Author Archives: Tim Lenton

Two things you could say about Paul Durrant: he gave it everything, and he cared

I worked with him for many years, and I didn’t always agree with him. As news editor of the biggest selling regional morning newspaper in England, he knew what he wanted, and when that didn’t quite match the story the reporter brought in, the reporter had to go back and try again.

In my innocence, I felt that the reporter, having done the interviews and seen for himself or herself, might have more insight than the office-bound news editor. But I was probably wrong. Certainly the reporters in question stand behind him, praising him for his guidance, and for making them the stars they are today.

He produced top quality news stories. He was a master of the intro, and he understood how to motivate his staff to go that bit further. He would not tolerate laziness, but he could forgive someone who tried and kept on trying, even if they made mistakes. He spotted star quality and insisted that it was not wasted.

Outside the office he was relaxed and friendly and knew how to encourage people – a vital quality. By no means perfect himself – who is? – he understood imperfections in others, but he knew about the importance of keeping up standards. It was no accident that the Eastern Daily Press was such a fine newspaper when he was in the news editor’s chair.

Underlying it all was a warm person who was unafraid to put himself on the line. As a result, he was a gigantic figure. And yes, that’s a metaphor.

We will miss him.

Paul “Duzza” Durrant, died 10 February 2016.

If 52 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. So says Anatole France, and I’m sure you agree. However, if 52 million people say it, there is a good chance that it will be on the front page of most newspapers.

Democracy is a fine thing – or if not a fine thing, the best thing we’ve got to run a country. Dictators might do it more efficiently, but they tend to lack perspective. The trains run on time, but people go missing.

Sadly, however, the democratic process always delivers a government that many people would prefer was not governing. That is the way it works. For democracy to succeed, those who lose out have to be willing to accept it.

This can be extremely frustrating, particularly when the issues are crucial. And this why many people resort to marching, striking, random action – or, more frequently, joining an online pressure group, like Avaaz.

These pressure groups gather thousands if not millions of signatures for petitions that aim to bypass the normal democratic system and “shame” politicians into giving them what they want.

If big business behaves like this, it is clearly a bad thing. But if people like you and I do it, surely that’s just having our say in a reasonable way?

No, it’s the same thing. Only the voices are different.

But surely we’re right, and they’re wrong?

We like to think we’re right, of course, and sometimes we are. The trouble with online pressure groups is the assumption that they are always backing the right horse.

But often petitions are created that attract huge numbers of votes when the organisers, let alone those who sign, have no expertise whatsoever in the subject at hand. Key phrases are enough to get people to sign, rather in the way that when a friend on Facebook asks you to “like” their page, most people barely hesitate, let alone look at it.

What are these phrases? “Climate change” is an obvious one (ignoring the fact that no-one says the climate isn’t changing); “genetically engineering of crops” is another; so are “a free NHS” and “lower speed limits”. There are many others.

This week some whales got beached and died in eastern England. Someone scrawled “Man’s fault” on one of them, and I can’t help thinking that he or she is typical of those who sign online petitions. A whale has died; so somehow it must be our fault, or the fault of some huge corporation somewhere, or genetically modified sea water.

We have a right to protest, and I am certainly not saying that everyone who signs online petitions does so irresponsibly. But while we have a right to protest, we also have a duty not to sign just anything that is put before us, simply because it sounds right; not to march before we understand (in detail) why; and not to strike against the public without checking to see if there is a more effective way of hurting whoever is actually in the wrong.

Democracy is a fine thing – but it needs a bit of thought. In general, crowds don’t do much thinking.

There may not have been much about the Lord’s Prayer in cinemas over the Christmas period, but at least there was Star Wars.

And if you happen to live in my neck of the woods, there was a bonus: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the local theatre.

One of these productions is of course almost explicitly Christian, though it is hard to know how many of our secularised children actually realise it. Perhaps more than we think: children are pretty sharp, and tend to find out things.

