Author Archives: Tim Lenton

5 September 2011

As I made myself comfortable in the hospital waiting room, my eye was caught by a notice directly in front of me: “Please do not move.” For a moment I thought I was on the road again, and all the dreams of Brake, the anti-motorist organisation, had come true.

Had I slipped into an alternative dimension? Or would “Do not move” be replacing 20mph signs in the near future, and all speed limits in the fulness of time?

Funny things, speed limits. They are the same whatever car you drive, whatever the time of day, whatever the road surface and whatever the weather conditions. They are the same if you are an expert driver or completely hopeless (and the driving test does little to weed out the hopeless, because it lets you keep trying until you scrape through).

Speed limits are the same whatever the capacity of your engine, however fast you can accelerate and however efficiently you can brake. They are the same however good your eyesight and however good or bad your reaction time, however well you concentrate, and however much you like talking to your passengers, changing the CD or adjusting the heater.

In other words, they take no account at all of the essential quality of driving. They just set an arbitrary speed beyond which you must not go – and this speed is not even decided by experts. They create an offence which is not subject to any kind of judgement as to the danger involved, because it is decided by a machine – and a machine whose accuracy you cannot rely on.

Why are some people determined to pin so many accidents on to speed? Partly because it’s so simple: you don’t have to think about it. And Einstein did say: “You should make everything as simple as possible.” However, he did add the vital three words “but not simpler”. Where speed limits are concerned, we have made things too simple. As a result we are criminalising good drivers, and making barely competent drivers think they are good.
But hasn’t it been shown that speed cameras stop accidents? No, the statistics are variable, in that while one area will show a fall in accidents if you choose the right time periods to focus on, another will seem to indicate – from a similarly arbitrary selection – that the cameras actually increase accidents.

How could that be? By taking drivers’ eyes away from the road. When I am checking my speedometer I am not looking at the road, and when I am looking out for cameras, other hazards – yes, I do mean other hazards – have a slightly lower priority, whether I mean them to or not.

Some will point to a continuing fall in serious accidents since cameras were introduced. But this decline was well under way before the introduction of cameras, and in fact slowed down in the years after cameras appeared.

Of course, like everything else, it comes down to money. Speed cameras bring in money, and they are often placed quite cynically to ensure the money is maximised – on a downhill, straight stretch of road after miles of tortuous bends, for instance. A former police driver friend received points and a fine in just such a situation because he slightly exceeded the limit when overtaking; if he had slowed down when spotting the camera (a natural reaction), he might now be dead.

Some people do drive dangerously fast, and they need to be stopped. That is what traffic police are for. But we have failed to distinguish between dangerously fast and over the limit. The fact is that most speed limits are too low. If the limits were right, the argument against cameras would be weak. But they are not right. Sometimes, they are nowhere near right.

When I started driving, in the 1960s, police advice was to drive as quickly as you safely could: they called it progressive driving. I believe this is good advice. Slow driving dulls the senses and slows reaction times. We are producing a mass of people who can follow rules but can’t drive well – who appear incapable of overtaking and who do not concentrate on the road. Worrying, at a time when so many accidents are caused by fatigue, boredom and lack of attention.

Highways authorities and road safety “experts” want us to go slowly. I want to go faster. Not ridiculously fast, but safely fast. Fast enough to be helpful to other road users.

I think there are excellent reasons for doing this. But the wrong people are in power. And as a much wiser writer said, “they would not be in power if they were not the wrong people”. So I guess there is no hope. “Please do not move” is the way forward. If you see what I mean.

Never mind all this turning-on and turning-off of speed cameras. Most of the real advances in road safety seem to happen in Scotland.

A couple of months ago, for instance, road crashes at five Aberdeenshire blackspots were reduced by 100% through retexturing the road surface to improve skid resistance.

This would, I suspect, by regarded as a lost opportunity by English road safety-in-numbers partnerships, who would have slammed in speed humps, chicanes and cameras before you could say Banff.

Their solution would have had the twin advantages of bringing in cash (always a prime aim of road safety in England) and maintaining a solid accident rate to justify their own existence.

Understandable. Who doesn’t want to justify their own existence? Still, I prefer the Scottish approach on the grounds that it actually contributes to road safety. When it comes to contributing to the road safety industry, England is streets ahead.

Our northern neighbour should also be praised for its attempts to keep roads open, unlike my home city of Norwich, which closes as many roads as possible, either permanently or for an inordinately long time.

