Author Archives: Tim Lenton

The vicar in the new TV sitcom Rev is slightly less of a caricature than those we have become familiar with in the past. But he struggles with similar worldly issues, from abusive builders to colleagues with dubious driving forces.

In the opening episode the topic of church schools raised its head, with the scarcely ground-breaking but admittedly funny idea of parents using various forms of bribery to get their children through the doors.

I can hardly suggest that this does not happen, but they are not the kind of Church of England schools I am familiar with.

The hundreds of church primary schools in East Anglia, where I happen to live, are there to serve all the children in the community. They are there because historically the church wanted to educate children when no-one else was interested. And they are immensely popular precisely because of their grounding in the Christian faith, which is seen as enhancing the children’s education and providing a positive ethos for behaviour and relationships.

This is true whether the parents are Christian, secular or belonging to other faiths. In one school an inspector was told by Muslim parents that they valued their children’s Christian school precisely because it had a basis in faith. Other parents without any faith routinely say how much they appreciate the Christian ethos, because it has a beneficial effect on their children.

They feel loved, and they are optimistic about their prospects. They feel there is a reason for their existence. In stark contrast to many of their elders, they have high self-esteem.

To argue, as some have done, that all this is part of a plot to indoctrinate children is to misunderstand Christianity completely. It is not a club trying to attract more members than another club. It is an offer of love, forgiveness and spiritual completeness. It is an offer that remains open permanently and does not seek to coerce anyone. It is an offer that everyone is free to reject and remain loved.

That is what makes these schools special.

Unlucky for too long

The importance of being lucky in sport is often underestimated. We prefer to think that the best player or team always wins, but they don’t.

In tennis a bad line call can change a match; in football a wrong decision by the referee is frequently crucial; and in cricket especially batsmen are at the mercy of the umpire’s eye.

Commentators wax lyrical about a batsman who has scored a couple of hundred when he was in fact dropped on 2 and wrongly given not-out on 6. On the other hand a batsman who is mistakenly adjudged lbw for a duck has “failed again”.

The first man should really have scored 2 or 6, and the second might have gone on to a magnificent 200.

We are told that this kind of thing “evens itself out” – but does it? Maybe some brilliant players never made it because they were unlucky for too long…

Letters pages in newspapers are strange and alien worlds, dominated by “facts that everybody knows” and answers to questions no-one has asked. In short, they are political places, and I feel uneasy in them.

I occasionally cross their borders, but I know in my heart that it’s a waste of time. My opinions are not of the “everybody knows” kind, and I always attract swift retorts from people who do know, know exactly what they know, and know that what anyone else knows is not worth knowing.

Recently I wrote again on the subject of speed limits, which I happen to think are often dangerously low. I left the country immediately afterwards – not to avoid gangs of marauding tortoises, but because I had a holiday booked. So I may have missed some responses, but I did see two, both of which were typical in different ways.

One came from a resident of the Newmarket Road area in Norwich, who objected to my suggestion that 30mph was too slow a limit for a wide open road with excellent visibility and houses set back.

She said residents had asked for the limit, which I don’t doubt at all. They always do. But why had they wanted it? Because “pedestrians have to take their life in their hands to cross three lanes of traffic via the new refuge there because of the newly installed bus lane. Cars joining the main road from the slip road are required to perform a dangerous manoeuvre crossing the new bus lane…” and so on.

Clearly there is a problem, but it’s not a speeding problem: it’s a bus lane problem. If a bus lane makes it dangerous for pedestrians to cross, why have a bus lane? To save buses a few seconds? Why is there not a footbridge, or a pelican crossing?

I suggest that when traffic has been travelling at 30mph along there for a while, she will find it even more difficult to cross the road, because she will have a continuous slow-moving stream of metal to contend with.

She mentions cars illegally turning right across the bus lane: this is not a speed problem; again it is a bus lane problem. Why is it even possible to perform this manoeuvre anyway? What is the highways authority playing at?

Another letter started: “Mr Lenton suggests we should be concentrating on enforcing existing speed limits”, which I didn’t say and do not support.

Ideally I would like to see speed limits functioning in an advisory capacity, because speed itself is not a problem. On any given road it may sometimes be safe to go at 40mph, and at other times 20mph will be too fast.

Prosecution should be for dangerous driving, not exceeding an arbitrary, ill-chosen limit. This does of course mean having traffic police about, and that I do support.

Nevertheless casual newspaper readers are left with the impression that (a) I am in favour of strict enforcement of speed limits and (b) I don’t care if residents are knocked down as long as I can drive fast.

