Author Archives: Tim Lenton

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.

In such a safety-conscious society as ours, it is surprising that anyone is ever urged to do anything dangerous.

Scarcely a week goes by, however, without someone saying that the latest change to the transport system, however weird and irritating, is good because it will get people on their bikes. Or to put it in a slightly less ambiguous way, persuade them to take up cycling.

But cycling is indisputably dangerous. This is not just my view: confirmed cyclists are always saying so, and using that argument to try to compel drivers of motorised vehicles to slow down.

The danger, however, does not come just from cars, buses and lorries. Any regular watcher of the Tour de France will be aware that cyclists are likely to come to grief as a result of road conditions or indeed because of the behaviour of other cyclists – or, sometimes, spectators.

Cycling is dangerous of itself, because it enables you to reach quite high speeds in areas whether others are going at markedly different speeds, and you have very little protection.

So why encourage people to cycle? It’s supposed to be good for your health, though it doesn’t do much for knee joints. Is it healthy to cycle through gales, storms, ice and fog? I suspect not. In every case walking is much healthier – and safer.

How can we reduce the danger? Well, cycling evangelists are inclined to show us pictures of idyllic cycling scenes in enlightened continental towns. What they rarely point out is that the cyclists we see there are not Lycra-clad Tour wannabes with helmets, gloves and video cameras, hurtling along as fast as their 20 gears can take them. They are the gentler cyclists that those of us of more advanced years remember from our schooldays, when cycling on pavements (dangerous to pedestrians then and now) was likely to result in a sharp encounter with a local bobby, an official warning or a fine.

So why encourage people to cycle? Not because it’s safe, but because it’s fun. I suggest the problems we experience with some cyclists nowadays arise because cycling has been promoted as something morally superior – something safer and cleaner. As always, those who seize the moral high ground rapidly become obnoxious, because self-righteousness is no more attractive than self-justification.

Cycling is an indulgence, but that’s fine. In everyday life it can be useful; as a sport it’s undeniably exciting. But it’s not a religion, and it’s not politics. If we view it as either, we are opening the door to conflict. Going the wrong way up a one-way street and jumping the lights at the other end.

I am a little confused about amnesties.

I know I should be writing about Jeremy Corbyn, refugees or pigs, but I think they are being more than adequately covered. Commentary on amnesties, however, is somewhat sparse at present.

My local council is keen on them. I say keen, but that may be overstating it. They are keen in a lackadaisical, intermittent sort of way.

Every now and then they emerge from a kind of dream-state and think: Wait a minute, we don’t allow people to get rid of paint, wood preservatives, weed killers, thinners, varnishes and household cleaning products at any of our tips. Strangely, they think (I am surmising here), there seems to be an increasing amount of paint, wood preservatives, weed killers, thinners, varnishes and household cleaning products dumped in the countryside. Can there be a connection?

And then they think an amnesty would be a good idea. So they arrange “weekend-long” events at remote waste disposal sites where such items can be left for free. The bold type is theirs, as if it is a huge privilege for us to travel to these remote sites and deposit items which we quite legitimately own and cannot get rid of in any other legal way.

As far as I am concerned, a proper amnesty involves pardon and forgiveness. Why do I need pardon or forgiveness for owning paint? Or household cleaning products? Isn’t it simply that the council have failed to provide a proper service for getting rid of these items and are trying to pin the blame on us?

By calling it an amnesty they are transferring guilt from themselves to us. I am sure you will agree with me that this is shocking. Free the paint owners! Give us a tip! Sign here. I would start a petition if it was not too much trouble.

I may or may not take part in a Household Hazardous Waste Amnesty event. If I do, it does not mean I am going along with this travesty. I am simply dumping paint. Or household cleaning products. Do not read anything more into it than that.

On those surprisingly frequent occasions when someone asks me what I’m doing in my retirement, I cannot help but hesitate – because what I’m mainly doing is writing poetry.

If I admit it, a glazed expression comes upon them, because poetry has unfortunate connotations to the average consumer. That’s because it’s such a catch-all word, covering anything that more or less rhymes and has shortish lines.

The subject matter in much poetry is often one-dimensional, and rarely goes beyond the descriptive. It may use flowery language, but it is rarely creative. It is often self-indulgent and only accidentally surprising.

One of my favourite poets, P J Kavanagh, who died recently, put it well: “Phoney-rustic bards / Spare us your thoughts about birds.”

But there’s a catch, because I’ve noticed that quite mediocre poetry may be well received, especially if it rhymes and contains key words, like sunset or God. And if it evokes some kind of favourable reaction in the reader or listener, doesn’t that make it good?

I’m not sure it does. A lot of unexceptional writing gets favourable reaction from some people – and makes others tear their hair out.

Maybe there should be two different words: verse and poetry. Verse is easy, harmless and can make you smile. It may be good on its own terms. Real poetry, however, is – well, I would call it magic with words.

If a poem pulls a rabbit out of a hat, saws a lady in half (and puts her together again), makes the heaviest things float in mid-air, waves a wand, surprises the audience and moves quickly enough to deceive the eye, then it has achieved something. If it simply reminds us that beautiful things are beautiful and birds are nice to look at, there is no magic.

Real poetry is an art worth cultivating. It can turn your world upside down. It contains truth and something beyond. Always something beyond. It’s what I’m always aiming at, though whether I ever achieve it is for others to say. As Leonard Cohen put it, “poetry is a verdict, not an occupation”.

When I say I’m writing poetry, “magic with words” is what I would hope might come into people’s minds. Sadly, I suspect it doesn’t.

Never trust a man who reads his poetry aloud. There is no telling what else he may be capable of.

I did not say that. Someone else did, but I have not been able to recall who it was, and my research has failed to uncover it. But it seems to me a fair point.

So there is no telling what I may be capable of, because I do read my poetry aloud – mainly in Suffolk.

I know that my home city, Norwich, is a UNESCO city of literature and has a proud heritage. But it is Suffolk poetry groups that have mainly invited me to read, and last week I found myself in Walpole Old Chapel, near Halesworth, doing just that.

In Suffolk I have read in various places: a café and a library in Halesworth, a theatre in Lowestoft and the John Peel Centre in Stowmarket. I have also read in Bantry, Ireland, and several venues – mainly large houses and the odd church – in Norfolk. But Suffolk seems to be the centre at the moment, and Walpole Old Chapel is the kind of bizarre event that you could not make up.

Each year large numbers of mainly Suffolk poets are invited to Walpole on a summer Sunday afternoon to read their “three finest poems” – a euphemistic phrase employed by the admirable organiser (and fine poet) Mike Bannister.

This year we could tell by the number of cars parked down a grassy lane opposite that many poets had flocked to the scene. This was good and bad. The bad was that with a large number of poets all reading three poems, it did not take a genius to work out that it would be a long session.

And I was on last.

The building is a poem in itself: an early nonconformist chapel preserved with all its idiosyncratic gated stalls and most of the original dust; two pulpits (of which the higher was considered too dangerous); and a gallery with creaking stairs.

The event started at just after 5pm and lasted (with a break for refreshments) until well after 8.30, with dusk turning rapidly into night. Someone found an electric light, and the last three of us managed to complete the performance. But not before a bird flew into the building and could not find its way out: so there was a counter-attraction as it flew swiftly and anxiously from one end of the ceiling to the other.

Still, despite the chill in the air and the wearying limbs, it was a privilege to be there. The bird was eventually freed to fly, and so were we. I shall undoubtedly be back in Suffolk soon. Trust me.