Author Archives: Tim Lenton

Hogging the middle lane: impossible in Norfolk

What is the essential difference between gay marriage and hogging the middle lane? Hard to pin down, isn’t it?  People get very angry in each case, both for and against. Making law about them did not appear in any party’s manifesto, as far as I can recall. Possibly one of them strikes at the very heart of our culture, but I am not sure which.

Gay marriage has not yet affected me to any great degree, but hogging the middle lane certainly has – though less often than you might think. As a Norfolk resident, I do not encounter roads with middle lanes unless I travel out of the county.

There is not a single mile of motorway in Norfolk, and no three-lane roads. There may be people living in Norfolk who have never travelled on a road with three lanes.

And yet the Government feels compelled to permit the police to issue fixed penalty notices to offending drivers. It may be the only UK law that does not apply in Norfolk.

So why am I worried? The trouble is, unlike gay marriage, it is not entirely clear what constitutes “hogging the middle lane”. Is travelling at or around the speed limit in the middle lane more dangerous or annoying than the driver who overtakes you in the right-hand lane while you’re passing someone in the inside lane, then veers across the carriageway to the inside lane to show you how considerate (or law-abiding) he is?

Don’t get me wrong. Slow drivers in the middle lane are very annoying if  the outside lane is busy. They can be irritating anywhere, but you can’t make laws against irritating people. If you could, most politicians and television presenters would soon be illegal.

Hogging the middle lane, like tailgating (how close is a tail?), are wide open to interpretation. We may find both annoying, but how soon would it be before someone judges us  – excellent drivers that we are – as spending too long in the middle or driving marginally too close to the car in front? And of course we can’t argue our case. It’s either accept a fixed penalty fine and endorsement or go before magistrates who will automatically accept what the police say. Oh yes they will.

As a Norfolk driver I am more concerned with dual carriageways, where people hog not the middle but the outside lane. In Norwich itself (and I am sure elsewhere) you can find yourself crawling behind a driver who is in the outside lane either by accident or because he or she wants to turn right in three roundabouts’ time. As always, the bad drivers win.

And outside towns and cities there are still the HGVs who take minutes to overtake each other while a queue of cars piles up behind, disrupting the natural flow and creating clear and obvious danger. And while I’m at it, has someone changed the Highway Code so that if you want to overtake, you simply signal right and move out, regardless of what is happening behind you? How about some fixed penalty notices there?

What is really annoying though (oh, you thought I was already annoyed?) is that the Government puts all this stuff on the same level as something that is not careless or irritating, but downright reckless: texting while driving.

Can you imagine anything more idiotic? I can easily eat a sandwich while controlling a vehicle – especially if it is given to me by a passenger – but there is no way anyone can text safely while driving. And yet the penalty remains the same. Are we supposed to take these people seriously?

Of course when it comes down to it, nothing much will change, because there are so few traffic police on the road that even the worst driver is unlikely to get caught. I have always argued that this is a bad thing, because of the general efficiency of the traffic police, but with so many fixed penalty offences flying about, I am not so sure.

Posted on June 5 2013 in Articles. Tagged , , .

Boneland

Sometimes I step out of the wood
on to a straw-covered path:
a warm wind brushes the hill

Sometimes the woodland ways are too steep,
and the square, unbedded stones
bite into my sole

Sometimes I go on and
sometimes I go back
looking for a place so thin that
even I cannot mistake it

Always there is
the witching wood, and
I am knot-lost,

confronted by an angel who knows
the time and the place
and will uncover me

Feeling not despair but desire,
I recognise boneland,
the place of transition

where the turbulence of time
ebbs like a lackadaisical tide

and leaves me stretched
helplessly on the bare beach
holding on to godliness
but surrounded by demons

and the fishes of galilee:
trodden on,
transformed

 

 

I wrote this poem after walking  a footpath near Holt and visiting a bookshop

Posted on May 13 2013 in Poetry

Papering over the cracks

Hard to underestimate the excitement of a council election, with in cases up to 25% of voters rushing eagerly to the polling stations. Even more exciting, of course, when the boring old major parties get swept aside by a new clown on the block.

Yes, it’s the United Kingdom Independence Party, the politicians everyone loves to hate. Well, not everyone, maybe. Just right-thinking lower-case liberal democrats.