See what I mean by an alien world?

Everyone wants to be safe. But it is only in recent years that inhabitants of the United Kingdom have begun to feel that they have a right to be safe – that it is a reasonable expectation.

They are outraged that a fox should be in a child’s bedroom. Not frightened, but outraged. Foxes have no right to be in bedrooms. We live in a country shorn of dangerous wildlife, and that, apparently, is as it should be.

A gunman runs amok for reasons unknown, and we are outraged that the police did not stop him immediately. We have a right to be protected from gunmen, don’t we?

But humans are unpredictable, and can be pushed over the edge. Foxes are not tame. Life is not at all safe, actually.

It has been so sanitised that we think it is, and we think it should be. But why should it? Scientifically speaking, life exists on the edge of things, in precarious circumstances. As humans, we walk an unlikely tightrope.

It is astonishing, when you think about it, that over 30 million drivers on our roads manage to miss each other with astonishing regularity, given the often badly designed pieces of tarmac that they drive on, and the fact that many of them are not really very good at it.

It is surprising that immensely powerful forces of nature have tended to leave us alone most of the time. My generation is fortunate that its civilians have never been involved in war.

But we don’t have any right to our safe and easy way of life, and we may soon find it less safe and more difficult. We have no right to be outraged at that, and it is no good looking for scapegoats. We have to deal with it ourselves.

Good at gullibility

What would be the best possible outcome for the anti-Israel activists who boarded the recent Gaza-bound flotilla?

Surely that the Israelis would over-react and commit some act of violence against them that could be spun through the world’s media and used as more propaganda against Israel.

And that is exactly what happened.

Killing people is not good, even in the face of severe provocation, but it strikes me that you have to be particularly gullible to see the flotilla as peaceful victims.

Of course, gullibility is something that certain sections of the media are particularly good at.

Speed limits represent the maximum safe speed in ideal conditions.

So a 30mph limit should mean that it is safe to travel at 30mph if weather and road conditions are good, but not if it is raining hard, or the road is damaged, or there are a lot of parked cars or pedestrians about.

Recently it seems that many highway authorities, and certainly pressure groups like the warm-hearted but inexpert Brake, are ignoring this principle by assuming that if the speed limit is 30mph, everyone will travel at 30mph. This is clearly ludicrous, but their policies are based on it.

So the call yet again is to reduce speed limits. What effect will this have? It will have no effect at all on the people it is supposed to target – namely those who travel too fast whatever the limit. They will continue to do so.

What effect will it have on good drivers? A lot of the time, they will have to drive more slowly than is necessary. Does that matter?

Ignoring the economic argument for getting work done more quickly, let’s consider the practical aspects. The good driver – and most drivers are pretty good – will know from experience what the correct speed is for the conditions. If forced to drive consistently more slowly, he or she will get frustrated, bored and distracted. If the speed limit is enforced by cameras, he or she will look repeatedly at the speedometer, because a good driver does not want to become a criminal.

The result will be large numbers of drivers who are not alert and who are paying less attention to potential road hazards than they would normally do. Clearly, this increases the danger to other road users.

Because the argument for blanket slowing down is essentially flawed, Brake has been using an emotional argument about the effect on children of being hit at 30mph – as if anyone wanted to hit a child at any speed. I mean, we all love children, right? But what they don’t seem to realise is that if you drive at 30mph, you will not hit anyone at that speed unless you are driving with your eyes closed (or watching your speedometer too closely).

If you can see clearly ahead, you will be able to avoid a child running into the road because you see them long before they get there. Even if you can’t see clearly enough to avoid them completely, you will have reduced speed considerably before impact. To state that someone driving at 30mph will hit a child at 30mph is just inaccurate, to put it as kindly as I can.

A recent survey, again by Brake, shows that nearly three-quarters of motorists drive at 35mph in a 30mph limit. I’m sure they do. This is because 30mph is very often (though not always) too slow in good conditions, and is actually an argument for increasing the limit. Needless to say, they don’t see it that way.

Instead of victimising safe motorists and making the roads more dangerous – which is what slower limits would do – it is time we targeted really dangerous drivers. There are various ways of doing this (cameras set to realistically high levels is one option), but the most desirable by far is increased numbers of traffic police. Combined with proper penalties for proper offences, this would hit the dangerous drivers and remove the repeated demands and distractions from so-called safety “experts” who simply don’t like cars.

