Author Archives: Tim Lenton

Farewell to Philomena

Farewell to Philomena
Farewell to Bantry Bay
The blossom’s out in Baltimore
But no, I cannot stay

I will not say I’m dreaming
The sun is coming through
God knows there is a meaning
In everything you do

Yes, I remember Skibbereen
And the cliffs at Mizen Head
I cannot see you any more
The living or the dead

Farewell to Philomena
Farewell to Bantry Bay
The blossom’s out in Baltimore
And no, I cannot stay

You stood there on the mountain road
With angels in your hair
You tried to see the future
The future was not there

I will not say I’m dreaming
The sun is coming through
God knows there is a meaning
In everything you do

Farewell to Philomena
Farewell to Bantry Bay
The blossom’s out in Baltimore
And no, I cannot stay

 

These are the lyrics to a song inspired by my neighbour, Philomena, who died recently.  She came from Baltimore, in an area of southern Ireland I happened to visit a few years ago.

Posted on March 26 2014 in Poetry. Tagged , .

They’re closing in on me

I was born in Norwich, and nearly 70 years later, I still live in that “fine city”.  Yes, it is fine. We have no truck with modesty here.

I am not completely immobile, though. During some early years of my childhood I lived in Coventry, and for a while in the 60s and early 70s, I was in London. After that, I spent 12 years in the Norfolk countryside, driving into Norwich from Yelverton every evening to work as a sub-editor on the Eastern Daily Press.

But for 30 years now I have been back in Norwich again. Of course there have been many changes in the 68 years since my childhood adventures in Brian Avenue, but not so many that I get lost. I do, however, have to find different ways of getting to places, because my freedom to move around has been considerably restricted.

Strange, that. You might think that moving around in 2014 should be easier than it was in the 1950s and 60s. But no – and I am not talking entirely about road humps, though it would be hard to conceive of a less intelligent way of slowing traffic down than dumping lumps of tarmac in the middle of the road.

What really interests me is the number of streets that are now closed to me as a driver.

When I passed my driving test, a little over 50 years ago, I could drive from my home in Brian Avenue through Mill Close to Southwell Road – a useful short cut, or rat run, as I believe they’re called now by people who think twenty is plenty.

This was stopped by the rather radical method of building a series of apartments across the road.  In more recent times a similar fate has befallen Bishopgate, St Georges Street and Princes Street, though in these cases bollards were the preferred method. Castle Meadow is now also off limits to me, to say nothing of the handy route round behind the Assembly House and out on to Rampant Horse Street by what is now an extended Marks & Spencer.

Queen Street, Brazen Gate, Wessex Street – I’ve travelled them all, at all times of day.

Of course I understand that cars are bad, and pedestrians (and of course cyclists) are good. So getting cars out of the city centre is obviously desirable, which is why Norwich City Council are now planning to close St Stephens and several other city centre roads to me and my car as well.

On returning from the south late at night along the A11, at the moment I enjoy driving straight through the city, down an empty St Stephen’s, round the cuddly one-way system and down Prince of Wales Road to where I live, off Riverside Road. This clearly has to be stopped, and the city are all ready to do it.

Of course road closures mean you have to drive further, which wastes fuel and is not green. I just thought I’d mention that.

One day, I imagine, I shall emerge from the street where I live, which is a cul de sac, and discover that the road at the bottom has been closed. But that will be OK, because I will be able to walk, or get on my bike. Oh yes, I have a bike.

Meanwhile I used to be able to simply walk straight into the Cathedral by the main door, and also straight on to the platforms at Norwich Station. Both these freedoms are now also denied me.

How worried should I be?

Posted on March 26 2014 in Articles. Tagged , , .

stillness inside

reeds by the stream
direct the sun downwards,
opening doors:
I stand rooted to dry land,
locked in an old landscape

a bare branch
above the water
a scratch of stalks –
as harsh and as sharp
as this life torn by pain

no clear path here
in this shadowy web
of tangled twigs:
I tilt my head to discern
ripples of the future

listening
for small sounds of life
and renewed hope – 
the splash of a fish
catching frail damselflies

sounds of the past
roar along the river,
shifting focus:
here at the eye of the storm
stillness reaches inside

 

[This is another of the tanka strings from my new book, written in conjunction with Joy McCall and called Stillness Lies Deep. Joy’s words are in italics. The book is available from Mousehold Press.]

Posted on February 27 2014 in Poetry

Thirty-five keeps you alive

Dropping the mask of democracy and going straight for totalitarian rule, the slower-driving campaign group 20’s Plenty for Us has suggested that councils should implement 20mph limits without public consultation.