Of course there is not a great deal about lions and witches in the Bible. One strains to think of even a single reference to wardrobes. But the story that C S Lewis wrote is the same story of Christianity in different words: the power of light over darkness; self-sacrifice; forgiveness; love; even resurrection.

But what about Star Wars? Not quite the same clear reflection there, perhaps, but it arouses in us very similar reactions. In the SW universe there is good and evil, and the evil appears overwhelming, just as it does in Narnia.

There is also something hidden that makes all the difference. In Lewis’ story it is the reappearance of Aslan at a critical moment. In Star Wars, the title says it: The Force Awakens. The moment that sends a shiver up the spine is the moment when this is revealed, and the Force makes its choice (I would like to be more explicit, but you may not have seen it yet).

There are those who would identify the Force with the power of the Holy Spirit. You could also argue that it is the light entering the world, and the darkness being unable to overcome it. Take your choice. Either or both.

What is undeniable is that people leave both productions uplifted, having seen light overcome darkness. There’s no real reason people should want to see light defeat darkness unless we are created that way – and stories like this dig it out of us.

You have to feel sorry for the early church. As well as having to do business without the benefits of risk assessment and health and safety policies, they also had to manage without parochial church councils – all things that the Church of England takes for granted.

I was reminded all too forcibly of this when I received my (or someone else’s) copy of PCC News, the “newspaper for all PCC members to help support your church”. Newspapers are another thing the early church missed out on, by the way. Not to mention parish magazines.

The Church of England has it very easy really. It has Gift Aid, for instance, and we all know what fun that is – especially those who are unfortunate enough to be church treasurers. Judas would never have betrayed Jesus if he’d had Gift Aid. He would simply have run away.

The front page of PCC News this month is all about finding grants, which as we all know is literally hours – possibly days – of fun. And when you’ve found them, you have to bid for them, if you don’t have a nervous breakdown first. I tried to imagine James and John tackling this, but couldn’t. Matthew, perhaps.

It is hard to say what the most exhilarating part of being a Christian in the 21^st century is, compared to the first century AD. Glancing at the headlines in PCC News, I suppose it may be “Authorised Lay Ministry: Volunteer’s and Employer’s Liability Insurance”, which would certainly tempt the average fisherman away from his boat and into discipleship like a shot.

Or maybe it’s the helpful “Flow chart: How to obtain faculty approval”. If only that had been around shortly after the Resurrection, things would have gone much more smoothly, and Christianity might have become really big.

And how much easier it would have been to arrange things like the feeding of the five thousand, walking on the water, the Transfiguration, the raising of Lazarus, the wedding at Cana and the Last Supper (bearing in mind the alcohol involved in these last two) – and indeed Christmas itself – if the key players had had access to an article on “Keeping the right side of the law when holding events”.

When you think about it, it’s amazing Christianity ever got off the ground, which brings me to the Ascension. They were lucky to get away with that.

Shock, horror: cinemas cannot show adverts that reflect a basic belief. Or so it seems.

Digital Cinema Media, who handle adverts for mainline cinema groups such as Odeon, have caused a small furore by rejecting an advert from the Church of England which features the Lord’s Prayer.

They have done so because they have a policy barring adverts on behalf of any “religion, faith or equivalent systems of belief”.

But surely everyone has a system of belief. The most common system of belief reflected at the cinema in terms of adverts is materialism, together with the accumulation of wealth and desirable objects, human or otherwise.

This may not be a belief involving prayers and traditional doctrines – though plenty of prayers seem to be muttered, and there is a central doctrine: that this world is all there is, and therefore we have to enjoy it to the full, come what may.

Obviously adverts do not state this in so many words, and that is possibly why DCM are happy with them. But the advert in question also does not state a system of belief in so many words. It simply reflects it.

The chestnut about “possibly offending some people” is really not good enough. Any film ever produced and every advert ever shown are capable of offending some people, because some people are very, very sensitive. But you cannot pander to such people.

A healthy society is one in which people can express their own beliefs without worrying about being gunned down by fanatics, whether those fanatics use words or bullets. I may believe that Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and others have some things wrong, but I don’t want to stop them expressing their views. I certainly believe that materialists are hopelessly misguided, but I am not going to ban them from advertising hoardings.

