Author Archives: Tim Lenton

Just a little bit lower, and I’ll feel better

Funny thing, temperature.

Over the past week or two in the UK we’ve experienced some pretty low temperatures. Not as low as Antarctica, or even Braemar on a bad day, but low nevertheless.

However, if we wear the right clothing, we can survive it without much trouble. In fact a brisk walk up to a nearby hill (taking care not to break a leg on the unsanded pavements or the uncollected rubbish) can be quite invigorating. The nip of frost on bare cheeks is kind of pleasant, in a bracing sort of way.  The outdoor life holds no terrors for us.

And yet when the temperature goes up, so that it’s about ten degrees warmer – say five or six degrees above freezing – we start to feel unpleasantly cold. The outdoor life is suddenly not for us, and we hasten inside to make friends with the central heating.

Why should this be? Why is a lukewarm bath somehow less pleasant than a cold one? Are we designed to prefer extremes? Or is it just me?

Maybe it’s a psychological thing. Very cold weather has visual compensations: the beauty of icy spider webs, the purity of fresh-fallen snow – the stunning, inexplicable attraction of something that is actually threatening to us, like floods and bombers. Not many of us would share the view of a friend of mine, who believes that “if you’ve seen one snow-covered mountain, you’ve seen them all”.

Slightly warmer weather, however, has no visual excitement. It brings dampness, greyness, mud and a vague uneasiness. The countryside becomes flat and tedious, like a dithering driver. There is no stimulus for our minds to grapple with. No vital questions, like “Why does butter remain hard in winter, even in a centrally heated house?”

Somehow, cold seems to enliven us, as long as it doesn’t go too far and remove our toes and fingers. We dive into it, make snowmen, ride sleds, throw snowballs.

I have this suspicion, for what it’s worth, that snow and ice open our minds to other dimensions, but maybe this is because I live in a temperate, comfortable climate and can put up with a limited amount of ice and snow, as long as it eventually goes away and releases my car from its clutches. If I lived in an igloo, perhaps a heatwave would open my mind to other dimensions.

Maybe we’re desperate for something to open our minds to other dimensions, even if it’s just a change in the temperature. Something that makes us see things differently.

Posted on January 29 2013 in Articles. Tagged .

Are you concentrating, or have you dropped something?

I can’t say this very often, but I was pleasantly surprised by an article on road safety that appeared in Norfolk County Council’s “magazine for all residents” that eased its way carefully through my door this winter.

It was titled “Keep your mind on the road”, and I read it very attentively, keeping my mind on it. I was not driving at the time.

What surprised me? I don’t think the word “speed” was mentioned once.

Speed limits, cameras and associated persecution are not – taking the world as a whole – very high among the great evils of our time. But they do affect many of us in Britain almost every day, sometimes for long periods. So I think it’s reasonable to hope that transport authorities might see sense on the issue. In recent years, that has not happened much, and it has been unusual to see anything written about road safety without speed being seen as the main problem.

That article, by contrast, concentrated on what is clearly a major cause of accidents: lack of attention. It pointed out: “There are lots of distractions every day which take your mind off the road, from jogging while listening to music to turning round to talk to passengers in the car.”

It also struck fairly new ground in suggesting that cyclists, walkers and joggers need to concentrate just as much as drivers. It offered courses in cycling and motor cycling training for young people and in teaching children to cross the road, as well as co-ordinating and promoting driver development – important when it takes years to learn to drive really well.

By that time you know how fast it is safe to drive in most situations. You also know what causes accidents – stupidity, inattention, boredom and poor judgement tend to top the list. Excessive speed is also dangerous, of course, but this is not the same thing as going faster than speed limits that are for the most part inexpertly fixed. And it’s rarely uncovered by cameras because they are normally set to catch people, not to keep the roads safe.

We’re all familiar, and fed up, with puerile slogans like Speed Kills (it doesn’t) and It’s Fifty for a Reason (yes, usually a very bad reason). I’m in favour of speed limits, set by people who know what is realistic and safe (experienced traffic police, for example) but preferably to advise rather than punish motorists. It is only poor drivers (and non-drivers) who like slow limits punitively policed, because they don’t understand how fast is safe. They assume they’re safe because they’re obeying the law. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Reckless behaviour in a motor vehicle is a serious offence, but this is masked by the pretence that speed is the major issue. Even those few serious accidents attributed primarily to speed by the police are usually the result of some other criminal activity, like drug-taking or theft.

Reckless behaviour in a car always involves a lack of proper attention, and that includes using a mobile phone, fiddling with the cd-player, watching the speedometer, carrying on a vigorous debate with a passenger, pointing at landscape features and trying to find the glasses that fell off the central console. Driving is dangerous, and we mustn’t forget it.