Risk of stalemate

World chess champion Viswanathan (Vishy) Anand has narrowly avoided the need for a coalition with his challenger, Veselin Topalov, when he beat him in the final game of 12 in the championship match in Sofia this week.

Although Anand, from India, scored only 6½ against his Bulgarian opponent’s 5½, this was sufficient to take the title outright.

Players keen on proportional representation would like the championship decided by a tournament of the top players. In that case, if Anand won with 12, Topalov scored  11 and the world’s currently highest rated player, Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, made 10, the championship could theoretically be shared by Topalov and Carlsen.

Sources close to the International Chess Federation described this as “fanciful”, but Prof Sam “Ian” Aufmerksam, of the University of East Anglia’s School of Chess, Penguins and Road Surfacing, said it could herald an exciting new era of chess politics. On the other hand it could lead to stalemate, or perpetual check.

Anyone with any sense was unavailable for comment.

An astounding turnround in voting habits has been predicted by the parliamentary candidate for Corpusty East, Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago (90).

Mr Houseago, who has a bad leg and is standing for the first time this year, said yesterday that voters could not help but be overwhelmed by his party’s radical immigration policy.

“It is a radical policy,” he said. “We would allow anyone at all to come to this country to live, as long as the country they come from takes someone in return. We suggest primarily operators of speed camera vans, then Guardian readers, and if necessary Liberal Democrats in general.

“We are convinced this will receive radical and widespread support, and I will be the new MP for Corpusty East within a week.”

Asked if his was a single-issue campaign, Mr Houseago said he would not go that far. He planned to introduce capital punishment for anyone who referred to voters as bigots. He supported wind turbines completely, as long as they were confined to Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea. “They would fit in well there,” he said, “because they don’t do anything useful, but are very expensive and make a lot of themselves.”

Mr Houseago’s flat earth spokesperson, Professor V A R Scheinlich, said he was planning an independent inquiry on house-building. It would be conducted mainly by house-builders and decorators. He promised that a whitewash would be very unlikely, and such allegations were totally without foundation.

Corpusty East is a new seat, formed by combining parts of Little London with Irmingland. Local expert Len “Kissme” Hardy of Hindolveston described it as both radical and far-reaching. It was quite possible that it would hold the balance of power, he insisted.

The shock result in Corpusty East, where favourite Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago lost on a 90 per cent swing to someone else, was attributed today to a misunderstanding.

“We really didn’t get our message across,” he said. “Too many voters thought I was trying to form a Government, but I would have been quite happy to share power with Dave or Gordon – or even Nick, if he could have met my demands.

“With the situation in turmoil, I believe we should have a rerun. Now that everyone knows the way votes are going, they can adjust their choice accordingly. If that happened, I’m sure I would be returned by a monstrous majority.”

Corpusty East, a new seat formed from parts of Little London and Irmingland, will until then be represented by the winner of yesterday’s poll, Len “Kissme” Hardy of Hindolveston, who was standing as an Independent while claiming double expenses.

“Len is well thought of in the area,” said radical cleric the Rev Nick Repps-cum-Bastwick, “and should make a fine member when he is available.”

Mr Hardy is a whole food chef and comet chaser and has been linked with Mr Houseago’s ex-fiancee, Dorothea Goodchild. He favours “getting out of Europe and into the Atlantic”, abolition of bicycles and turning the A11 into a motorway. He is also a strong supporter of the Free Hingham Poetry Collective.

“I was delighted to get into double figures,” he told Professor David Dumbleberry in an exclusive interview. “That’s always plenty in Corpusty. Where’s the canteen?”

Twitter hate campaign

Amazing the amount of hatred generated by General Elections. Twitter was alive with vituperative comments about the Tories, mainly of the “they’re posh” variety, which I would have thought was a bit simplistic even for 140 characters.

Then the possibility that the Tories might form a minority government made these same people apoplectic. How can they have the nerve to want to govern, they gasped, when they haven’t got a majority? Well, I hate to point this out, but they have a lot more votes than anyone else.

But what about the Lib Dems and Labour together? Mmm, yes, but what makes them think that Liberal Democrat voters’ second choice would be Labour? And Tories plus Lib Dems is an even bigger majority.

Of course the biggest majority would be Tories and Labour. Why don’t we go for that?

All very amusing. But not as amusing as Gordon Brown, an inveterate obstacle to electoral reform, who now suddenly finds it’s pretty much his priority. Please, Nick?
Come on, Nick. You know you want to.

Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that if this was an English election, the Tories would be overwhelming winners. Can all those Tweeters be closet Scots?