I am a Christian, though not a good one, and no doubt many people believe I have some things wrong. They are undoubtedly right. I would like to persuade them that the essence of what I believe is true, but I have no desire to prevent them putting their views forward.

In any case, the advert in question is not a sermon. It uses the Lord’s Prayer – which, whatever you believe about Jesus, is historic, widely loved, beautiful and poetic. But it is used to illustrate its part in the daily lives of ordinary people, rather than as a tool of political persuasion.

The irony is that the vast majority of non-Christians will not be offended at all by this advert. The Muslim Council of Britain, for instance, is reported as saying it is “flabbergasted that anyone would find this prayer offensive”.

If I were to be picky about it, I would have to say that Christianity is not a religion or a system of belief. It is a faith based on the love of God for you and me. You take it or leave it. There is no sinister plot to convert everyone – just a gift on offer, which everyone is absolutely free to ignore.

That’s Christmas. Don’t expect to hear it at a cinema near you.

Sometimes I think no-one at all is paying attention. All right, you may say, why should we pay attention? We have better things to do. But hold on, I say, I’m not talking about me. Well, that makes a change, you say, and I agree; it does get a bit tiresome.

All right, I am talking about me. But mainly I’m talking about a motor insurance company and a certain East Anglian water organisation. Obviously I can’t be more specific, because they might sue me. What I’m about to say is true, but no-one in their right mind would want to believe it.

The water organisation has lost its meter. It has lost it because it is still using an address for it that became obsolete in the 1970s, when all the houses in the street in question were knocked down. That’s roughly 40 years ago.

I have told it about this, more than once and quite recently. I also told it the correct address and how to find it. To be fair someone did find it after that, but omitted to insert the new meter that was required.  After a few weeks they sent a surveyor out to replace the meter. He couldn’t find it. He was still using the obsolete address.

Why did they not change their records? I expect they were too busy. More exciting things were happening.

The motor insurance incident was much more short-term. An accident occurred when a wall pulled out and hit the front of my car. I was not driving it at the time, but that need not detain us.

Because this incident occurred in Suffolk, not too far from Halesworth, there was no mobile phone signal. (I agree, there is no phone signal for most of Norfolk either.) So the driver of the vehicle rang the insurance company from a friend’s house.

After some discussion, the car was towed back to Norwich, where it awaited inspection. This took some time to arrange, because despite our giving the insurance company our home phone number and our mobile numbers, they were unable to reach us. It transpired that they were ringing the friend’s number.

Then the guy doing the inspection turned up at the friend’s house, because that’s where he thought the car was. There were other wrong phone calls, but eventually he turned up, coincidentally, in the right place at the right time and examined our vehicle. He reported back to the company, and they gave the repair the go-ahead.

Fine, I said. I was happy to use one of their approved repairers. Which was the nearest to me? It was in Halesworth. No, I said, thinking they were still labouring under a misapprehension concerning the location of the vehicle. But they weren’t. The nearest approved repairer to Norwich was in Halesworth, roughly an hour away and less than ten miles from where the accident happened.

You know what they say: history repeats itself. It has to, because no-one listens. Well, I think no-one listens to the present either.

We learnt this week that the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing, rather than receding. To my mind this is relevant to the many recent claims that it is receding overall. But no, apparently it’s irrelevant because it’s still receding in some places, though not as much as it’s growing in others.

In London, where the ice has not yet reached, an experiment was made to reduce speed limits to 20mph in the hope that this would reduce accidents. In fact casualty data showed that slight injuries to pedestrians and cyclists were continuing to rise.

So the experiment was a failure, then?  Oh, no. “Given the reduction in average speeds that was measured, it could be argued that the increase in casualties would have been higher or of a more serious nature had it not been for the lower speed limit.”

So the question resolves itself into alternatives. Is no-one listening at all? Or is everyone stupid? Yes, I know that includes me. I’m making a note of it now.