My solution? The same as yours, probably: more traffic police. And in the cities, more visible police generally. And more education as suggested by the article that prompted this one. Not fatuous slogans, and wilfully diverting people’s attention from the real problem.

Posted on January 9 2013 in Articles. Tagged .

Unexplained light

The precise shape of the star
and the way it moved,
backwards and forwards,
does not concern the wise,

who love
unexplained light

Private browsing –
examining conjunctions,
comets and dwarfs –
tempts the unwary

into disintegrating time
and again

A baby can throw the best-laid plans
into disarray,
reaching for empty hands,
hoping for gold

Posted on January 8 2013 in Poetry

Do we believe Christmas is real?

Do you believe in Father Christmas? All right, that’s an easy one. But what do you really, really believe in? And what connection does it have to reality?

Someone said that reality is what remains after you stop believing in it. In other words, reality doesn’t depend on  belief. Or does it?

Experiments in quantum physics suggest that what happens may depend on who is watching. St Paul says that an act of faith is necessary for the veil to be lifted from our eyes: that we can’t see what’s really going on until we place our faith in God.

Most people, of course, reject that entirely. Seeing is believing, we say. Give us proof, and then we’ll believe.

A lot of people believed the world was going to end on December 21 this year, because certain calculations involving the Mayan calendar suggested as much. You don’t have to be cranky or gullible to believe that an ancient people may have known something we don’t. To paraphrase Linus in Peanuts, some of those ancient people were pretty sharp. But to put all our eggs in the Mayan basket would have been unwise, to say the least. All prophecies attempting to date the end of the world have been wrong. So far. Obviously.

Many people regard faith in much the same way as putting all your roulette chips on one number. Others see it as a no-cost bet. But people who believe Christianity is true (as opposed to those who see it as a respectable lifestyle) don’t see it as a bet at all. They agree with Stephen Verney, who wrote that “faith is being grasped by a truth which confronts you and which is self-evident and overwhelming, and then trusting yourself to the reality which you now see”.

This is, I suppose, an irritating viewpoint to those who don’t believe and would prefer the matter to be settled in a “rational” way. But the coming together of faith and reality is a powerful thing.

To many people, Christmas consists largely of a temporary suspension of disbelief. And despite a few high points, this can only end in disappointment. Fooling ourselves can be fun on the kind of superficial level that occupies us most of the time, but how much more exciting if the essence of Christmas were actually true.

Is it a coincidence that all the great stories in world literature are about sacrifice, salvation and redemption? That is what really grips and moves us, until we return to reality. Unless of course we have it wrong: maybe we’re returning from reality when we put those stories aside and concentrate on the mundane horrors of making a living.

Reality and belief are intertwined. Don’t be fooled by the tinsel.

Posted on December 21 2012 in Articles. Tagged , , .

Lost and found

Out on a limb,
like desperate travellers looking for somewhere to stay
like lonely shepherds in the dark
like a young girl suddenly with child
like wise men laughed at, following a wild idea

we are lost in a shapeless world
waiting for something to happen
out of step with time

unaware of the resting place
and the angels
trying to see through the pain
something in the shape of a star

until at the perfect moment, just off the beat,
the sound of singing
or a knock on the door,
a safe delivery:

as if we had found something lost
like a coin or a sheep
or someone sleeping in a field:

someone who, on closer inspection,
appears to be us

Posted on December 16 2012 in Poetry

Landscape of the Baptism of Jesus

Here in the centre is the River Jordan,
boundary between past and future,
war and peace:
deep enough

and there, in the same picture,
the Dead Sea,
white like a sepulchre

If you look closely you can make out
a path going down
from Jerusalem to Jericho

and a Samaritan
off to one side

There are churches in Bethany,
old and new, like caves
for resurrection

Through the mists of time
the walls of a monastery
and St John, gazing upwards

seeing something
outside the landscape
away from the dusty Judean desert

away from Bethlehem,
away from the blinding light
away from the voice

that bursts out of the picture
and at the same time into it

The dove is hard to see
but the baptism remains,
undeceiving the eye

[This poem was written after a visit to the Salvador Dali Foundation at Figueres and a church next door to it, where I was struck by a large picture with the same title as the poem. It was a bleached-out  landscape, at the same time real and surreal, past and present.]
Posted on December 7 2012 in Poetry

Who cares about the public interest?

It will take more than three wise men and an infinite number of women bishops to decide the right action to take on the Leveson Report.

In one camp we have those who think we must install a statutory body to keep newspapers in order: failure to do so would be a cop-out. And in the other assortment of tents we have those who are concerned that any legal handcuffs could be misused, and that a free press is vital to a democratic society.

