Author Archives: Tim Lenton

It’s not often you find yourself in a congregation that includes top broadcasters Michael Buerk, Michael Portillo and David Starkey – as well as several others who I sort of recognised but couldn’t pin down.

The occasion was the funeral of my old friend David Coomes, who spent the major part of his working life as a radio producer at the BBC. He died after an incapacitating illness, and I was fortunate enough to spend some happy times with him and his wife Kristine fairly often during the last few years of his life.

We met when I joined a newspaper called The Christian back in 1966. It was my first job in journalism. I knew practically nothing, I was alone in London, and his infectious good humour was a great help in an office where I sometimes felt out of my depth. The paper was closed while I was on a year of absence at university, and he was made redundant too, working to start with on Middlesex County Times newspapers and helping me to get a job on the Acton Gazette as a sub-editor.

We were living opposite him in Winchmore Hill when our son was born. He and his first wife, Jennie, who was pregnant when we met, had a boy called Phil who became close friends with our son. So our families remained linked, even though we soon moved up to Norfolk to buy a house. Eventually David divorced and married newspaper editor Anne, moving up to Cheshire. She now edits the parish pump website for parish magazine editors.

When that marriage too broke up, David married Kristine, a highly talented German radio producer, researcher and trainer. It says something about him (and about his wives) that all three were at the funeral.

David was not only very, very good at what he did – hence the respect shown to him by people at the top of their game – he was generous, witty and kind. I don’t think he was ever quite sure about God, having periods of doubt and cynicism, but he never let go, and his love of the highly spiritual singer Leonard Cohen reflected that.

I would like to think I introduced him to Cohen, but my memory is not quite good enough to be sure. We certainly shared a love of his work, and it was absolutely right that instead of hymns at his funeral, three recordings of Cohen songs were played (You want it darker, Anthem and If it be your will). The words could not have been more appropriate.

David was a voracious reader of novels, and every time I saw him in the last few years, he presented me with two or three (or more) from his library to read – and to keep. He was making sure my brain kept working, and it was much appreciated. I will try not to let it slide, but it may be difficult.

Watching Scotland beat England in a one-day cricket international was quite satisfying – partly because I feel a strong affinity to Scotland, despite my recalcitrant DNA, and partly because it wasn’t what I call cricket.

The bats are too heavy, and everything is weighted in favour of the batsman, who invent silly new strokes like reverse sweeps and overhead volleys.

The interesting thing about cricket is not hitting the ball hard and getting a “maximum”, which I believe is a six, though that clearly has too few syllables. If you want to hit the ball hard without finesse you can play baseball (or rounders, as I call it).

The interesting thing about cricket is the subtleties that bowlers can use to make the ball swerve, spin or swing. Very little of that is possible in one-day cricket, with its white ball and hard pitches.

Yes, I’m a grumpy old man. I look back with longing to those days when cricket and other sports were played by teams rather than groups, going forward was rather taken for granted, and “positive” was an adjective.

Now that we have reached the much-trumpeted soccer World Cup finals, we have the same sorts of problems, except that most teams seem to prefer negatives to positives, and more emphasis its placed on possession of the ball than on actually scoring. The thing about scoring is that you give away possession of the ball, by putting it in a precise area: the net. You know, the kind of thing that most teams never seem to practise.

Yes, I’m a grumpy old man. There is a group of us, though not a team. But is it worth listening to us? I quote from a scientific article: “Every generation tends to see society going to the dogs as standards of education, behaviour, speech and pretty much everything else decline. In fact, what many people see as decline is simply a move away from the norms they are accustomed to.”

Well, that could be true, but it depends on your general world view. If you think things are generally improving, it applies, and I should shut up. If you think things are gradually getting worse, then it doesn’t help. I do happen to think that. Scientifically, it’s called entropy. It’s happening to me, and it seems to be happening to the world generally.

However, as a Christian I have to take a more optimistic view of the universe, and of myself. Entropy may not be the end. I quote from a non-scientific article: “This is what the Lord says— he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, ‘Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.’ ”

That’s more like it. I am no longer grumpy, going forward. I might almost say I’m positive.

One day many years ago I had something done to my teeth. I forget what it was (there are so many possibilities), but as usual it involved sitting still for quite a long time, and to distract me from the discomfort of it all, my dentist, Ross, put some music on.

It so happened that he chose an album by Mary Chapin Carpenter, which was why I ended up in the Theatre Royal during the Norfolk and Norwich Festival last month. I am not a great concert goer, but this one was exceptional because of the quality of the songs, and for some reason I hardly thought of my teeth at all. According to my cousin Mark – who is a constant concert goer – it was one of her best performances.

There was a warm-up artist, and her name was Emily Barker. She was part of the reason I went to the concert, because I had been so impressed with a song she sang that accompanied one of the Wallander series. It was called Nostalgia, if I remember rightly. It brought it all back.