I mean, UKIP wants to get out of Europe and restrict immigration: they must hate foreigners, which is appalling. I suppose it’s possible that they think the European Union is an undemocratic bureaucracy, and they may think that this is a small country unable to support a huge influx of people, but that can’t be right, can it?

I have to admit that the sparkly new UKIP councillors I have heard speak do not seem models of intelligence and erudition, but few politicians are. As they say on Bargain Hunt, it’s a question of scale.

In any case, we don’t really want to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, do we? We just want to scare the hell out of those familiar faces who have no policies and too many advisers, who behave like out-of-touch parents who think they know what’s good for us but are really concentrated on what’s good for them.

In many ways they are behaving like a medieval church, with UKIP nailing some new ideas to the door and the smell of burning in the air.  Or maybe it’s not that dramatic. UKIP may not have the staying power, or even the conviction. Or enough nails.

So are we going to go back to those dull old Tories and Socialists, with Lib Dems under the rather pathetic illusion that they’re a party of government and the Greens rapidly losing the argument?

Is there something to be said  for the Conservatives? In the past they have represented law and order, the maintaining of traditional values, and economic security.

Nothing wrong with that, you may argue, but the Tories have lost sight of compassion and a sense of justice. What about socialism, then?

Socialism, as far as I can see, only works in a country where everyone is decent – where they love one another. Unfortunately that country has not yet been located. Experience shows that the best you can hope for is that people may love one another as long as it doesn’t put themselves at a disadvantage. People are largely interested in what’s good for them, which is why the late 1970s were so disastrous and so many of us were mightily relieved when Maggie Thatcher got elected.

Thousands who were not there, or not even born, will pour out rage against Mrs Thatcher in retrospect, but the self-interest that she is condemned for fostering is at the very least no worse than the self-interest promoted by trade union leaders in the late 1970s. Crisis? Yes, there was.

If you are looking for love, it’s no good looking at politics. You have to look at Christianity, I’m afraid, and as a society, we’re shelving all that. Love at any cost is the answer, but unfortunately no-one is asking the question.

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” said Chesterton. “It has been found difficult and left untried.” Or corrupted.

Politics is not a natural environment for love, and perhaps the best politicians can do is paper over the cracks in our edifice of self-interest. If so, where is our hope? Where is real love?

Is it somewhere we just don’t want to look any more?

Posted on May 6 2013 in Articles. Tagged , .

Winter morning

Injecting ice
into the crack of dawn,
the east wind knocks twice
on my eyelids,
but no-one is in

 

This short poem was commended in the Norwich Writers’ Circle open competition this year and appears in their anthology

Posted on May 2 2013 in Poetry

Church targets hedgehogs

My eye was caught by a headline in a well-known church newspaper the other day. It read: “Church urged to help save the hedgehog.”

I sighed inwardly. The Church of England is capable of almost any kind of bizarre activity, and to be honest the salvation of hedgehogs is no odder than many of the things they get involved in, like pet services, civic services, the House of Lords and in the case of my own city’s Cathedral, building a nesting platform for peregrine falcons.

The Church of England, as we know, is broad church. As one eminent writer put it many years ago, “anything is possible in the Church of England – even Christianity”.

Hedgehogs are something else again, although I can see how they might fit in. Parochial church councils are notoriously prickly, for instance, and many congregations appear to hibernate for long periods.

The same newspaper report describes the hedgehog as a “near-endangered species”. Whatever this means (is it worse than slightly endangered, for example?), it seems to describe pretty accurately a number of Anglican communicants.

The prickliness of such church members, and their tendency to hibernate, may of course have something to do with their being nearly endangered. Perhaps if they could be more accurately described as bunnies, they would be more resilient, and church growth would not be a problem.

The Bible on the other hand has no truck with hedgehogs. It describes us all as sheep, which are not prickly but easily led. They also have a tendency to bleat, which many of us will identify with.

Would the salvation of sheep or rabbits be more straightforward than saving hedgehogs? I think it would, and one has to admire the determination of the church in tackling hedgehogs, especially when its avoidance of prickly questions at a national level is almost legendary.

Some might argue that Jesus is never reported to have said “Go into all the world and make disciples of all hedgehogs”, but of course one can’t prove anything from what is not mentioned.

We must applaud the Church of England’s radical outreach to all prickly creatures, to those who have many points to make, and to those who are asleep a lot of the time. And to hedgehogs, of course.