The former argue that any government likely to be elected in such a nice country as the UK would hardly shackle the press in any damaging way. They have clearly forgotten that the Germans, who are basically nice people like us, elected Hitler.

In other words, put temptation and enough fear in the hands of those keen to secure power, and they are likely to succumb to it. Why make it easy for them to shut down a main focus of criticism? Cameron probably wouldn’t do it, but I can think of a few other prominent politicians who might.

We are not quite at the time of year when three wise men might be available. Sadly, women bishops are also not to hand. But we do have Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye and panellist on Have I Got News for You, the TV news quiz that teeters between funny, puerile and self-righteous (the last two usually simultaneous).

Mr Hislop is a wise man where press freedom is concerned, although (or maybe because) he runs a satirical newspaper. He makes the rather vital point that all the misdemeanours, outrages and appalling behaviour that gave rise to the Leveson Inquiry are in fact already crimes, and so the perpetrators could have been arrested and charged, whether or not they happened to run or work for newspapers. The fact that they were not cannot be laid at the door of the Press.

There is absolutely no need for further laws, of which there are already far too many: after all, the freest country has the fewest laws. And we want to be free, don’t we?

In any case there is an important distinction to be made between scandal sheets and newspapers. The Code of Conduct for newspapers, adhered to fiercely by the local and regional newspapers praised by Leveson, relates borderline behaviour, like long lens photography and violation of privacy, to what is in the public interest, and that is a widely misunderstood term.

It certainly does not mean “what interests the public”. The public, sadly, does not like what it says it likes; if it did, the Sun would never have had the highest circulation figures. Like St Paul, the good that the public would they do not: but the evil which they would not, that they do. Or as Clive Barnes said in relation to television, “the most terrifying thing is what people do want”.

I think we all understand that. We are the public.

The public interest is defined by the Code of Conduct as “detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety; protecting public health and safety; or preventing the public from being misled”; and these are important matters, truly in the interests of us all. It cannot be right to  hamstring newspapers who are doing this kind of public service. Can it?

Of course it’s possible to be too idealistic about “good” local newspapers, who may not engage in phone hacking, but can skew readers’ views of key issues by taking positions that shut out views other than their own. There is no such thing as truly objective news, just as there is no such thing as a truly objective tweet or Facebook status.

You could go further and say it’s futile locking journalists away and handing out free klaxons to those with no code of conduct whatsoever. Either you want free speech, or you don’t.  It’s an interesting question.

Posted on December 6 2012 in Articles. Tagged , , .

Playing on Calvary

Look, I have found some pieces of wood:
now we can build a fort
or a temple
and make soldiers out of mud:

you and your soldiers
can try to destroy me, and I
can try to destroy you

That sounds like fun:
some of your soldiers can hide
in these strange holes in the hill

They are empty now, but look
as if they had something in them:
I wonder what it was

There is a large hole down here
that looks as if it might get in the way:
I will block it up with a big stone

Help me with the stone:
it will not stay where I put it:
it keeps rolling away

That is awkward:
it might make playing more difficult,
but I suppose we can pretend it is not there

Here are some more pieces of wood:
they have something on them, though –
something sticky

I will throw them away:
maybe we could go and play
somewhere else

Posted on November 5 2012 in Poetry. Tagged .

A hat with no rabbit

I am thinking of buying my wife an iPhone for her birthday.  Earlier I had been thinking about an iPad. You may think that either of these pieces of magic is an extravagant luxury, but someone has to stop the recession, and anyway, she’s worth it.

Magic? Close enough. Someone once said that any technology distinguishable from magic is not advanced enough, and Apple seem to be in the magic business.

It’s odd that eating forbidden fruit – often portrayed as an apple – was the temptation that Adam and Eve fell for, propelling us down the road to the mess we’re in now. Even odder, the tree involved was said to be the Tree of Knowledge. Maybe that’s Google, but Apple have the logo.

Either way, you can see what T S Eliot was getting at when he asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” He might have been talking about the Internet.

The precise location of the Tree of Life is probably not to be found in the garden of advanced technology. For all the magic technology produces – and if you think computers are magic, wait for replication technology – it lands you with a disproportionate amount of frustration.

The problem is not that it is insufficiently advanced, but that is too advanced in some areas, and inept in others.

The iPhone has a wealth of features, most of which I do not want. The same is true of video recorders and washing machines, and anything electronic.

But let’s stick to the iPhone. It’s absolutely wonderful, but much of the time it will be useless. Why? Well, leaving aside the possibility that the battery will run out, what is definitely going to happen is that you will soon find yourself somewhere where you can’t make or receive phone calls.

