Like many people, I stopped watching the news on television. Not because I was getting it off TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but initially because if I saw one more scientist standing at a podium next to the Prime Minister, I was likely to scream and race from the room. And later, because I came to realise that TV news wasn’t news anyway. It was prediction, with a bit of walking about.

This became very evident with the advent of a new Prime Minister. Up to the moment when the results were in, there was a great deal of discussion on the “news” about how many votes she might win by (if she won at all), and what she might then do; there was conjecture about who would be in her Cabinet, what  their jobs might be and what people might think.

What people might think is a big issue, apparently. Every now and then, a TV news reporter will wander off to somewhere remote, like Salford, and find someone who thinks that chaos is looming, either from Tory policies, energy bills, climate change or inflation. They never seem to find anyone who has a life remotely like mine, but I guess that’s my fault.

And it’s not news! We have a largish, overpopulated country. Surely something is happening somewhere that would be of interest. Trends and statistics are not news, because they can be easily twisted. What actually happens is news. 

Eventually Liz Truss reveals who is in her Cabinet: we want to know who they are, and a bit about them. But what we get is acres of meaningless conjecture about how they might work together and what policies they might pursue. Never mind that in a few hours we will be told all that. 

“And now let’s go back to our top story.” Which will be a newsreader standing outside Buckingham Palace, or Downing Street, or somewhere else where they don’t need to be, offering conjecture about what might happen in a few minutes time.

And then there’s the weather forecast. That’s often wrong too.

** It’s ironic that as I finished writing this, the Queen’s death was announced, and real news took over. If I said that it was tremendously sad, and her faith and service would be sorely missed, I would simply be saying what everyone else has said. Nevertheless, I say it. She took the throne when I was seven, and so I remember no other monarch. She was a truly amazing woman. The next few days are going to seem extremely odd.

I was conceived during the second world war. I don’t remember it happening, though I  guess I must have been there – if not at the time, then very shortly afterwards. At roughly the same time the German battleship Tirpitz was sunk. It seems a long time ago.

I don’t think I had a view at the time on the progress of the war, but if anyone had asked me, I’m sure I would have been quietly confident that we would win. 

I understand that things were quite tough just after the war – rationing, bomb sites, national debts and so on. Everything seemed fine to me. 

Some time later there was a bit of a crisis about Cuba, with alarmist prophecies about the end of the world and nuclear holocausts – not necessarily in that order. I was quietly confident. 

The Cold War dragged on, the Berlin Wall went up, and in the 1970s scientists got very worried about a new ice age. I didn’t think it was likely. The Berlin Wall came down. I wasn’t surprised. There were disasters all over the world. People got shot. I wasn’t worried. Sympathetic, but not worried.

Now the heat is on. I’m still not worried, but I’m not having as much fun. I think technology is the problem. Partly computer modelling, which I wouldn’t trust to see me across the street. Partly all those cameras. And partly pressure groups with degrees in social media. 

We used to just have elections, and then the people we elected governed us. Now we have unelected, trigger-happy groups constantly bombarding us and the Government with their own views. And the Government and local councils listening to them. Why? Pressure groups did not elect them – the people did. It’s just a form of bullying.

Did I mention cameras? We now have the police encouraging people with cameras – which is just about everyone – to send in videos of other people doing things they don’t like – especially drivers. This is another form of bullying. Cameras never get the whole picture. Laughable.

Meanwhile newsreaders are doing their best to frighten me. If it’s not a climate crisis, it’s inflation, energy bills and droughts. You’ve got to smile. 

Some time between tomorrow and a quarter of a century in the future, I shall almost certainly die. I am optimistic about it. As St Paul told those guys from Corinth, I can’t conceive how amazing it will be.

Before the operation, it was straightforward. They were just going to make a little hole, pop a camera and a scalpel in while I was otherwise engaged, then revive me and send me home. I asked several people, and they smiled and reassured me. But no-one mentioned that there were in fact four keyholes, and in fact it’s major surgery.

