Author Archives: Tim Lenton

Today I played my guitar until my fingers bled. It only took a few minutes, but it made me feel like an old bluesman, which I suppose is what I am – or a grumpy old man, to put it another way.

There were lots of things wrong with the world when I was young. I seem to remember a long, cold war of some kind, and heaps of rubble left over from the much warmer one that I just missed.

And very painful dentistry after I cycled into a car. A stationary car. Nowadays, under the new Highway Code, it would be the car’s fault, but it wasn’t then. It was definitely my fault, which didn’t make it any less painful.

Children walked to school, or sometimes cycled. They certainly weren’t taken there in cars. There were no cycle paths, no high-vis clothes, no lycra, no helmets and no silly little helmet-cams. As a result most people kind of liked cyclists. I know it seems hard to believe. 

Most of all, people weren’t afraid all the time.

Medicine was far less developed than it is now; it wasn’t all that long since antibiotics had been invented. That was 1928, and it happened by accident, like all the best science. If scientists had been organised at the time they would all have got together and said antibiotics were impossible, and not allowed anyone to argue with them because there was a consensus.

Or maybe there would have been a lockdown, with occasional parties. 

People died quite a lot (well, once each, obviously) of diseases that are now easily curable. My mother told me I had polio, though I don’t remember it. My parents were not keen on vaccination, but they were not called anti-vaxxers or banned from social media, or cancelled. 

We did not live in fear of dying, and no-one was woke. People got on pretty well, really, and a lot of them went to church, which meant that they believed in life after death. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

Of course they also believed in life before death. That helped too.

…that I did not attend any parties in or around Downing Street, wherever that is, during anything that might be described as a lockdown. Nor did I attend anything that looked as though it might be a party, even if it wasn’t. 

I did not attend anything that was not a party, even though it might have been. Nor did I break any rules, even though I might have done, if there were any.

However I cannot rule out the possibility that I might have done one or more of those things if I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

“Fancy a quick drink in the garden, Tim?” 

“Don’t mind if I do. It’s been a hard day, and those scientists are so pessimistic. They make your head ache.“

Or I suppose I might say: “Sorry, I’m going to follow the rules. I’m going home. In fact, I’m not sure I should be here in the first place.” Anything’s possible. 

All those things, if they were indeed things, would have happened in a quite different reality. Things do. The past is a foreign country. People act differently there. Sometimes.

I think most of us would agree with that. 

Board games go with Christmas, don’t they? Ludo and Scrabble, not to mention Monopoly and Dixit. Gold, frankincense, myrrh and Cluedo. A shepherd did it, with a crook, in the stable. You must remember.

But not chess. Too introspective, too binary, too many pieces on earth. 

Except that someone bought me a couple of chess books this year, and I was delighted. Especially as one of them contained four games I had played. I have been immortalised in print. All right – two of them were losses, but you can’t win them all, especially at chess, where the agony of losing possibly exceeds the joy of winning. A bit like Norwich City, except that Norwich City have forgotten what winning feels like.

This particular book, which I cannot praise too highly, because it has my games in it, is by my friend Mike Read, a senior international master who I have known since he was an outstanding schoolboy player at the City of Norwich School back in the 1970s. Hampered by medical problems over the years – he is unable to use a computer screen – he had huge success as an international correspondence player and has built an immense reputation as a chess analyst and annotater.

This, his third book, is called 110 Instructive Chess Annotations, and is considerably more exciting than it sounds, containing a tremendous variety of games from Norfolk players of varying strength, all closely examined and explained with that lucidity of style that has become his trademark in the prizewinning Norfolk chess magazine, En Passant – edited by David Le Moir, another prolific chess author.

As I have been involved with Norfolk chess for even longer than Mike (I played for CNS in the early 1960s and subsequently for Norfolk), the book is especially valuable to me, containing so many games by players who became friends, including two who died this year – Greg Tebble and Jonathan Wells, both the kindest of men. Chess may be hard fought, but between people who generally like each other.