Following secret discussions at an undisclosed beach hut, a new political party has been formed to fight the General Election on behalf of disillusioned voters.

Norfolk local hero Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, 90, said he had been forced to act by the lack of choice offered to the British people in general, and to his fiancee, Dorothea Goodchild, in particular.

“She was tearing her hair out because she couldn’t tell any difference between the parties,” he said. “And I couldn’t help her. They are all promising the same thing. The same old thing that we’ve been hearing for the last 20 years. They’re just a crowd of bankers. And lawyers.”

Mr Houseago said his new party would not be making any promises. “We won’t know how much of a mess the last lot have got us into till we’re elected,” he said. “So how can we make promises?

“I’m pretty sure we’ll have to put taxes up a lot to get us out of debt, but I’m not promising, though I know that’s what most people want.”

He said that in general his party would make the NHS easily accessible to all with no waiting, and guarantee successful diagnosis and treatment. He would make sure that all schools were equipped to come top of the league tables, if any, and that all pupils were above average. On equality, he said everyone would be considered equal except great crested newts and Len “Kissme” Hardy, of Hindolveston.

On climate change, he said he was in favour of it “seeing it was inevitable anyway”. On road safety, he said he thought it would be a good idea, but he felt recycling speed cameras and radar equipment was essential.

Asked the name of his party, Mr Houseago said he would not reveal it yet, because he did not want to invite ridicule from “smart-ass commentators and wishy-washy fascists”. He would not be appearing on Newsnight or The Culture Show, but he had been approached by the School of Penguins, Chess and Road Surfacing at the University of East Anglia.

Mr Houseago’s spokesman, 64, was not available for comment.

After a long silence, the School of Penguins, Chess and Road Surfacing at the University of East Anglia announced yesterday that it was replacing Professor Ian “Sam” Aufmerksam, its long-serving head.

Prof Aufmerksam had resigned following an embarrassing e-mail leak and the loss of key data.

New head of school Prof Sam “Ian” Aufmerksam said any resemblance between his name and that of his predecessor was coincidental, and he was quite happy for anyone to look for the data, though he did not think they would find it.

Though he admitted that some of the data had been wrong anyway, he stood by the conclusions reached and said there was no doubt that there would be penguins in East Anglia by 2020, or an hour or two later. He was supported in this by the government, many large businesses, banks and international organisations.

He also backed the controversial “penguin credit” scheme, whereby companies and individuals could pay large sums of money to adopt a penguin and place it “notionally” in Norfolk. He denied that unscrupulous individuals were stockpiling notional penguins.

He praised the government for subsidising the construction of icebergs at strategic points in East Anglia and elsewhere, and said these were absolutely essential: anyone who opposed them should be regarded as morally suspect.

Asked about reports that the icebergs would melt and leave ugly superstructure scarring the countryside, he attacked the selfishness of  “iceberg deniers”.

Meanwhile local hero Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, who has been missing for some years, has been found alive in the Autonomous Republic of Hingham, near Norfolk.

Asked to explain his absence, he said he had been taking part in an experiment run by Professor V A R Scheinlich, an expert in wormholes and time-space distortion. As a result of this he was reassessing his age to “something more realistic”.

Mr Houseago, 90, has been reunited with his fiancée, Dorothea Goodchild, who refused to give her age but said she had been “seeing someone”. This was now all in the past, and she was drawing a line under it, but she would not be available on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Mr Houseago is launching a campaign against poor headline-writing. He said headlines on articles frequently had nothing to do with the main point of the story. He blamed the “insidious influence of great crested newts”.

I was delighted to find this speed limit sign beside a road on the island of Captiva, in the Gulf of Mexico.

Most speed limits are set at unrealistic levels, so why not make it obviously ridiculous? This may be the first example of a satirical speed limit.

Not before time. The whole road safety industry has been overrun by fanatics with no relevant expertise. Unless of course it’s a conspiracy to grind us all into the ground.

Having struggled against a pretty strong tide for some years in a bid to get the causes of climate change reconsidered, I suppose I should be delighted to find the water suddenly flowing in the other direction.

Even such august institutions as the BBC and the Guardian newspaper have switched from being unquestioning backers of human-caused climate change to asking awkward questions about the methods used to arrive at such a verdict.

E-mail messages that somehow slipped out of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit have revealed that crucial climate data was omitted, manipulated or mislaid, and that dubious methods were employed to silence sceptics and get round the Freedom of Information Act.

It has been revealed elsewhere that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made a hugely inaccurate claim about the speed that Himalayan glaciers are melting, and that this claim was made specifically to encourage politicians to take “concrete action”.

