Author Archives: Tim Lenton

The other day I popped into Suffolk Poetry Festival for a couple of hours. It was held at the John Peel Centre in Stowmarket, and we got there by train. We left Norwich in blazing sunshine, and by Diss the sky was dark grey and it was pouring with rain. Fortunately, by the time we reached Stowmarket it was sunny again. Poetry is like that.

I read a couple of poems (one of them is printed below) and some tanka authored partly by my friend Joy McCall, who is described in her latest book, Fieldgates (published in America), as “the quintessentially English tanka poet”.

Tanka are Japanese in origin, of course, but Joy is pretty English, and certainly expert in the field of tanka – which in case you were wondering, are five-lined verses with a fixed number of syllables per line. In my case this is 4-6-4-7-6.  Joy’s versions are a little more flexible, which is why she is quintessential, and I’m not.

Actually, she is not only quintessential; she is incredible. Confined to a wheelchair by a road accident some years ago, she is in more or less constant pain and has repeated operations to stave off various kinds of collapse. But she is a prolific poet with enviable spiritual insight. The calm in the midst of the storm, you might say.

At the festival, I read my own tanka, and my wife read Joy’s responses. Joy not only finds travel difficult (though not impossible); she is also too shy to read for an audience; so this was a rare public performance of a tiny part of her work.

Funny things, poetry festivals. As well as readings of poetry and associated lectures and workshops, there was also at least one funny literary sketch, a lovely folk song and assorted monologues, one or two of them inspired. There was also a café run by the Green Party and an anti-Brexit rant in poetic form.

Not that this was a political or exclusive gathering. In fact poetry groups, and by extension festivals, are remarkably uncritical and welcoming – at least in Suffolk. There are no auditions, nor any obvious quality control. This is sometimes irritating but more often gives you a nice warm feeling in the stomach. Or maybe that was the coffee cake from the Green Café.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that if I was walking in the city somewhere, minding my own business, and a building fell on me, my wife would attribute the resulting fatality to my not eating the right food.

I know I am not eating the right food, because she tells me so quite often. She herself is eating the right food, which is why she looks about 20 years younger than me and is beautifully formed. No building would dare fall on her. If it tried to, it would undoubtedly miss.

It so happens, sadly, that I like food that is not right. In fact, the way you can tell which food is not right for me is that I like it.

I am not beautifully formed and would like to weigh rather less – an inviting target for a psychopathic building. But I have this strange feeling that if I go over to the bright side and stick to food that is good for me, I will not like it, get bored quickly and probably die (possibly of starvation) way before the building starts to look unsteady.

I am not a particularly fussy eater, but I once had lemon curd tart at school. I didn’t know what it was, went home and told my mother we’d had Vaseline tart, which I think was fairly accurate, taste-wise. I still don’t know what they do to lemons, which I love as a fruit (in small bursts), to make them taste so off-putting when they appear with meringues or drizzle cake. Or tarts.

As for couscous, hummus and tofu, I have doubts as to whether they are really meant to be edible. I could say the same for beetroot, and what is the point of vinegar, except to ruin perfectly good fish and chips?

While I am on the subject (or adjacent to it), pasta, rice and vegetables are not meals: they are things to have with meals, preferably in smallish quantities. This is not as widely known as it ought to be.

I would not like to give the impression that my wife is single-minded. She is funny, clever and laughs a lot, often at herself. So I don’t really mind what she says about my food.

Anyway, there is a slight chance that she would put the building death scenario down to my not getting enough exercise. This would obviously be harder to believe, because if I had been getting less exercise at that precise time I would not have been walking in the vicinity of the fatal building.

Still, I would not dismiss the possibility entirely.

Is this a crucifixion or a resurrection sky?
Is it the sky he was pinned to like a butterfly
skin running with blood
clouds stained sunset-red?
Or is it the ash-black, volcano-scarred sky
that lets no life through?
Darkness at noon, blank
as a worn-down tombstone,
words weathered away?
Is it the lightning-bright sky
torn apart by splinters of broken law,
channels for tingling spirit?
Or is it the arching white glory of an aching Easter dawn,
transfiguring, clean sheet, reborn?

And if a man walks down the valley and asks
the way to heaven,
does he look up?
Does he stumble as stones roll away?
Is there a lamb in the garden,
or someone praying beneath a tree?
A woman may meet an angel
out of the blue:
bread and wine may be set on rock,
waiting for fire.
Almost anything could happen.

But keep watching the sky.
Soon the stars will sing together
and you may catch a glimpse of the shining, shekinah walls
of the city of God, though not
as you imagined them.
The sky always surprises you.

Not so much an article, more a poem. And as it’s Easter, here’s another one…

Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, 87, the legendary activist and newt-chaser, has emerged from hiding to attack plans to cripple and exploit motorists in Norwich and elsewhere.

Mr Houseago was once voted the person with the most influence on Norfolk life, narrowly beating Richard “Volcano” Meek, the admired explorer, into sixth place. With the assistance of his former fiancée, Dorothea Goodchild, he conducted a long and genial campaign against the influence of newts on town and country planning, accusing them of conducting a “divisive and deceptive propaganda-driven attack” on the Norfolk way of life.