In the video that I found after falling for Wallander, Emily was accompanied by The Red Clay Halo, and I fell for the video too. Also the name of the group. It’s strange how one thing leads to another. In Norwich Emily did not bring the Halo but was accompanied by Lukas Drinkwater, another talented musician I had never heard of. There are so many of them. If it had not been for my dentist, I would never have heard of him.

The same could not be said for Barb Jungr, who I heard for the first time the same week, singing Bob Dylan songs in a tent the end of the evening. I was introduced to Bob Dylan back in the 1960s by a temporary friend who I have not seen for well over half a century. I bought my first Dylan album without having heard a single song of his, and was bowled over totally and immediately. Great lyrics, great tunes, great singing technique. If I were to say it changed my life, you might think I was exaggerating. But it did.

Barb sang quite differently but also brilliantly in jazz/cabaret style, accompanied by keyboard and bass. It was a marvellous evening, and her versions of songs I knew well were riveting. She was also witty and fun to be with.

She opened with the relatively recent Things Have Changed and ended with one of my old favourites, Chimes of Freedom. In between came the rarely heard but quite outstanding Blind Willie McTell – plus many others, of course. I wish you could all have heard it, but I understand some of you don’t like Bob Dylan songs. What’s the matter with you?

Why do I bother writing all this down? Because – as I say – I was musing on how one thing leads to another, and how you never have any idea that it’s going to happen. So thank you Ross, and thank you Colin, my temporary friend. And the rest of you, of course.

Thank you to the two people who responded to my few paragraphs last time and said they would like me to continue with the story. As this is a surprisingly high number of people even reading my posts, let alone responding positively, I am going to give it a shot. But that will take some time. For now, I am going to tell you about talking circles.

Most talking goes round in circles, of course. But occasionally someone gets excited about traditional ways of discussing things, and even more occasionally that person will set up a talking circle. More occasionally still, she will persuade other people to take part.

I took part in one of these the other day. I don’t know why, except that the person who asked was very persistent. (While we’re on that subject, can I remind all young people, particularly my grandchildren, that being persistent is the key to success: being talented is helpful, being lucky even more so, but being persistent is absolutely vital. You won’t believe this until you’re my age and regretting everything you didn’t do, or try, or finish.)

Anyway, we were sitting round in this circle, like Native Americans. That was the easy bit. If we wanted to speak, we had to pick up a stick, which someone had found on a beach. I don’t think the beach is essential, but apparently the stick is. You can’t talk if you don’t have the stick.

You can’t pick up the stick unless you have something to say – unless you are keen on meditation, in which case you can pick up the stick and think for a while, presumably because you have a burning desire to say something, though you don’t know what.

I don’t think that was in the rules; that’s just what happened. Incidentally, isn’t it strange how many people who love silent meditation can’t stop talking, or wanting to talk?

Anyway, this went on for some time, and some of what people said was quite interesting, though I suspect not in the way the person who organised it wanted it to be. Still, it was a circle, and the people on the circumference just went round and round, like bicycle wheels but without the helmets.

There is a flaw in all this, of course, and it’s not punctures (though I suppose that could happen). The main flaw is that the people who like talking talk, and the people who don’t much like talking, or can’t reach the stick, remain silent. The stick had a definite attraction to certain people, like a magnet.

That was all right for us, though, because we were told that what was really important was listening. Presumably in that case picking up the stick was self-sacrificial, because then you had to talk and couldn’t listen.

I hope I’m not making this sound complicated. The other important thing is to set a time when you have to finish. We did that. That worked well.

Over the years, I’ve started writing many works of fiction and finished a few. The other day I came across this one. These are the first four paragraphs. Do you think it’s worth continuing?

Sally-Anne McTell was born clinging to wreckage. The wreckage in this case was her mother, Wendy, who had been abandoned on a beach by her boyfriend, Roger, seven months through her pregnancy. Many of her friends saw this as a despicable, cowardly move on his part, because Wendy had a hard time struggling back through the soft sand and on to the promenade. Roger’s friends saw it as justified desperation, because Wendy was a pessimist – not just looking on the black side of things, but on the even blacker side of the blackness. She did not see how anything could possibly turn out well. In her experience, it never did.

“It’s all right for you,” she told an incredulous Roger. “You can go out to work. I’ll have to look after it every day. I’ve got a degree, you know. It will probably be ill, or brain-damaged.”

Roger said he did not believe brain damage was hereditary, and in any case the child might with any luck take after its father. This may have been a mistake. In response, Wendy detailed at length the ways in which she hoped the child would not turn out to be like its father, and Roger decided he wanted nothing more to do with either of them. His flat was empty by the weekend, and his sickly white saloon car was never seen in Norfolk again.

All of which was rather ironic, because the father of Wendy’s child was in fact a geography teacher who had met her one night in a pub on the seafront when Roger was in Peterborough. As they were both drunk at the time, neither of them remembered having sex behind the Marina Centre, though Wendy was puzzled to find sand in her stilettos the next day. As Wendy was in the habit of sleeping with Roger, she naturally assumed he was the father. In fact, he was sterile, but he did not find this out until much later, when he was living in Camden, Maine, with an optimistic waitress called Camille…