Anyway I shall be playing through those games by friends and familiar ghosts, absorbing Mike’s astute comments and delighting in the magic of maths and music that chess reveals to those who love it. Too much? Maybe.

110 Instructive Chess Annotations, by SIM Mike Read, is available from Amazon at cost price, which happens to be £10.35. 

I know I am slowing down, but that’s my age. However, I can’t help noticing that a whole host of other things are slowing down too.

Civil servants, for instance. We already knew that the function of bureaucrats was to stop people doing things, but now they seem to be working on that more and more slowly. Soon no-one will be able to do anything. It’s probably already too late to leave the country.

Civil servants don’t worry about this, because they have large pensions and don’t have to make a profit. Why should they go anywhere? Or do anything?

They are also risk-averse, but so is the whole country, except you and me. Take look at health and safety guidance – any health and safety guidance, whether it’s covid-related or not. One thing is certain: it will be very, very long – so long that you lose the will to live before finishing it. And you forget whatever it was that you had been intending to do before you discovered you needed a risk assessment.

Trains are slowing down, because someone is always working on the track. And traffic is slowing down too – for several reasons. One is similar: more and more roads are being dug up for no apparent purpose. It’s essential work, of course, but not so essential that it requires workmen to move, or even appear.

Then there are speed cameras. Most speed limits are set about ten miles an hour slower than necessary, and if you drive at a reasonable speed you are likely to be out of pocket and collecting penalty points. So you drive slowly, lose concentration and hit someone. Then the ambulance will take ages to get there because of the road humps and diversions.

Cyclists are encouraged, because they are slower. At least, they used to be. Now they leave cars in their wake.

Why am I worried about all this? Because I think that as a people we are losing impetus. Nothing gets done; there is no urgency; paperwork mounts up and blocks any forward progress. So what? Well, it’s physics, isn’t it? If you lose impetus, you lose purpose, you fade away, whimper, get colder and colder and then die.

That could happen quite quickly.

The Daily Telegraph, which is not one of the more empty-headed of newspapers, reported on the “terrorist” taxi bombing Liverpool under the rather surprising heading: “Suicide bomber  was a Christian convert”. 

If he was, someone did not do a very good job of explaining to the bomber – now sadly deceased, so we can’t ask him – what being a Christian means. Even the most antagonistic of critics can hardly depict Jesus Christ as someone likely to blow people up, gun them down or punch them in the mouth.

This is not what Christianity is about. Nevertheless, the Telegraph added: “It is unknown whether he (the bomber) was following the Christian faith at the time of the attack.”

Happily, I can tell them: he wasn’t. He may have been calling himself a Christian, but he was not doing what Christians do. The fact is that you can call yourself anything, using any pronouns you wish, but it doesn’t make you what you say you are. I could call myself a double-decker bus, but that doesn’t make me one. 

The following day the Telegraph, still confused, added: “At Liverpool Cathedral…a person can become a Christian in as little as five weeks.” This is not as shocking as it’s apparently intended to seem. Indeed, one can become a Christian in a few minutes, given the right information and a wholehearted response. Or, as a Christian might put it, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Stephen Verney, a former bishop, puts it rather well. “Faith (ie becoming a Christian) is being grasped by a truth which confronts you and which is self-evident and overwhelming, and then trusting yourself to the reality of what you now see.”

Christianity is not a club or a tribe that you decide to join – one of a number of options. It is a response. That is why forced conversion – a stick being used in various parts of the world to batter Christians – is nonsense. You cannot make someone believe; you can make them follow certain rules, but that is not what Christianity is about: it is about love and forgiveness. Anything else is a perversion.

Obviously Christians make mistakes. That is where forgiveness comes in. But to make a mistake of such gargantuan proportions hardly suggests that this particular gentleman was trying to follow a Christian lifestyle. More that he was mistaking himself for a double-decker bus.