I understand the new Archbishop will be making a statement shortly. Or, possibly, not.

Posted on March 19 2013 in Articles

Translation

When you reach that place
you are translated
and I can no longer read you

A tightrope walker has been at work,
running the risk of getting the balance wrong
and falling

or a ferryman,
bringing you across rough seas
for whatever price is right

maybe an alchemist,
changing you from clay to gold
in little more than an instant

Now I am left with a commentary
that tries to unravel you
in my own language

tries to describe the unknowable journey
and the place you reached

I can no longer read you for myself
you are somewhere else
somewhere full of ecstasy
and empty of explanation

It is good to see you there

Posted on March 9 2013 in Poetry

Savage cruelty – the easy option

What could be worse than being trapped in front of a television set on a Saturday night? Ant and Dec, followed by The Cube, followed by Jonathan Ross.

Well, lots of things of course. Being trapped in a rugby scrum. Or living in one of the countries that underwent the Arab Spring and discovering that, as a Christian, you are now more likely to be killed than you were when the dictators were in power.

What could be quite as frightening as being confronted by a mob of wintry Arabs with misconceived religious beliefs? Perhaps being confronted by a mob of mad Englishmen with misconceived religious beliefs, as we have demonstrated quite convincingly in the past. As novelist Petru Dumitriu put it, there is nothing quite like “the savage cruelty of people who are sure they are right”, especially when there are a lot of them.

Part of the fear (on both sides) stems from an inability to understand what is being said by those who are foreign to our way of thinking. Language barriers are fearsome things, and translation is not an easy art.

I come fresh from a translation workshop led by Dr B J Epstein of the University of East Anglia, where the difficulties of getting all the meaning of a piece of writing across from one language to another were expounded clearly.

We tried to imagine how a passage from Alice in Wonderland, with its extremely English wordplay, could possibly be conveyed into Swedish (or anything else). My rather esoteric view is that it is impossible, just as it is impossible to translate poetry into another language, because there is too much involved: precision, rhythm, context, nuance, word play of many kinds.

And as much religious belief was expressed originally as poetry – or at least in a poetic language like Hebrew or Aramaic – it is not surprising that we may not quite “get it” when it is transferred into a modern, more literal tongue. We tend to end up with chopped up religion instead of the whole body. I’m not sure how this works with Arabic, but no doubt the opportunities exist.

Getting the spirit of a piece of writing is something we seem ill-equipped to do in the modern world, with its knee-jerk journalistic view of things and its painful self-righteousness and eagerness to cast the first stone, with many more to follow.

Perhaps the answer is to be aware that you may not quite understand the other person’s point of view, and to give him or her the benefit of the doubt – or at least listen as hard as you can.

The shorthand term for that is love, but maybe that would take too much time and effort. Much easier to throw something. A quick fix: it might make us feel better. Switch channels – there may be something better on the other side.

 

 

*After attending the workshop on translation, I wrote the following poem, which is of course not about translation but is helped by some of the ideas discussed there.

Posted on March 9 2013 in Articles. Tagged , , , .

Horse meat and Leonard Cohen

I could eat a horse, and so could you. So could most people, because a healthy horse is perfectly edible.

To call it a contaminant, as many in the media have done, is as misleading as calling carbon dioxide a pollutant. Horse is not toxic or impure, and nor is carbon dioxide, which is a naturally occurring gas, just as horse is a naturally occurring animal. If anything is being polluted here, it is language.

But there is something else going on, and Leonard Cohen, the master of language, foresaw it (and much more) in his song The Future. “Things are going to slide,” he said, “slide in all directions; won’t be nothing you can measure any more.”

The problem is not that there is horse in ready foods: it is that ready foods are so mediocre that you can’t tell whether there is horse in them or not.

Some concoctions invite substitution, like meat balls. Are they beef, pork or something even more sinister? If they don’t tell us on the tin – or the packet – how can we know?

All right, we can avoid that kind of food if we’re worried. But if we do, we are still faced with another trend in supermarkets: dumbing down. I have been infuriated recently in the vegetable section (and that can be dangerous) by finding potatoes labelled “Potatoes” or sometimes  daringly “White Potatoes”.

Now I suppose there may be people who don’t know a potato when they see it, or can’t tell the difference between white and red, but when I’m looking for potatoes I want to know what sort they are. I happen to like King Edwards, but they’re becoming increasingly hard to find.

