautifully written columns in the Observer in the 1970s led me to try my hand at the same thing. I got hold of one of the earliest video recorders, taped programmes while I was at work (in the evening) and spent a few priceless daylight hours writing a TV column for the Church of England Newspaper.

This later became a more general column, and I was eventually able to write a weekly page for the Eastern Daily Press, which lasted for eleven years, as well as many other pieces, including fiction and poetry. But that’s another story. Several other stories, in fact.

There are many things Clive James and I did not have in common. I could not be Australian – I have never even been there, because it’s too far, as Corey Ford almost said. And I could not share his lack of belief in an afterlife, because I think it’s an absurd position to take up in face of all the evidence. But you can admire someone without agreeing with them.

“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light,” he said. He always caught the light for me. I may be the only person in the world who would say his three strongest influences as a writer were Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Clive James.

I hope this doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, but I suspect it might. You have to laugh, don’t you?

Last week saw a rather sad landmark for the Lenton family: my uncle Paul, the youngest of my father’s brothers, died at the age of 96. He was the last of his generation, and the longest-lived.

This of course means that I am now part of the oldest generation, and some time in the not-too-distant future someone may well be writing similar words about me, or one of my brothers or cousins. That, I have to admit, is a little unsettling.

Paul was a good man. He founded a church near Eaton Park and was decorated for his first aid work during the war. He played football till he was well over 50 – mainly in goal –- and I played against him on occasion. His team in those matches was Park Church. I played for Surrey Chapel. Games took place twice a year, on Boxing Day and Easter Monday, and were the forerunner of today’s thriving Norwich Christian Football League.

Paul was born in Norwich, but his parents came from further afield. His father was born in Norman’s Cross, near Peterborough, and his mother in Sheffield. I’m not sure where they met, but I suspect it was in London, where my grandmother was a hospital nurse. Her maiden name was Booth, and she always claimed that she was related to the founder of the Salvation Army, but no-one ever worked out how.

The family moved to Norwich from Mansfield in about 1908. Their two eldest sons, Leonard and Reg, had already been born, but the rest were born in Norwich. Leonard moved to Africa not long after he married, and I don’t think I ever met him, though I now know his daughter, who lives in Liverpool.

Reg was a good friend to us, particularly after my father died of a stroke at the age of 43. But eventually he too moved away, though not so far. His three children – all older than me – now live in South-West England.

The Lenton family continued to grow in Norwich and became stalwarts at Surrey Chapel free church. The next boy, Frank, became a manager at Colman’s, and my father David went into local government, eventually becoming assistant education officer in Coventry.

Ken followed in 1915. He was a company secretary, I believe, and probably because he lived fairly close to us in Norwich, I became friendly with his two children, one of whom is now dead.

Having produced five boys, my grandparents now came up with two girls – Dorothea, who was matron of Norwich School when it took boarders, and who was one of the nicest people I’ve met. Her sister Kathleen was rather more severe, but I got to know her better after she returned from Zimbabwe after many years as a nurse/missionary and lived in Norwich until her death in 2011. She had outlived two husbands. Neither girl produced children.

Paul’s birth in 1923 completed that generation of the Lenton family. His three children survive him – two of them living in Norwich and one in Lincolnshire.

I still have an aunt living just outside Norwich. She is in her 90s, but she is not a Lenton – she is my mother’s youngest sister; so her maiden name was Brown. But that’s another story.