Consultation “creates a perception of indecision rather than leadership or vision”, says the group.

Well, quite. Why ask people what they want when you already know the answer? It’s a no-brainer, especially if you don’t depend on votes to get into positions of power. Genghis Khan would be right behind you.

Of course it’s possible that you don’t know the answer. It’s possible that you have a built-in prejudice and a gimmicky name, and not much else.

Brighton & Hove City Council recently dropped plans to introduce 20mph limits in a number of areas after consultation revealed that most residents in those areas opposed the plans. How’s that?

Commendable in the extreme, but not the normal approach. Consultation nowadays is a cunning way of making people think they have a say. It was introduced, as revealed by my column in the Eastern Daily Press, by the Autonomous Republic of Hingham, and became known as Hingham Democracy.

I wrote: “Some years ago now, in the last century, there was a dispute over whether the (scout) hut should be sold or not. It was decided to take a poll of residents and to abide by the result – as long as 300 votes were cast. The result went the wrong way, but as luck would have it, only 299 votes were cast – once it was established that the 300th was a spoiled paper. So the referendum was set aside.”

Is this a trick that 20’s Plenty for Us are willing to cast aside in their rush to dictatorship?

Surveys, they say, “prove” that 20mph is right – but then surveys can prove anything, if you ask the right questions.

Bristol City Council know all about that. They tried to justify the imposition of 20mph limits in two pilot areas by “showing” that it increased walking and cycling by 23% and 20%. But it was revealed by an expert that their methods of arriving at these figures were deeply flawed. They came back by blustering: “If we want safer roads we need lower speeds; if we want lower speeds we need lower limits.”

In other words, we have made up our minds and do not want to be confused by the facts. In fact, we would rather you were confused, if you don’t mind.

Not at all; of course we don’t. Or do we?

In fact their prejudice is unsustainable. Look with a cool eye at the causes of accidents, and you will see that speed is way, way down near the bottom. Fatigue, boredom, inattention and incompetence are much higher in the list, and all of those increase at lower speeds.

Excessive speed is certainly dangerous, but that is not the same as exceeding the speed limits, unless they are set by experts. Sadly, they are not.

But I am not going to persuade you of this if you have already bought into the slowness=safety daydream.

After all, look at the huge numbers of road deaths in towns since the dreadful automobile was invented. To keep a clear head, of course, it’s essential that you overlook the 1000 or so deaths caused each year in London alone before that by horses or horse-drawn vehicles.

Irrelevant? Of course.

So how to get through to the public what 20’s Plenty are up to? My current plan is to form some more campaign groups with cute names. Thirty’s Flirty may not do it, but how about Thirty-Five Keeps You Alive? Or Fifty’s Nifty?

Not serious enough? Well, I’m not sure serious does it. After all, Oscar Wilde said seriousness was the only refuge of the shallow.

Anyway, I’m not asking you: I’m telling you. That’s the way to do it. There should be an MBE in it, don’t you think?

Posted on February 27 2014 in Articles. Tagged , .

caverns

we lit candles
in the ruined church
and wept –
where is the God
to save us from ourselves?

wax spills outwards,
accidental patterns
on empty air:
prayer fills the vacant space,
sending unexpected love

the emptiness
of deep pits and dark caves;
the silences –
let me not rush to fill them
with mindless broken words

from the caverns
of too reluctant hearts
water rises:
filling the flood plains where
we build fortresses of sand

candle flame dies,
the winter tides erode
unsettled sand –
holy water and dark earth
are strange bedfellows

 

[This is one of the tanka strings from my new book, written in conjunction with Joy McCall and called Stillness Lies Deep. In this particular pentaptych, Joy’s words are in italics. The book is available from Mousehold Press.]

Posted on February 13 2014 in Poetry

Money can’t buy you good weather

Some people go for sandbags; others prefer money. Possibly sandbags full of money would do it.

Is your home flooded? No problem. The Government has lots of money, so everything will be fine.

Whose fault is it anyway?   Perhaps the Environment Agency, who are so infatuated with wildlife that they don’t have time to dredge rivers. Perhaps the Government, who don’t live in Somerset and are in love with high-speed trains. Perhaps the planners, who are keen to build on flood plains. Perhaps local authorities. Perhaps the police. Perhaps the fairies.

Someone should have stopped it.

Remember King Canute, who tried to stop the tide coming in and couldn’t – presumably because he hadn’t allocated enough money – or sand. Haven’t we progressed any further than that?

Well, Canute was not quite that stupid. If you read the story carefully, you’ll find that he was not making foolhardy attempts to stop the sea coming in. He was demonstrating to his wrong-headed supporters and subjects that he wasn’t all-powerful, and some things cannot be stopped.