So I sort of expected I might be OK to go to a celebration meal (nothing to do with the operation) three days later. I was booked to lead a retreat the following weekend. I thought that might be all right too. No-one seemed to recall – or at least mention – that recovery time for this kind of operation is at least 5-6 weeks.

I did not make the meal. My temperature was up and down, and I felt lousy. I had no appetite. It’s hard to explain how bad you can feel without actually having much pain. Four days in, my wife rang the surgery – a desperate measure. I spoke to a receptionist, who spoke to a doctor. The doctor didn’t speak to me. Instead he decided I should go to A&E immediately. Obviously I was not keen to do this: I’ve heard about A&E. Indeed, I’ve been there. It is not a fun day out.

But then a miracle happened. My wife dropped me at A&E, where I was greeted by a standard notice saying they were busy, and could I go somewhere else, please. I persisted and encountered a very pleasant triage nurse who booked me in quickly and arranged for me to see a doctor who was within shouting distance. He examined me and said he didn’t think the wounds were infected. On the other hand, they might be. He prescribed me some antibiotics. My wife hadn’t finished her coffee.

She drove me to the chemists’s, where they at first refused to believe that the hospital could have prescribed anything electronically. “Never been known,” they said. However, I pointed out that I had watched the doctor do it, and so they looked. He had. I had my pills. We went home.

You probably think I’m in need of care and attention by now. But what happened next went beyond that. I had my antibiotics; so all must be well, I thought. Despite still feeling lousy, I went to the Retreat. I even managed to lead a couple of sessions, eat some stuff and walk down to the river. I was totally exhausted. All the time. And I couldn’t sleep.

Meanwhile, the temperature was rising. Not mine – Norfolk’s. Normally I quite like being warm, but this was hell. Warmed up. It was an actual personalised climate crisis. A real one. I felt very ill. What was wrong with my appetite? Why wasn’t I getting better? Why wasn’t the air moving?

Ok, you’re off the hook. Not much else happened. I carried on feeling ill, had no appetite and was very, very tired. I got diarrhoea. Time seemed to get slower and slower. Perhaps it was normal.

Reader, it is. It’s normal to be told that your operation is straightforward, and they just have to make a little hole. It’s normal to be sent home with no warning about how you might feel, or how long it might go on. It’s normal not to have a follow-up appointment. It’s normal for no-one medical to look at your body afterwards.

I have just entered my third week of convalescence. Today I saw a nurse accidentally (annual blood check), and she explained how major the surgery was, and everything else. It was a pleasure to hear her describe exactly what was going on. She even looked at my scars. One to one. In person.

That’s it really. Hopefully I shall gradually feel better and less tired. I just thought it might be worth putting down what actually happens after an operation. It may be that no-one else will tell you.

I am due to have an operation shortly. It’s my fourth attempt, for reasons which need not detain us. As a result I keep coming across stories about routine operations – and mine is very routine – that have gone horribly wrong.

I did query the necessity for my operation with a consultant (and several other people). After an ultrasound and an ultradiscussion we agreed that the minimal risks of the operation outweighed the slightly less minimal risks involved in not having it.

Like the rest of life, there is no way of being sure. It’s a bit of a gamble – a gamble weighted heavily in my favour, but still not a sure thing. By which I mean, it’s not the only horse running.

A friend told me she had a foolproof method of knowing whether I should go ahead or not. More than one method, actually. The first involved making interlocking circles with my fingers, and the second involved standing still. The third involved a pendulum. I have not tried any of these. When you start depending on fingers and pendulums (or is it pendula?) things are getting serious in all the wrong ways.

I also tried prayer, which is getting serious in the right way, but I have not yet received a definitive answer. I am going ahead until God tells me not to. I don’t know how He might do that, but clearly He could.

Anyway, I have just received a phone call from the hospital. At first I assumed they were postponing again, but it turned out they were just checking things that had already been checked. I don’t mind this. The more checks the better in this sort of situation.