Scotland, meanwhile, has managed to put a Model T Ford on top of Ben Nevis – again. This was achieved originally a century ago, when apparently the roads in the Ben Nevis summit area were better and the car was driven to the top.

This time the car was driven successfully halfway up, but then deconstructed and reassembled at the top. I hesitate to mention this, because if the anti-motorist boys and girls at Brake get to hear of it, I suspect that they will recommend this method for all car journeys.

Could be useful in Norwich, I suppose.

Several sightings have been made in the eastern Cairngorms of the lesser spotted conservationist, a species which is not indigenous to the area and is regarded by many as a threat to local fauna.

It is very difficult to track down and inhabits moral high ground that is largely inaccessible to an important species, the common or garden walker. The effects of its presence are far-reaching.

Typically, many hundreds of yards of posts and wire netting will appear almost overnight, rendering romantic wild areas suddenly inaccessible. Sometimes patches of heather will be burnt, and notices will appear saying that this is a good thing, because it will grow again.

The lesser spotted conservationist is hard to pin down, being perfectly camouflaged, and will survive almost anything you can throw at it.

Prof V A R Scheinlich, the noted expert, is concerned that the species is spreading uncontrollably from greener areas to the south and will cause irreversible changes to previously untouched glens and mountain wilderness.

“We must all be on our guard,” he said. “It represents a very subtle menace to the common or garden walker – on a spiritual level in particular. The ubiquitous wire may seem to have little practical effect, but it deters the walker, sometimes on a subliminal level, from enjoying the area and may lead in time to the disappearance of walkers completely, rather in the way the grey squirrels have evicted the attractive red from many areas further south.

“Once established, the conservationist can take over an area, and things will never be the same. Which is kind of ironic, if you think about it.”

When my grandson was four, I was able to take him across the road to Norwich rail station, and we could wander down the platforms and watch the trains.

If we felt like it, we could hop on a Bittern Line train to Sheringham, buy a ticket from the conductor and enjoy a few hours on the beach.

Since this is public transport, you might think that someone would be encouraging us to use it. So how has it improved?

It hasn’t. It’s much worse.

I can no longer take my grandson, who is now eight, on to the platforms to watch the trains, because electronic barriers have been erected to check our tickets. These frequently don’t work, and there is always a member of staff standing there – so the saving is not obvious. But they do effectively stop us watching the trains.

They also stop us hopping spontaneously on to a train, because now we have to buy a ticket first. Which means we have to queue up behind people who have long, complicated queries but still intend to travel today – and therefore we have to get to the ticket office very early and waste time.

As an added attraction, if you are in the station waiting for someone, you can’t use the toilets – because they are behind the barriers.

I wonder what the people behind all this would have done if they wanted to make us stop using the trains and get back into our cars.

Restricted access, part two

Thursday, 12 May 2011

After writing last time about the difficulty of getting access to the platforms on Norwich rail station, I have noticed that there are many areas I cannot access as easily as I could when I was young – or even middle-aged.

I used to be able to wander through the wonderful Norwich Cathedral easily: now I have to access it through the amusingly named Hostry, where I am invited to pay £5, and getting out at the other end is not always possible without detouring through the cloisters.

When I worked at the Eastern Daily Press it used to be possible on warm summer evenings to get out on to the roof and stroll from one side to the other. Health and safety has long since forbidden this, and security now prevents any kind of unauthorised strolling.

I used to be able to walk behind my house and through an alley into Thorpe Road – as did many other local residents – but this is now owned by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, and two locked gates guard the way. Not too wild about that.

There are many roads in the city now closed to me when I am driving. I used to be able to drive from Eleanor Road through to Southwell Road in Norwich, until sheltered housing was plonked across the road. More recently I have been prevented from driving from Riverside Road over the river and up Bishop Bridge Road, and across the bridge from St Andrew’s Hall to the Playhouse.

There are other examples. I suspect that the horribly neglected building at the top of Mountergate – once a famous fish and chip shop – has been allowed to fester on and on because the scaffolding holding it “up” conveniently prevents motor vehicles getting into King Street.

Of course I realised  that as I got older I would not be able to do what I used to do. But this wasn’t really what I had envisaged.

Protests against cuts are nothing new. One of the problems with improving services to the public is that what is given cannot easily be taken away: the new, improved situation quickly becomes the norm. More than that – it becomes essential.

