Author Archives: Tim Lenton

If you close your eyes, you can imagine this article written in yellow and blue. These colours are very popular on the Internet at the moment to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

I know very little about Ukraine, except that it is very big – much bigger than I would have guessed it was, say, a couple of months ago. It’s huge. You could lose several armies in it, which is something I would like to see happen quite soon.

I have no idea whether the Ukrainians are particularly nice people or not. It would probably be racist to say they were or they weren’t, because countries are made up of individuals, some of whom will be better than others. The same goes for Russians. Or the British.

What is undoubtedly true is that it is wrong for one country to invade another and kill people. This is something that none of us in the West would do – at least in the 21st century. Of course Mr Putin may not be in the 21st century: it is hard to locate him exactly.

It is however undoubtedly right to be on the side of a country that is invaded, right to open our doors to refugees, to help where we can, and to pray for the terrified.

I do not know one word of Ukrainian. However, I am getting to know a few of their cities. What confuses me slightly is our pronunciation of them. I had known of Sebastopol since childhood, and had always pronounced it Sebastoepoll, with the emphasis on the last syllable. Now I find it is called Sevastopol, which is a minor difference, but apparently pronounced Sebastopple, with the stress on the penultimate syllable.

Kiev, which everyone knew because of the chicken, was always pronounced as two syllables. Now, suddenly, it is pronounced Keev. Is this in solidarity with the Ukrainians, I wonder? If so, I am not sure it works, because it disconnects us from something we could imagine we knew.

Presumably we still call Moscow Moscow because we we will not go along with what the Russians call it, which is Moskva. We might offer to call it that if the Russians withdraw.

I’m sure there will be people who are shocked at my writing about pronunciation when people are being killed and the world is on the brink of a huge, army-devouring disaster. But words are critical: the way we use them shapes our attitudes and leads to conflict or peace.

I could repeat the same truths about finding a way to peace that many others have done, and it is not that I don’t feel them strongly. But if you say the same thing too often, the impact is often lost. I agree with all that, but what can we really do except pray and provide aid? Better people than me may know. I don’t.

The other day someone drove into the river near the centre of Norwich. It happened at a roundabout; so of course police closed the roundabout and several nearby roads, causing traffic chaos throughout the city – partly because the council has for years been intent on closing as many roads as possible, and often there are no reasonable alternative routes.

All right – the driver had to be retrieved from the river, and quickly, because he might have survived. Sadly, he didn’t. And I guess the car had to be retrieved, too – though the urgency for that is less obvious. And of course barriers had to be replaced, because there was every chance that someone else might drive into the river too. It’s never happened before, but you never know…

I’m making too much of this, aren’t I? I should be mourning the sad loss of life, and not worrying about road closures. And I do mourn the sad loss of life, but I also wish we weren’t so complacent about blocking roads and holding people up, because that can cost lives too. In this case the roads were closed for six hours, which I reckon is about five hours too long.

Whenever there is any kind of road traffic incident, the first thing police do is close roads. Sometimes this is necessary, but all too often it goes on way, way too long. And it’s not just the police. It’s anyone who digs up the road – a group of people who as far are as I can see are organised (I use the word loosely) by a shadowy group of conspirators who hate cars. This means they hate an awful lot of people.

I live in a cul de sac, which means I do not have a variety of routes by which to get home (or get out, for that matter). Recently the council (or Transport for Norwich, as they jokingly call themselves) decided it wanted to make elaborate changes to the junction about a couple of hundred yards from our house. This included a “bus gate” ( or as you and I might call it, a “road block”). Being near a junction, it had an effect on four major roads. These are already heavily used. The effect of the changes will be to make the congestion worse.

There was course a consultation. Amazingly, despite many objections, it went ahead as planned. Who would have thought?

So we have six months of disruption. The major road at the bottom of our street has been made one-way: that happened three weeks ago, necessitating long detours, and it was absolutely unnecessary. Nothing has happened on that road. It is simply coned off.

At the same time the two lanes approaching the traffic lights from two other directions (one of which we have to take to get home) were reduced to a single lane each – again for no reason. This led to huge tailbacks, delays and pollution. A couple of us wrote to our councillor, and this was changed; then they changed it back, we wrote again and they changed it back again. What a waste of time.

I am half expecting to wake up one morning to find I can’t get out of my street at all. There will be road works as far as the eye can see, but no-one actually doing anything.

Is it car hatred, or apathy? Or simply lethargy? Or some kind of corruption? It certainly isn’t democracy, and there seems to be very limited intelligence involved. Must be covid. If I screamed, would anyone hear me?

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.