Author Archives: Tim Lenton

I have come to expect that in any area that can be described as even remotely political, my views are at variance with just about all my friends, and are certainly not represented by anyone standing in my constituency for any form of office, be it MP, mayor, police commissioner, binman or traffic warden.

This means that not only I am effectively disenfranchised, but I cannot talk to my friends either.

So clearly I cannot venture any kind of opinion on whether we should stay staunchly in the European Union or come out of it as quickly as possible. I will however make one or two observations.

Most young to medium-young people seem in favour of staying in. This may be because they have never experienced life outside the EU, or indeed known that such a thing was possible. However, young people are the future, and if they want to stay in, perhaps we should let them. It won’t be long before it won’t matter to me one way or the other. In fact that day is fast approaching.

Most people of my generation want to leave. That may be something of a generalisation, but if it’s true, I suspect it’s because they resent the dishonest way we were dragged into it. Or maybe they remember the halcyon days when we made our own laws and could laugh at all the stupid things we did, instead of grimly blaming them on foreigners.

It has been suggested that we should judge the merits of our journey by looking at our fellow travellers. How can we think of leaving when Batty Boris and Michael Gove are also of that opinion? That sort of makes sense until you realise that David Cameron and George Osborne are of the opposite opinion.

(I myself am astonished at how many loud and abusive Cameron-haters have in recent weeks seem to have fallen in love with him. Will it last? You tell me.)

The idea that older may be wiser has long gone by the board – at least in our up-to-the-minute culture. It is of course wrong to say that those with more experience, expertise and knowledge are necessarily wiser, but they may not all have Alzheimer’s either. I know I haven’t. At least, I don’t think so.

So which way should you vote? Are you frightened of migrants or terrified by trade deficits? Do you think the NHS is sinking fast, or is the sky on fire? I suppose you could make a balanced decision, and vote to come out a little way and then edge back. Independence Day or Divergent? It’s tail-on-the-donkey time.

I say this at the risk of upsetting all my friends.

I made my first visit of the season to Carrow Road last night, and saw Norwich City beat Watford 4-2. It was an exciting occasion: my neighbour’s 13-year-old son, Freddie, was one of the mascots, and there was much merriment all round. Which is odd, because the night ended with Norwich being relegated to the Championship, thanks to Sunderland’s win against Everton.

It was not a particularly merry evening for me. First, I forgot how to swipe my wife’s season ticket, then I entered the ground through the wrong lounge and couldn’t find my seat (although I’d sat in it many times before) and finally I was barred from the lounge at half time because I’d left my ticket with someone who was already in there.

I didn’t mind too much about that, because they don’t serve black tea. I mean, really.

I did mind the constant sit-stand yo-yoing up and down because people arrived late, left early for half-time, came back late and then left early at the end. It’s not as though the football was boring – on this occasion, anyway. But Norwich, I’m told, are a yo-yo club, and I suppose this includes the spectators. Since I’m not a regular spectator, I can’t really expect anyone to take note of my muttering.

(In case you’re mystified, a yo-yo club is one that is relegated one year and promoted the next. We hope.)

But why the merriment? Don’t football fans really care? Is their club a joke?

I find it strangely reassuring. I know Bill Shankly said football was “not a matter of life and death: it’s more important than that”, but of course it really isn’t, is it? And the Championship can be more fun than the Premiership, unless you’re Leicester. And let’s face it, most of us aren’t. We’re not even Richard III.

Strangely, what brought about the merriment was acceptance of the inevitable. Norwich were going down. No-one suggested otherwise, though it was not settled mathematically. A week earlier, when there was realistic hope, there was no merriment –­ just tension, and a touch of despair.

Last night we’d got beyond all that. We were going to have a good season in the Championship and not endure a long series of 1-0 losses to off-colour super-teams. At least that’s what we hope. And it’s a merry thought. The win against Watford was a kind of promise of things to come.

When I left Wembley after the euphoric play-off final last year, a Middlesbrough fan approached a group of us and said: “You’re going to lose all your matches next year, and we’re going to win the league.” How we laughed, not because we held him in scorn, but because we knew that he was probably right.

He almost was. As Norwich go down, they pass Middlesbrough on the way up. What goes around, comes around. You’ve got to be merry, haven’t you?

Unless you believe in a particularly strict version of determinism in which referees are gods, you have to admit that football is a pretty random sport.

Any match that ends with a one-goal difference could certainly have gone either way, with bad bounces, poor decisions and a breath of wind being among the tiny factors that could swing it. That being the case, league tables – like school league tables – are relatively meaningless.

Unfortunately they do decide promotion, delegation and trophies, but a moment’s reflection will tell you that it’s all luck, and there’s no use making a fuss about it.

Take Norwich City. They are likely to be relegated, but most of their losses have been by single-goal margins, and even some of the ones that weren’t could have been victories.

In the first game of the season they lost 3-1. But they had a perfectly good goal – actually an excellent one, according to the opposing manager – disallowed, a penalty turned down, and the third goal by the opposition came in the final minute when they were desperately trying to retrieve the situation. So clearly, they could have won 2-1.