In similar vein, IPCC allegations that global warming is linked to natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods have been shown to have no scientific basis, but were based on publicity from organisations with political rather than scientific motives.

Interviewed by the Sunday Times, disaster loss expert Dr Roger Pielke Jr said: “All the literature published before and since the IPCC report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part but can’t find it.”

According to Dr Pielke, “as much as 40 per cent of the Stern Review projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change” derive from this miscalculation. The original figures, I understand, have now been altered in the Stern Report, but the wrong conclusions remain.

All this is now being discussed openly. So why am I not delighted? Because of the capacity of politicians to carry on regardless.

The Tories who, like nearly all UK politicians, ignore all the counter-evidence being thrown up against human-caused climate change, are now intending to ally themselves with Lord Stern to advise on the creation of a “Green Investment Bank”.

And Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband says it would be “profoundly irresponsible” to allow recent controversies over scientific data to undermine the fight against global warming, because it would be “devastating” for future generations if the world community did not continue with its efforts to cut carbon emissions.

And that’s another reason I’m not delighted. In any other scientific field, so many problems concerning the data would result in a total rethink of the conclusions, and probably of the whole hypothesis. In climate science, it seems, the conclusions exist independently of the data.

What has happened in effect is that the whole process in dealing with so-called human-induced climate change has proved so much to the liking of politicians that they are not interested in whether it’s true any more.

In fact, it would be so embarrassing for them if it were not true that they will ignore the possibility as long as they can.

As a result, pieces of “evidence” of human-induced climate change that had been hyped and widely publicised to get support from the well-intentioned now magically become minor errors of little significance.

Of course there are good things to come out of the policies being pursued. Energy saving and eco-awareness, for instance. But there are bad things too: massive unnecessary costs imposed on industry in a recession; hectares of ugly, inefficient windfarms despoiling the countryside; reduction of road-building; unrealistic and draconian traffic restrictions; the carbon credit money-making scams.

So no, I’m not delighted. I’m not delighted at being called a denier, as in holocaust. I’m not delighted at being accused of not caring about the future.

I’m not delighted that respected scientists are abused and silenced, and their work being described as “voodoo science” when it is actually rigorous and precise. I’m not delighted at the politicians, lobbyists and engine-drivers on the IPCC masquerading as scientists and altering research to fit their own ambitions.

I really am hard to please, aren’t I?

There’s a reason for this

A pleasant weekend among the hills and dales of Derbyshire recently was marred by the bizarre speed limits – not in the hills but on the roads.

Even more annoying than the ridiculously low limits were the patronising signs reading “It’s 50 for a reason”.

Of course it’s 50 for a reason. Even I don’t think it’s a totally random figure. But is it a good reason?

Too often the reasoning seems to be: take a perfectly safe speed and subtract a minimum of 10mph.

Deeper down, the reason could simply be that the highways authority are a bunch of hopeless drivers.

If you want to see theatre used in a clever, original and funny way, Bertolt Brecht is your man.

Like Leonard Cohen, he has a reputation for being depressing. Both men, if you pay attention to them, are inspiring, uplifting and brilliant.

I saw Brecht’s Man is Man in Norwich, at the Playhouse, performed with great energy by Theatre Paradisum. In a joke that Brecht would have appreciated, the cast was all-female.

It was stunning. Mesmerising. But the theatre was nearly empty: I counted 60 in the audience.

Why the lack of interest? Well, there was no-one from television in the cast, and it wasn’t Shakespeare. Nor was it opera, ballet or pantomime.

It is not the first time I have seen first-rate theatre sparsely attended in the city. Do we have no further need of it? Is high culture the only temptation for some, and the paralysing deadness of reality TV opium enough for the rest?

Playwrights like Brecht take life seriously, which is why they can be so iconoclastically funny. Perhaps we are not serious enough about life. Or at any rate, not serious enough to want to find out more.

In the wrong place to judge

In Haiti untold thousands of people are dying. We sit at home and watch, and some of us send money.

Some of us know exactly what is going on, because we have newspapers and televisions. Or do we know? I rather like the story about Mother Teresa, who “knew exactly what was going on in the world, because she never read a newspaper”. Ben Hecht said that “trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand on a clock”.

We are not there; so while we can imagine what is going on, and see a minute part of it, we are in no position to pass judgement on those who try to help.

Some people see prayer as useless: they are entitled to their point of view, though of course they are wrong! But what is 100% certain is that being judgmental is worse than useless. Always.