Of course he was right. He had a level-headed view of humanity’s limitations – a view that we seem to have jettisoned as life has got easier and easier.

We are used to being safe. We are insured. We take precautions. If something goes wrong, there is someone to put it right.

Except that no-one has yet mastered the sea, any more than they have mastered the rain or the wind. Or the climate. We like to think that we can, and it’s just a question of making the right decisions, using the right energy, making everything completely safe.

But this is a delusion. We happen to have been living in a very quiet period. In past centuries there have been huge sea floods of unknown origin. That story about Lyonesse – the land between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles that was lost during a “huge sea flood” – is usually described as a myth. Couldn’t happen, could it?

Or could it? We forget that in Roman times the coast of my home county, Norfolk, was very different, with the sea pushing much further inland. We forget the Fens – drained relatively recently. Stories of huge, destructive storms filter down the centuries.

The sea is not easy to push aside. The weather cannot always be easily handled.

Some say there is no such thing as bad weather, just inadequate clothing. I don’t think so.

There is nothing we can do to stop continuous rain, hurricane force winds or months of snow – any more than we can predict or defend against tsunamis and meteorites. Money won’t do it, and nor will sandbags.

The odds are against extreme weather – which simply means that it doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen, and it is just as likely to happen now as at any other time. We take the best precautions we can.

I took the precaution of not buying a house on a flood plain. But the hill on which I live is made of chalk, and there are tunnels in it. Even a small amount of snow and ice makes our steep road hard to use. There are large trees that could fall on us.

Nowhere is completely safe, and we have no right to complete safety. Many parts of the world are forced to be aware of this. Why not us?

What we do have is responsibility – to do the best we can, to protect each other, to have compassion and to recognise that we are not yet ready – nowhere near ready – to conquer the universe. That is not what the universe is for.

Posted on February 13 2014 in Articles

Are banks that won’t speak to you dumb?

We spend so much time criticising bankers for being greedy at the highest level that we forget the incompetence lower down.

I have just spent many hours over several days trying to get a very straightforward current account usable on the internet. This would undoubtedly be easy if it was my personal account, but it happens to be the account of a small charity – to be precise, a church.

First, of course, I tried the bank that already had the account. Could I speak to someone in the branch? No, they didn’t deal with internet banking. But they could give me a number to call.

I spent close to two hours on the phone. It took them much of that time to work out why they couldn’t do it. They were embarrassed. They arranged to refund the cost of the phone call (which they never did).

They then discovered that this particular account was very old and had been opened “wrongly”. No, they couldn’t make it available on the internet. I would have to open a new account.

Could they transfer all the standing orders and direct debits to the new account? No, they couldn’t. I would have to do all that myself.

This seemed nonsense to me. Perhaps if I switched the account to a new bank, they would do it (this service is advertised widely nowadays).

I tried a new bank. They couldn’t speak to me in the branch about it. They had a feeling another bank might do it. I tried the other bank. They didn’t.

I went back to the main branch of the previous bank. They couldn’t talk about it in the branch either, but they could supply a phone so that I could speak to Rotherham.

I spoke to Rotherham, which is slightly better than speaking to India. Oh yes, they said. We can do that. They would send me forms.

They sent me forms. They sent me so many forms that it would clearly need several hours to complete them, especially as many of the questions were irrelevant and therefore unanswerable. They also required a meeting of the church council to pass a resolution, and credit ratings from three different people.

They gave me a phone number that I could call for assistance. I could actually feel my blood pressure rising.

In the end, I resigned as treasurer. Life is too short – or it soon would be. A sympathetic colleague responded by offering to contact the first bank…

Meanwhile I decided to put in a Gift Aid claim form. The Revenue people, who apparently are former bankers, have a new system, which I had sweated blood to register for some months ago. The system got confused (or maybe it was me) because I was already registered for self-assessment. I needed a new log-in number and password. Don’t talk to me about passwords.

Anyway, I accessed the system and downloaded the claim form. I couldn’t open it. Apparently the Revenue are unaware that many people use Mac computers and have decided to use a file that Macs can’t open. Brilliant.

I downloaded some software that should have opened the file. My Mac wouldn’t accept the new software because it suspected it contained malware. So I took several deep breaths, downloaded some other software, and it did open it.

Eventually, after several false starts, I filled it in. It was not straightforward. It could have been. But it wasn’t.

I am reasonably computer literate. Goodness knows how the average church treasurer manages. Perhaps they have to employ accountants.