They did want me to take a lateral flow test, though. Once I’d remembered what it was, I said I already had one. I got it from Morrisons. But it seems I have to get a proper Government one. I made a call, answered some questions online, and I believe it’s on its way: I hope it gets here in time.

If you read another of these articles, it means it did, and the operation went ahead, and I survived. If not, it was nice knowing you. I love you all.

Funny thing, progress. It should work: we learn from experience, improve things as we go along, and one morning we wake up and everything’s perfect – or at least, better than it was before.

Sadly, though, it seems to work backwards. All right – scientific advances mean that if you have a health problem, you have a better chance of getting it fixed than you did 50 years ago. But can you get an appointment more easily? No, that’s much, much harder than it was 50 years ago. I know: I was there.

Of course, if you are an administrator, especially in the NHS, things are much better: more jobs, more money, new things that have to be regulated. But those of us who are being administrated might not see it like that. Oh no we don’t.

Much of this backward progress had happened because there is a large body of people who, as Charlie Brown would say, like to function in an advisory capacity – or as I might say, a dictatorial capacity.

I read this morning of a motorist who was fined for driving “too close” to a cyclist – the evidence (and this is the critical bit) coming from the cyclist’s camera. I’m sure that gave a wide screen view taking in all the contributing factors. Or am I? We all seem to be far too keen to catch our fellow human beings out … as well as helmet cams, we have windscreen cams in cars and will no doubt have pedestrian cams soon. If we haven’t already.

The result, of course, is that those of us who don’t hate motorists hate cyclists, especially when councils plough up cities to put in unnecessary and often unused cycle paths.

We also have battalions of busybody speedcheckers who have nothing better to do than stand at the side of the road and try to catch motorists out. It doesn’t matter how well someone is driving: someone else has decided on a random speed limit based on dubious statistics, and they have gone just beyond it; so they are evil and must be stopped. Really?

But it’s not just health and the roads. Everywhere new rules and regulations are being introduced, often in the spurious name of health and safety but also to “avoid giving offence”. To be alive in Britain in 2022 is to tiptoe through the world, afraid of breaching one abysmal dogma after another. And there are plenty of people who love to set the system up and make sure it’s applied.

During the Covid outbreak, many of these compulsive “managers” were in their element, of course. So many more rules; so many more offenders. And now, as things return to “normal”, I am convinced that many would-be volunteers are dissuaded by the reams of paperwork that have to be filled in. A woman who lives not far from me recently appealed for volunteers to help with a meals on wheels scheme – only to be taken to task by a neighbour who warned that such volunteers might constitute a risk unless they were properly registered and filled in all the necessary forms.

I’m sure that successfully dissuaded anyone who might have been wanting to lend a hand. Well done, Madam.

The only progress we really seem to have made is in eliminating trust and giving way to fear on all fronts. If that is the case, I have to agree with Ogden Nash, who said that “progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on far too long”.

A close friend of mine blames all of society’s ills on cars and television. If neither of these had been invented, she says, we would be much better off – our horizons limited both physically and mentally to the benefit of communities and families.

No doubt she is much wiser than I am: I would just prefer it if speed cameras had not been invented. 

I would never say that, of course, because I would get a barrage of criticism from the usual suspects, who have been outnumbering me for some time. Still, as Anatole France said, if 52 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

I am in fact a right-wing, litter-throwing, woke-cancelling, dog-hating, anti-Brexit, climate-denying, cycle-wielding anarchist Liverpool supporter. I’m joking, of course. Only one or two of those tendencies is true, and it’s certainly not the Liverpool one.

The real trouble with our country nowadays is that we know too much about each other, and of course social media are to blame. I discovered today that my local community (in the broadest sense) harbours a nest of anti-Monarchist troublemakers who favour disrupting Jubilee street parties. I find this obnoxious (or do I?) but without social media I wouldn’t know who they were. 

Until I made use of Facebook – which despite objections from people who know what they’re talking about, I find useful for keeping in contact with ex-colleagues – I didn’t know how many people I liked and respected harboured political views that I found not only unexpected but preposterous. Happily I have a measure of self-restraint, and so they don’t know they hate me.