I can foresee a time when, to avoid the horse problem, all meat will be labelled “Meat”; in fact I’m almost sure I’ve come across meat curry in the not-too-distant past. Then where will we be? I’ll tell you. We’ll be on the fish counter, trying to distinguish between hake (fish) and herring (fish).

Or will we just go for one of those “meal deals” that seem to crop up everywhere, and not worry our little heads about it?

Posted on February 14 2013 in Articles. Tagged , , .

Truth is more important than speed

I was never very keen on Chris Huhne as portrayed by the popular prints. If he were a regular reader of this site, he would probably not be keen on me.

If on the other hand we met anonymously at a party (as long as it was not a political one), we might get on quite well, laughing ruefully about life’s little misfortunes and how you never actually achieve what you’re aiming at.

What sort of little misfortunes? Well, being caught by a speed camera, for instance. And then thinking it might be simpler if you pretended it was your wife who was driving.

Not much harm in that, is there? And denying it afterwards? Well, it’s all pretty trivial, isn’t it?

National newspaper columnists have not gone along with this wholeheartedly.  Some of the verdicts: “error upon error”; “dodging and scheming”; “a display of hubris and ego that is utterly bewildering”; “a very minor misdemeanour”; and “a series of stupid, utterly avoidable decisions”.

Again, we’ve all been there. But Cabinet ministers, even Lib Dem ones who are in office almost accidentally, are expected to have high standards. Where Mr Huhne went wrong was in deciding wrongly which standards were more important.

Clearly he thought that at all costs people should not know he had been exceeding the speed limit. In order to cover this up, it was worth the risk of lying and, when the lie was exposed, it was worth the risk of lying again.

I know this is hard to believe, but during the last war (and for a long time before and after) cyclists had to use lights after dark. The trouble was that because of the privations of war, batteries became unavailable. As a result many cyclists, who depended on their machines to get to and from work, were prosecuted for riding without lights and fined.

The injustice of this was raised in the House of the Commons, and the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, said that the police “should exercise a wide discretion”. He had no doubt that “in any individual case the police will take account of any mitigating circumstances”.

You may wonder about the relevance of this to Mr Huhne. It lies in the nature of the speed camera, which knows nothing of mitigating circumstances and exercising discretion. In fact it knows nothing of the quality of driving. All it knows is that something went at a certain speed and therefore had to be photographed, and that as a result, someone had to be punished.

This is actually a deplorable way of administering justice, and so one has sympathy with Mr Huhne. If it had been revealed by self-righteous journalists that the Energy Secretary had been caught speeding, I would have thought no worse of him. It happens. It did not mean he was driving carelessly, or that anyone was in any danger. No-one got hurt.

Up to that point, anyway. It was what happened next that hurt. In protecting himself from being exposed as a fast driver to the kind of people who find that deplorable – the kind of people who would back most of his lack-of-energy policies – he decided that it wouldn’t matter so much if he lied.

But he was completely wrong. Speed by itself is not a problem. Lying is. If he is willing to lie about one small thing – and worse, to deflect the “guilt” on to someone else – why should we believe him when he says we need 32,000 new wind turbines and have to wreck the landscape to save the planet? Or that speed cameras are a good idea?

A better system of justice might have enabled him to contest the “trivial” issue of speed. But lying is a different kettle of fish. Of course we all know that politicians lie about policy. But lying on such a personal level is a symptom of a deeper problem.

Nevertheless, I refuse to go along with those who will paint him for ever as “shamed” or “disgraced” politician Chris Huhne. I believe in redemption, and that goes for Cabinet Ministers, Lib Dems and Energy Secretaries as well as less exalted human beings. For all you know I have done worse than Mr Huhne, and he probably has qualities that outshine mine.

He has reached a low point. It is up to him, and not us, where he goes from there.

Posted on February 6 2013 in Articles

Passing place

In the wild land
between Ben Avon and Gairnshiel
between black snow and white wind
there is a passing place

where spirit brushes flesh
clouds shift shapes
and brown is the colour
of my true love’s eyes

In the heather, footprints can just be seen
reaching upwards, almost hidden:
the road like a juggler
throws, then catches

nine times out of ten,
and I keep passing.

This is the place:
enchantment is a wound
that reopens.

I pass again.

Posted on January 29 2013 in Poetry