He is now concerned that one consortium of great-crested newts is making a comeback, sometimes using the name Transport for Norwich, and sometimes the name of a former Leeds midfielder who prefers to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

He says the newts want all of Norwich, even those roads that are closed – which is most of them – to have a maximum speed limit of 20mph. This is because 20 rhymes with “plenty”, which Mr Houseago describes as “the most unfortunate linguistic coincidence this century”.

He adds: “It will soon escalate, or possibly decelerate. You mark my words, we’ll soon be regaled with ‘Ten is Zen’, and some other so-called genius will be made an MBE.”

Comet-chaser and whole food chef Len “Kissme” Hardy, an old opponent of Mr Houseago, denied that the 20mph project was pointless and a vanity project. He also claimed that public consultation was carried out in order to find out what people wanted, but this suggestion was discounted as “far-fetched” and in some cases “ludicrous”.

Mr Houseago, in a burst of research-led thinking, pointed out that Manchester City Council had abandoned a plan for a city-wide roll-out of 20mph limits because it wasn’t having the anticipated benefits. But Mr Hardy retorted that Leicestershire County Council, which was nearer and therefore more likely to be right, wanted more average speed cameras, regardless of whether they were needed or not. Unfortunately the DfT did not think this was a good idea.

Mr Houseago said it just went to show that even the DfT could be right occasionally.

Meanwhile a newt representing Twenty’s Plenty said there should be no need to ask people whether they wanted things, because newts already knew what was best, and it was a waste of time. “That’s typical,” said Ms Goodchild from her almost inaccessible home in the centre of Norwich.

Comedian Tracey Ullman has produced a couple of sketches recently that poke fun at the an attitude to Christianity which seems to be becoming increasingly prevalent in our green and pleasant land.

The first portrayed an applicant for a job who was received enthusiastically until she mentioned she was a Christian, when the interviewers stepped back, thinking she must be weird. The second portrayed a baptism which was going well until the godmother mentioned that she was glad to do it because she was a Christian, when the parents recoiled. Then the vicar revealed that he too was a Christian…

If part of the job of a comedian is to laugh at the absurdities in society, this was spot on. I am aware that not everyone in the UK is a Christian or even believes in God. But it is a country founded on Christian principles, and part of the reason so many people want to live here is that we have a rule of law founded on those Christian principles. The Christian ideas of love, freedom and justice still mean something.

But there are disturbing signs that all this is at risk. This week a Christian MP was questioned by the BBC and by a colleague because she came straight to a parliamentary committee from an Ash Wednesday service, where traditionally a small ash cross is marked on the forehead.

The Spectator reported: “To her credit, she kept her ashes intact, explaining: ‘I think they just thought I didn’t want to be embarrassed – but I was not going to rub it off. Many religions have visible symbols and Christians should not feel any embarrassment in either practising their religion or in the public display of religious symbols.’”

A small thing, perhaps, but the so-called BBC blew it up into a big issue on its website and Facebook site. Why? Would they have questioned the actions of people of other faiths in the same way? I suspect not. It’s more what The Spectator goes on to call the Secular Inquisition, which everyone expects.

More seriously, because it involves the justice system, it is now under question whether preaching Christianity outside of church is permitted – despite the fact that our history shows that the evangelism of people like the Wesleys probably saved the country from violence and divisions in the past.

Two street preachers in Bristol were convicted of a public order offence after the prosecutor claimed that publicly quoting parts of the King James Bible in modern Britain “should be considered to be abusive and is a criminal matter”.

He told the court that “although the words preached are included in a version of the Bible in 1611, this does not mean that they are incapable of amounting to a public order offence in 2016”.

He also claimed: “To say to someone that Jesus is the only God is not a matter of truth. To the extent that they are saying that the only way to God is through Jesus, that cannot be a truth.”

It may not be a truth to everyone, but it is a serious claim not confined to 1611, and one that under any realistic  view of religious freedom must be capable of being expressed to others. If it is expressed in an abusive way, that is another matter, and totally out of tune with the actions of Jesus himself. But in this case it was the listeners who became abusive. Were they prosecuted? Of course not.

Do we want to remain a Christian country? I suggest it is essential for the sake of our sanity and security. In the past few weeks a Hindu mob invaded a Christian peace festival in India, beat up the pastor and attacked other Christians; in Egypt some 200 Christian families have had to flee the northern Sinai town of Al Arish, where six Christians were recently murdered and Islamist threaten to ethnically cleanse the area. There are many similar examples from other countries.

Could it happen here? We may scoff at the possibility. But if we go along with the idea that Christians are weird or habitually abusive in their beliefs, we are sliding, and it may be that in the words of Leonard Cohen, “things are going to slide in all directions”.

Some Christians certainly are weird – some people say I am myself – but my beliefs are not, and I do not want to be afraid to express them. At the moment the ignorance of prosecutors and magistrates may simply be mildly alarming – even absurd. But is it just the thin end of a quickly widening wedge?