Author Archives: Tim Lenton

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.

Writing a poem every day for Lent has proved difficult – which should not be surprising mathematically, as the sum total is roughly the same as I wrote in the whole of last year.

But it’s not just the maths. Some would say that writing a poem is an inspirational thing, triggered by a spur-of-the-moment insight or observation. Can you really write poems to order, one a day, like taking pills?

Obviously you can, in the sense that poems are just words on a page. You write them, and there they are. The real question is: are they any good, or are you just filling a quota, reaching a target, ticking off data, like Ofsted?

In the poetry league table, am I outstanding, good, requiring improvement, inadequate or – the latest worry – coasting? Count my words and you won’t have much idea. But is there another way?

The question of quality is a serious one, because it is difficult to settle. Counting is much easier, and so politicians and journalists prefer it. If there is an easy way of doing something, most of us prefer it, even if it does not give such useful results. The fact that it gives some results, and they can be counted, is what matters.

If we set targets, we can see if they have been met. If we create a league table, someone will be at the top and bottom. If we set tests, we can easily work out whether someone has passed or failed.

But it’s all a cheap trick, really. You can no more measure the quality of education by counting data than you can measure the quality of poetry by counting words. Education is much too complicated for that. It requires inspiration and insight, every day.

And yes, that is possible. Teachers and head teachers do it all the time. They would do it even better if we could get rid of all that counting.

I want to start by making a confession. I quite often watch Bargain Hunt on BBC 1. This is largely because it’s shown at lunchtime, when I settle down for my 12.30 sandwich and mug of tea, but I can quite see how some of you would regard this as no excuse. Still, there it is.

As a result I have learned that nearly all those vases, paintings, tables and toys that are lying around are in fact worth very little at all. I have also learned that if presenter Tim Wonnacott (currently stepping down after many years) takes a dislike to something wooden, he will describe it as “shedwork” – in other words, it was made in a shed by someone insignificant.

This has always struck me as unnecessarily judgmental. Surely something is either well made or not: whether it was made in a shed is irrelevant.

Who made it is also irrelevant, really, though the right name will often add many pounds to an item. It’s rather like those art forgeries that are impossible to tell from the original. If you can’t tell them from the original, surely they’re just as good, just as beautiful and just as worth hanging on your wall?

Why do we care so much about status?

At the theatre not long ago I heard a customer drawl smugly to a friend: “Not bad, considering they’re amateurs.” But surely either it’s well done or it isn’t. You may think the customer is being considerate in not applying the same criteria to amateurs as to professionals. I think he’s being condescending.

Allied to all this is the tendency to make judgments about a statement of national or world importance on the basis of who said it. Of course it’s important to understand that all politicians have axes to grind (sometimes pretty silly ones), but surely something is either true or it isn’t? We should not refuse to consider something on the grounds that it was said by someone on the right – or the left.

The difficult thing about voting on whether or not to leave the European Union, for example, is to work out what is the truth and what is not. We can’t do that by watching who is voting which way.

If someone knocks together a policy in a shed, it may be a very beautiful policy, or it may be rubbish. But the shed has nothing to do with it. The truth is what counts.