When I was growing up, back in the 50s and 60s, the local council provided only basic services: it didn’t have a website, for a start, and there were no “eco issues”. People weren’t paid all that much, and raw materials were relatively cheap too. There were far fewer time-consuming legal requirements.

It could be argued that almost everything that has changed has been for the better. That’s not a position I would take, but it’s still quite hard for me to identify cuts I would want to make in 2011. I don’t like to see people losing their jobs, even if I think the jobs are a waste of space.

But you won’t find me waving banners either – largely because I suspect that the same people protesting loudly at cuts would shout equally loudly if council tax were raised to maintain services.

I sympathise with councillors to some extent, because they have an impossible job, and they are paid only expenses. I don’t sympathise much with council officials whose salaries run into six figures.

But I can’t see how it benefits anyone to take up an attitude of hate towards any one political party. As far as I can see, politicians of all colours make disastrous mistakes, but none of them does it deliberately. Few of them, unfortunately, tell the truth, but maybe that is the cost of democracy and a fickle, selfish electorate. I hope it isn’t, but I suspect it is.

I can see that a policy of cutting debt makes sense, but strangling the economy by putting people out of work doesn’t. Making poor people poorer doesn’t help anyone. If Jesus came to preach good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to deliver those who are crushed, we can hardly justify trampling the poor and destroying people’s lives.

The national debt is admittedly the highest it’s been since the early 70s, but in the 50s and 60s, it was much higher. Of course, the world is a more volatile place nowadays – a place where it might be dangerous to expose yourself.

It seems to me that the only sensible course is to raise income tax in an attempt to reduce national debt in a way that harms fewest people. I don’t expect this to be a popular idea. In fact, I expect it to be ignored.

So what would make a real difference? We could start by deciding not to hate each other, even if our politics are contradictory. A society based on love and co-operation is not one that is going to come to grief. It would be good news, not just for the poor, but for everyone.

I was accosted by an attractive woman as I made my way out of the Castle Museum in Norwich the other day. I suppose it was a small disappointment that she was involved in market research, but you can’t have everything.

The conversation proved interesting, largely because she revealed early on that she had written a book called I’m a Street Girl Now. This happened to tie in rather neatly with my conviction, held over many years, that market research is a cross between prostitution and bank robbery. I didn’t mention that to her, of course. I’m not heartless.

I should also stress immediately that the woman in question was not engaged in any criminal or even borderline activity. She was simply asking me a series of pretty silly questions about my museum-going habits, and as she was very easy to talk to – or to put it another way, very good at her part-time job – I was quite happy to answer them.

They were not her questions, of course. I don’t know whose questions they were, but I suspect some kind of machine, or at the very most a mind from which imagination had been surgically removed. It is probably the same machine or desensitised mind that comes up with all market research questions. Please don’t tell me that a lot of thought goes into it, because that would be very, very frightening.

One of the questions the Street Girl asked me was how many times I had been to a museum in the past year. I don’t know about you, but I keep no record of this sort of thing, and don’t have the slightest idea – just as I have not the remotest idea how much I spend on clothes in a year, or how much on food in a week (other questions I have been asked). I suspect very strongly that it is hugely different year on year and week on week – and no, it has nothing to do with the recession. It’s more to do with having only a vague idea how long a year is. Or a week.

I know roughly how old I am and how much money comes into my household, but that’s about all. I make the rest up. I assume that most market research victims make their answers up out of desperation, and I know for a fact that some people lie in cold blood, because I have heard them do it.

And yet marketing decisions are presumably based on this rubbish. Or is it, as I strongly suspect, that market research is done purely to give some pseudo-scientific credence to a decision that has already been made? It’s an easy trick to frame questions to give the answers you want, as anyone involved in the road safety industry knows. But why bother?

Why bother with public consultation if you know what you’re going to do anyway – even if through some bungling, the street girls, clipboards and websites come up with answers you can’t twist to your purposes? How often I go to museums may mean nothing – unless you want to shut museums, or charge more for them, or take the fun out of life completely.

Why prostitution and bank robbery? Because market research extracts large amounts of money from those sucked into commissioning it, and provides nothing more than passing satisfaction, followed by an empty feeling.

How do we stop it? Well, someone said reality is what continues to exist after you stop believing in it. So if we stop believing in market research, there’s every chance it will disappear. It is, after all, unreal. Let’s give it a go.

I have been having a discussion with a friend about the use of the word mankind. She claims that it makes women “invisible” and should be abandoned in favour of humankind or humanity – or, if not abandoned, used only to refer to men.