In the recent game against relegation rivals Sunderland they had, if I remember rightly, 14 corners against nil. The first Sunderland goal was a contentious penalty, the second came after an unpenalised  foul on the Norwich centre back, and Norwich had an obvious penalty (possibly two) not given. So that could easily have been a draw, or a win if they hadn’t missed an open goal. But the records will tell you they lost 0-3.

This is not a desperate attempt to demonstrate that Norwich City deserve to stay in the Premiership and pick up all the gold at the end of the rainbow. Who could make such a judgement? Only someone who took into account all the little knocks and accidents, the unlucky injuries and appalling decisions that make football such a fascinating – or, looked at another way, pointless – game.

I don’t want to have a go at referees. Well, that’s not strictly true: I do want to have a go at referees, because some of their decisions are unbelievable. Why is manhandling  the opponent in the penalty area not penalised, or only penalised sometimes?  Why does Vardy get a penalty when he runs in front of the centre back and falls over?

But of course refereeing is difficult. I’ve  done it only a few times, and I found it very, very difficult. And this is not an attack on referees; it’s an attack on the idea that the right team wins. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t – usually when Liverpool is involved.

So why watch at all? Well, some of it is beautiful. A lot of it isn’t, which is why I prefer highlights. But as a consistent and accurate measure of the excellence of competing teams? Give us a break. Only a pundit would think that.

More and more, day after day, I feel less in sync with life in 21st century Britain. Or should I say England? Or maybe the UK?  I never used to worry about that sort of thing.

Maybe it’s the European Union, but then I never felt very happy there. I thought we were conned into going in, I never liked the bureaucracy and feel the justice system is weighted against the innocent. Its so-called democracy is a pale reflection of ours and I’m surprised that so many people think its Parliament has the same function and powers as the British Parliament.

But then, I’m constantly amazed at what some people think, just as they would be amazed at what I think – if I told them.

Most of the time, though, I’m just puzzled. Take recycling. All of our recycling goes into one bin – apart from the food waste. So the cardboard, paper, cans, bottles and many different kinds of plastic have to be separated  by someone else, which must be easier than it sounds. Presumably.

And I’m still not sure what kind of plastic can be recycled. All of it, or just some? What about greasy paper? Or plastic smelling of fish? Is there a risk of cross-contamination? A news story this week suggested that householders in some areas might have their bins taken away if they don’t wash out their baked bean cans; so expect to see lots of baked bean cans littering our motorways. Or have I missed something?

Paint, of course, can’t be recycled or thrown away, unless – as I have recently been informed – you put cat litter in the cans and dry the paint out. Then you can throw them away, but not recycle them. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Did I mention smart phones? No, I don’t want to recycle them. I just want to know why my iPhone works better on 4G than it does on Wifi when I’m at home.

Regular readers (yes, I mean you – both of you) will not be surprised to hear that I am also puzzled by speed limits, which are so often inappropriate. For instance, our local highways authority has recently placed 30mph limits on several of the major roads heading north outside the city while they cut down some trees in preparation for building a distributor road.

These limits may be necessary to protect workers if the trees are particularly close to the highway, but the limits remain all night and over the weekends, when nothing is happening. Many drivers with an “It’s the law” mentality jam on their brakes and proceed at funereal pace all night, while others with a more practical outlook ignore it. I would say that was a recipe for disaster, but of course it isn’t: it’s an accident waiting to happen.

Now I understand from the Alliance of British Drivers that the Government is set to scrap the statutory requirement for signing speed limits altogether. This, it suggests, “can only result in multiple signing standards, the creation of real danger, genuine confusion and the criminalisation of swathes of the motoring public”.

This sounds like malice on the part of the Government, but I was always taught never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, and I expect this falls into just such a category.

As does so much else. I heard the other day that it takes five hours to fill in a form to get a disabled person a stairlift. Of course it does. Why wouldn’t it?

I  have just been to see the film Allegiant. This, as many of you know, is the latest in the Divergent series. It follows Insurgent. Despite the fact that is sent in a dystopian Chicago, I have to say that I enjoyed it.

I am not much for dystopias generally. I live only a few hundred yards from Prince of Wales Road in Norwich, and that’s quite dystopian enough.

Despite my basic enjoyment, though, two things bothered me in the film. One was that the heroine’s hairstyle had taken a distinct turn for the worse since Insurgent; and perhaps more importantly, I was concerned by the technology. It didn’t bother me that flying machines appeared and disappeared at will and contained many advanced features. This sort of thing is bound to happen, although in the real world they will still have to give way to cyclists.

What worried me was that seat belt technology didn’t seem to have advanced at all: in fact, it seemed to have gone backwards. Clunk, click, every trip.

Hopefully this will have been cleaned up for the next film in the series, which I am reliably informed will be called Detergent. It will involve a walled city continuing a number of factions, some of them washed up and some not so much. The heroine will revert to her former hairstyle, and seat belts will be replaced by magic.

Who was it that said any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced? A very wise man, I hear you say, and indeed many novelists have taken it to heart. Detergent will have it as a central feature. I understand the film will sparkle, there will be dishes in prominent roles, and the baddies will come clean in the end. The city itself will have all the dirt removed.

I can’t wait.