We are not talking Outer Hebrides here. We are talking large chunks of Norfolk, my home county, and practically anywhere I’ve been on holiday this year, which happens to be Aberdeenshire, Dorset, Devon, Catalonia and Normandy.

OK, that’s an obscene number of holidays for one year, but they all have one thing in common. The area I happened to be in was out of range.

That’s not magic. That’s a hat with no rabbit.

I know this is not Apple’s fault. The intricate technology they provide usually works very well, but if you can’t actually use it to do what it’s intended to do, is it worth the trouble?

Maybe that’s what the Tree of Knowledge is all about, in the end. Anger and frustration. Not delivering what it promises. The Tree of Life was the one to go for. Can we start again?

Posted on November 5 2012 in Articles. Tagged , , , , .

Lucky evening on the wrong track

It would be unrealistic to expect public transport to work flawlessly all the time, and maybe it’s unfair to snipe at it. It is after all burdened with inbuilt failings, such as  starting from somewhere you aren’t, and taking you to somewhere you don’t quite want to be. We accept that: if it’s for everyone, it’s going to be inconvenient for everyone too.

But surely it is realistic to expect those in charge of public transport to make every kind of effort to make it as convenient as possible. All right, railway lines need to be maintained, and maintenance has to be done some time. But…

I returned to Norwich from a holiday in Europe halfway through a Saturday evening. Of course, the rail and tube managers didn’t know that. I mean, that almost never happens, does it? At the same time a goodly number of Norwich City supporters were returning to Norwich from a Chelsea game: another of those unpredictable events. And lots of people were moving around London. Who would have thought?

I was lucky to start with. I bought an Underground ticket from the ticket office at St Pancras, and was told (instead of having to work it out by trial and error) that the normal route to Liverpool Street was closed. I had to go to Holborn and change on to the Central line. Fair enough; I lived in London for a few years, and I know how that works. What I hadn’t anticipated was that King’s Cross/St Pancras is a focal point on the Underground, and everybody had to do this. Everybody is an awful lot of people.

The platforms were full, the trains were packed, and the escalators weren’t working properly. By ruthless use of our luggage, we were able to get on a couple of trains, however, and eventually we reached Liverpool Street, where we looked eagerly for a sign telling us which train went to Norwich, because it was getting late.

There was nothing. Norwich had been wiped from the universe, as far as Liverpool Street was concerned. As a last resort, I endeavoured to interest a guy on the Information desk, and he told me to go to Platform 14, which turned out to be empty. Slightly concerned, I told a nearby station official that I wanted to get to Norwich. “You’ll be lucky,” he riposted in a merry way. I did not feel lucky.

However, he did direct us to a train for Southend, from which unlikely vehicle, he told us, we should alight at Billericay, mount a coach to Witham and from there slip into a train to Norwich. We followed his instructions and sat for a while on a nearly empty train, getting more and more uneasy. Then an assorted crew joined us, prominent among them a group of Canary supporters with hands full of Big Macs. I anticipated the worst. City had lost 4-1.

What a pessimistic Mr Grumpy I am. The supporters turned out to be good-humoured and chatty throughout the journey. If some of them had had full control of their bodily functions, they would have been perfect travelling companions. In the coach between charming Billericay and gentle Witham they kept up a witty banter with a young and rather posh girl who was trying to persuade them to come to her party. They had a much firmer grasp on reality than she did, and even the coach driver appreciated their jolly enlivenment of the journey.

The coaches, by the way, were excellent. They took us from where we were to where we had to be in comfort and style. What can I say?

At Witham a train was waiting for us, together with some rail officials humorously bearing the words “Customer Services” on their yellow jackets. I may be wrong, but they did not seem keen to be there.

You might expect that a train company that had been forced to inconvenience large numbers of its passengers would try to make up for it in some way. I would suggest making sure that the substitute trains were in good order and left at frequent intervals. Instead, we waited for half an hour while further passengers trickled in, and did not get going until even after the allocated departure time of 11.10pm (we had left Liverpool Street just after 9.30). The train itself felt even older than me, creaking and groaning in and out of every station as it shuffled its way towards Norwich.

But what I would definitely do if I was a train company (an unlikely event) would be to make sure there was a buffet car on board. Actually, what I would do is provide free food and drink, but a buffet car would have done. I began to see headlines like “City fans run amok on train”, but again my expectations were too low. Or maybe the fans were too tired.

We eventually alighted from the train in Norwich just after 12.30am. Again we were lucky: we live only a couple of hundred yards from the station. As we emerged we saw a long queue of despairing passengers, and no taxis in sight.

Posted on October 12 2012 in Articles. Tagged , .