This makes me uneasy. Mankind means humanity and not people of the male persuasion. It is a useful word that has the virtue of being unambiguous and inclusive of every being that comes under the heading human. Humanity can mean compassion, and human race is inaccurate, because mankind is not a race but a species.

Changing the use of language to reflect a political position has a bad history. We’ve all read 1984. Changing the language to pander to people who are over-sensitive is equally disturbing – if not another version of the same thing. If women feel disempowered or invisible, then it’s nothing to do with language: it’s to do with relationships and attitudes. Bullying is bullying, whatever the gender.

I myself have never seen an invisible woman. I hope that’s not a dismissive thing to say. All the women I know are very visible indeed, and I rejoice that this is so. Almost everything I can do, a woman can do, both legally and practically, though not all of them can do it as well. Some can do it better, and most of them can do it better than most men could, but that’s another story. It’s also a wild generalisation, but it’s not offensive to women, I hope. Needless to say, all women can do things I can’t.

I once wrote a piece extolling the virtues of the female approach – and was castigated by a woman for being patronising. So I know I can’t win.

But the fact is that if you, as a woman, have been made to feel small or powerless by a man, you are likely to see that happening everywhere, and the three letters m-a-n are as a red rag to a bull, or in this case a heifer. But in English man has a dual meaning, like many, many other words. It may mean an adult male, or it may mean a member of the human race, or the human race as a whole. In mankind it has no gender reference at all.

This is not really a difficult concept to grasp. But if you look at other languages, it makes things even clearer. In French, mankind translates as humanité, whereas an adult male is homme. In German, mankind translates as Menschheit, whereas the German for a male adult is Mann. Interestingly in German the word man is equivalent to (though wider used than) the English one (as in Royal Family). Does this intimidate German women? And do they get annoyed that the word Mädchen, meaning girl, is in fact a neuter noun? Perhaps they do.

It just so happens that in English, the letters m-a-n have different meanings, like the letters s-e-t and many others. When it comes down to it, if you object to mankind, you might as well object to mandarins, manatees and Manchester United.

You could even argue that with the word man having a dual meaning, adult English males might feel aggrieved that they have no distinct word referring to them, whereas women have. There used to be a distinct word for man – the Old English wer – but there isn’t now.

The experience of my friend is that “male language feels alienating and dismissive, that men are thought of as more important”. I personally don’t know what male language is. Language is available to anyone. The use of words like man, or mankind, as descriptive terms is neutral.

It is quite wrong that women – any woman – should feel alienated or dismissed as of no importance. Obviously women are of equal value to men: any other position is absurd. I personally prefer them, but that is a question of taste.

I am sorry my friend has had the experience she has, but I don’t think changing the meaning or use of words that are simply descriptive and, in fact, inclusive, can possibly help her, or her cause. It might even alienate people who would be on her side. If there is a side.

Should I abandon all this logic, though, and simply not use the word mankind, so that she feels better? Well, I would like her to feel better. So it all comes down to this question: what is more important, language or feelings?

Tricky. Leonard Cohen says: “I don’t trust my inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go.” Does language come and go too? And if it does, what can we rely on to express ourselves accurately?

Bidding for money wastes more time and energy than almost any other activity.

I have no figures to back that up, but if you wanted to set up a project to unearth such statistics, you could probably bid for Lottery money to fund it. It would be a waste of time and energy, but that’s the way the world goes round.

Not literally, of course, unless you believe that the time and effort expended in bidding is somehow channelled into reinforcing gravity – and that is so unlikely that even the European Union would find it hard to justify.

But say you have lots of time and energy, and you would like to set up a project to benefit the community. Say, further, that your project involves working with children or vulnerable adults. Quite reasonably, you would like about £5000 to pay for it. It’s not much, and it’s available in a fund somewhere. Unfortunately the only way you can proceed is to bid for the money.

If you go ahead in your normal headstrong way you will receive a mere 15-page application form and 21 pages of guidance. And this is not fun reading. It is serious stuff. Oh yes. The sort of thing that saps most people’s will to live. The sort of thing that stops you working with children and vulnerable adults altogether.

It is not just a question of filling in the form, though that is debilitating enough. Before making your request for funding you need to “have safeguarding policies in place that are appropriate to your organisation’s work” – policies that have to be reviewed “at least every year”.

