Author Archives: Tim Lenton

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.

This has been an exciting week for me. I found something I have been looking for for many years.

When I say looking, I admit I have not been spending all my spare time on the project. It has been a rather intermittent search, not carried out in the most efficient manner. If you know me, that may not come as a surprise.

But then I realised that I could get professional help. Not a therapist in this case, but the people at the Norfolk Record Office. And they came up trumps. A very nice man on the end of an e-mail not only located my mother’s parents’ grave in general terms, but gave me a reference number.

Two reference numbers, to be precise. And while one of them was not very helpful, the other one was. Now I knew that the grave was not only in Norwich’s Earlham Cemetery, but in which much smaller section it could be found.

I had tried looking round Earlham without the reference numbers, after my sole surviving aunt on my mother’s side told me the grave was off Farrow Road, straight in and underneath a tree. This was not as pinpoint as you might think, especially as Earlham Cemetery lies on both sides of Farrow Road and contains a veritable forest of trees. Typically, I explored the wrong side first.

When I got the numbers, I realised it was on the other side. So this week my wife and I took a sunlit stroll in Section 55, and eventually we pinned it down. As the NRO man had predicted, my grandmother’s name was Rosanna, not Rosa, as I had thought. The grave was under a tree. It was a nice moment.

I already knew where my father’s parents were buried, because their resting place is almost within an arm’s reach of my parents’ grave in the Rosary. I also know where two great-great grandparents are buried (Harlestone, in Northamptonshire). Nice grave, actually. If you happen to live there, or nearby, it’s near the church door, and their names are William Archer and Elizabeth Benson. I also have a great-grandfather buried at Folksworth, near Peterborough. His name is Henry Lenton, and he married William and Elizabeth’s daughter, Jane.

Sorry, boring. Other people’s family trees are usually not very exciting, and mine is particularly dull. I would not make it on to Who Do You Think You Are? though I would love to have all those historians at my beck and call. I am fascinated by where I come from, because as one someone of WDYTYA said this week: “If you don’t know where you’ve come from, how can you know where you’re going?”

Not sure about the connection, but it sounds good. And really, I would love to know more about my ancestors, especially if one of them did something remarkable. My father’s mother used to say she was related to the founder of the Salvation Army. Her name was Booth, but that was about as far as it went. I would like to go further.

To be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed by Dippy the Dinosaur, now in his (or her) last month at Norwich Cathedral. The sheer size was certainly impressive, but then I discovered that it wasn’t a real dinosaur. It wasn’t even real dinosaur bones – just plaster casts. And from several different dinosaurs, apparently.

Emerging latish from a Free Church background, I have always had my doubts about church relics, but this was not even close. St Dippy? I don’t think so.

I had a similar revelation when I visited a museum at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk and saw what I thought was breath-taking workmanship on weapons and other artefacts from the 6th and 7th centuries AD, around the time of the jolly King Raedwald and his unnamed queen. My wife then pointed out that they were reconstructions.

You may think I was a bit naive to expect more, especially given my reputation for scepticism. But if I am told that a number of huge mounds in a field contain (or once contained) ships, bodies, gold and silver, what am I supposed to think? Do I just take their word for it?

I’ve always thought that if you want to build up a reputation as a scientist, the two obvious fields to be in are archaeology and geology. Both deal with the distant past (the difference being one of scale), and so no-one is going to be around to say you’re wrong. You can come up with any theory you like, especially if it’s more or less the same as everyone else’s.

This may be a rather sweeping conclusion, but geology at least seems to be entirely based on the theory of uniformitarianism – which states that the same natural laws and processes observable today have always been in operation on Earth and in the universe, and at the same rate. To me this is quite absurd. How do we know? We don’t.

This principle is also the key to dating; so it spills over into archaeology. It probably spills over into other things as well, which would explain statistics. Or maybe that’s a conspiracy theory.

Still, it reminds me of a quote from someone called Barnabas: “I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.”

Maybe some scientific laws survive only because we agree to treat them as laws. Is it time to think of other options?