Of course all this is not confined to bankers. I tried to take out some travel insurance recently and got so frustrated by the obscurity of the medical conditions element in online forms that I went to a broker.

Yes, they did speak to people personally about travel insurance. But not people who were over 64. Of course.

However, they had a number I could ring…

I do hope bankers don’t take these criticisms personally – especially those nice cashiers who smile at me and take my money on a regular basis.

But if they (or their superiors) do take offence, I’m afraid I can’t speak to them about it. However, I do have a number they could ring.

Posted on January 23 2014 in Articles. Tagged , , .

New year

I lie in a cooling bath on New Year’s Day
thinking about redemption,
unresolved

Outside the streets are empty,
reluctant to make a start:
the sky is gallows grey, and
a half-read novel slumps on the mat

Downstairs scraps of food
wait to be cast out,
but it is too early:
my head is unprepared

The future strolls past,
glances in
and ambles onwards

It is time to wash my thinning hair:
I persuade the last shampoo
into my right hand,
knowing and forgetting
last year’s bottle is now empty

I shrug, and the water ripples:
I take the bottle in my weak left fingers
and throw it across the room
towards the bin:
an impossible shot

It goes in
without
touching
the sides

It is a new year:
there is nothing I cannot do

Posted on January 16 2014 in Poetry

Luck and the beautiful game

I enjoy watching sport for aesthetic reasons. I am almost as perplexed by people who treat football as if it were a kind of war game as I am by those who don’t like sport at all.

If games are not beautiful, why bother with them? Most football enthusiasts (at least, those as old as I am) remember Danny Blanchflower’s famous comment: “The game is about glory. It’s about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”

The team I happen to follow (because I was born in the same city) does not have this problem at the moment. It wins neither gloriously nor boringly; it rarely wins at all. But flashes of beauty persist.

Winning is important of course; there is no point in playing any game if you don’t take it seriously – by which I mean accept it on its own terms. Someone who is not really interested in playing destroys the game. And by taking it seriously I don’t mean being insanely set on winning.

I was once accused of being overly competitive at croquet – an accusation that mystified me until I realised that the person who made the accusation was not really interested in games.

I was trying to win because if I did not try to win, the whole game was pointless. If I did not win (I can’t actually remember whether I did or not) it was not going to affect my life, or even the rest of the day. It’s quite possible to try hard to win, but not mind if you don’t.

This is harder if you play football in the Premiership or cricket for England. There, defeat can affect your whole life. Sport has become more than a game, and that is difficult to take, because when it comes down to it, when there is not much to choose between teams, winning or losing is often a question of luck.

This seems to me to be obvious, but it is often ignored by commentators, who say that “these things even themselves out”. Do they? I have seen little evidence of it.

In cricket a batsman may be dropped on 5, 6 and 7 and go on to score 200. This is praised as a remarkable innings. If he had been caught on 5, 6 or 7 – as he should have been – he would have been criticised for giving his wicket away cheaply.

There is always one ball that will get you out as a batsman. If this comes along in the first over, that’s bad luck. Logically this could keep happening; so it could be that there are superb batsman who have never made many runs.

In football split-second decisions can change everything. I have functioned briefly as both referee and linesman in very low-level matches, so I know how difficult it is. But the fall-out is huge at top level.

In a game I was watching recently a clearance was blocked by an attacker with his arm. It should have been a free kick to the defending team, but the referee was unsighted and quite a long way away. The game continued, and the player who blocked with his arm raced forward and came down in the penalty area – and was awarded a very dubious penalty.

So what should have been an advantage to the defending team turned out to be a goal against them.

This kind of thing happens all the time, even without the added ingredient of players diving or simulating fouls.

Does this spoil the game? It depends on the stakes. The chief executive of my local football team said recently he would rather die than see the team relegated.  Bill Shankly, former manager of Liverpool, said: “Football is not a matter of life and death… it’s much more important than that.”

They were both lying, of course. To be relegated is unlucky, and not at all beautiful. But sport, like life, is not an exact science: the best team doesn’t always win, any more than the best people live longer.

Would we have it any other way? Think hard before you answer.

Posted on January 16 2014 in Articles. Tagged , , , , .

Like a lamb

On the dark hills at first
shepherds watch
the dance of the stars

In the dark shelter
a fragile child,
bare arms outstretched

Outside, angels deliver
the glory of God:
heaven’s light comes down,
flows like a river

into the dark tower
where lambs
are wrapped for slaughter

Swaddling cloths
are borrowed:
like a lamb,
the child
is covered

ready for sacrifice
full of glory
full of light

Shepherds rush in
out of the darkness:
and the night dissolves

 

Posted on December 21 2013 in Poetry