You must also “complete a rigorous recruitment and selection process for staff and volunteers … including checking criminal records and taking up references”. Criminal record checks, which I think I am safe in saying are totally unfit for purpose, unless the purpose is extracting money from innocent people, must be renewed “at least every three years”.

In addition, and among other things, you must “provide child protection and health and safety training or guidance for staff and volunteers”.

So in addition to your creative and exciting project, you now have to write tedious safeguarding policies and review them, introduce a rigorous bureaucratic process involving references and CRB checks, and provide crippling health and safety training and guidance – oh, and a risk assessment. Did I mention that?

All that is all on one page of the 15-page form which, happily, is quite good for making paper aeroplanes, so all is not lost. You could give them to children or vulnerable adults. As long as you have safeguarding policies in place.

Julian Fellowes, writer of the ITV drama series Downton Abbey, has apparently become dispirited by the amount of criticism he has received. This ranges from anachronisms (yellow lines and TV aerials) and plagiarism (sugar mistaken for salt; flower show contretemps) to historical inaccuracies and “cosiness”.

He attributes these criticisms to “permanent negative nitpicking from the Left”, though as they stem mainly from Daily Telegraph readers, this seems a strange approach to take. Telegraph readers are notoriously obsessed with wearing the correct clothes and pronouncing words as they were pronounced 50 years ago, and one can imagine them seizing with glee on anything that clashes with their particular view of the world. After all Downton Abbey is set in the early 20th century, and many Telegraph readers are authorities on this era, because they still live in it.

What Mr Fellowes may be referring to is the way other sections of the media, which are certainly tilting towards the negative left if not toppling over in that direction, have picked up the anti-Downton baton and run with it enthusiastically.

Let me come out into the open. I do not know Mr Fellowes personally, but I enjoy Downton Abbey very much and am delighted that a new series has been commissioned. I am also a Daily Telegraph reader. Many of my views are left-wing. Some are not.

I wonder what sort of viewer watches a drama in order to spot historical inaccuracies and anachronisms. I further ponder on what kind of literate person is not aware that there are no new plots, just reworking of old ones. As a writer who reads a lot, I know that I use ideas, plots and words that have been used before and lodged, often unknowingly, in my brain. Every writer does.

The real question is whether Mr Fellowes has produced a worthwhile drama, and it seems to me that he has succeeded brilliantly, with the help of some top-class casting and acting. One of his most striking achievements, not common in much drama, is to portray goodness as though it is an attractive quality.

Perhaps this is the real problem. There are those who do not like landed gentry to have good qualities and to treat their servants well. I am sure there are many who do not like the idea of servants at all, especially servants who are good at what they do and happy to do it.

But the vital question is not who you are; it is how you react. Service is a dignified calling, whether it is in a country house, a restaurant or a department store. The so-called status of a job is a red herring. What matters is whether we do a job well. Mr Fellowes, in my view, serves us very well indeed.

Traffic lights in Thailand count down from 90 seconds, so that you know exactly how long you have to wait.

It strikes me that there is a lot to be said for this. Those of us not blessed with zen-like patience curse liberally at all the delays of modern life, but I don’t believe we really mind waiting: what really annoys us – what raises all those ulcers, trips all those heart attacks and tips us over into madness – is not knowing how long we have to wait.

I was in the waiting room at our local health centre the other day, and the time for my appointment had long passed. Had they overlooked my appointment? Had the doctor been called out to an emergency? What was wrong? What should I do?

I didn’t mind waiting. I understood that it might be necessary. But what I really need to know is how long I have to wait. And, if at all possible, why.

Is this too much to ask? Why is the bus not coming? Is it coming at all? Have I missed it, or has it been cancelled? How long must I stand in the rain?

There is a long tailback on the motorway. Nothing is moving.Well, it happens. But how long will it take to sort out? Will I reach my destination today? Should I ring home, and if I do, will a policeman pop up from nowhere and charge me with using a mobile phone while driving? Has it turned into a crime scene? I really need to know these things.

I am in the slow queue at the post office. Why is it slow? How long is it going to take for that young woman to post a second-class penguin to Siberia? Why does she need a receipt?

My book has not arrived from a retailer in America. How long is it supposed to take? What could go wrong? How long will it in fact take? Tell me, tell me.

It seems to me that we could take most of the stress out of society by simply informing people how long they have to wait, and why. The technology is there: it may be expensive, but think of the money the NHS would save.

They’ll do it in the end: just wait. I don’t know how long.