Twitter is another matter. It’s so easy to pop in the quick barbed comment, usually about road works, but so difficult to avoid annoying someone or other. In fact I think some people go on Twitter specifically to be annoyed.

In short, however much we disagree with each other, it’s best not to put it in writing – at least where someone might read it. A group of near neighbours of ours stand outside on a Friday night (weather permitting, and you know what they say about weather forecasters) and we have a drink. We get on very well, despite not having by any means the same political views. No-one gets annoyed, throws punches or walks out (or in). And you know why? Because we don’t write it down.

When I was young, pretty much everyone got on. For the same reason. Now we all hate each other. Or do we?

More than two years after narrowly avoiding lockdown in Bethlehem, after mysterious months of mask-wearing, social distancing and excessive ventilation, enduring myriad unintelligible and illogical restrictions, a spell in hospital with a gall-bladder infection and experiencing all the joys of a long low-fat diet – just when it felt safe to come in out of the cold, I caught Covid.

To be accurate, my wife and I both caught Covid, testing positive on the same day. She, being more resilient than I, was over it within a week; my version lingered for another three days. I still feel tired and have minor pains in my back.

Why should you be interested in this? Rumour has it that about seven people out of ten in England have had Covid in one form or another. And that’s the interesting thing – in one form or another. Because nearly everyone appears to be affected differently.

My wife and I both had the symptoms of a very bad head cold, with a few vague add-ons such as peculiar head pains and a certain amount of shivering. But neither of us had the “official” symptoms – high temperature, sore throat, loss of taste or smell. We just felt very ill, and so tested ourselves.

One friend said she felt “fantastic” while still testing positive. Others felt more or less OK. But of course many have been laid very low, with symptoms that go on and on and on, debilitating and more than distressing.

Naturally we know several people who have not caught it. Half a dozen of them have never been vaccinated. Others have had the full range of jabs. We have had three jabs and still caught it. We might ask what the jabs were for; you might answer that we would have been much more badly affected if we hadn’t had them, but that is conjecture. In fact, most of it is conjecture.

In view of all this, it must be right to return to normal life now, or we never will. Even civil servants might risk it.

It was that profound absurdist thinker Franz Kafka who put it most effectively: it is safer, he said, to be in chains than to be free. 

Most 21st century activists think the same way. And since safety appears to be the main preoccupation of us all, there is not much dispute that the chains will win. Even Tories are left-wingers nowadays. 

Coupled with belief that chains are the safest way of living is the illusion – or is it delusion? – that we can manufacture chains that are effective for every possible  situation. 

Take the “situation” in Ukraine. Evil is being perpetrated. Our concern is not primarily to battle it but to ascertain the safest way of reacting. This makes a certain kind of sense, doesn’t it?

But that’s just an extreme example. The health and safety industry is really in charge of everything we do. We have to wear helmets to ride bikes, seat belts to drive cars, obey speed limits of various kinds and follow numerous tortuous rules before forming any kind of group. Risk assessments, safeguarding, masks, speed cameras, speed humps, CCTV – you name it. 

The intrusion of government into what should be private and personal activities grows regularly, and many of us are all for it, citing “the greater good”. But of course all this is really chains. Is imprisonment of everyone the greatest good? 

No. Freedom Is vital if we to function in a human and loving way. Helen Keller said: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

Why do we want to be so safe? What are we afraid of? Well, death, I suppose: the horrific possibility that things may end for us at any minute. Better life imprisonment than that. 

But of course Easter reminds us that this is rubbish: death is not the end. How could it be? It is the shaky secular society that we live in that generates fear, and the obsession with safety. If we stood back and looked backwards at our history, outwards at those we admire or inwards at the essence of life itself, we would realise that there are more important things than being safe. And more exciting prospects than extinction. 

Resurrection, anyone?

Yet another article has appeared in my local paper on the question of  20mph limits – this time by a motoring writer. I was too slow to respond to it – caught in a 20mph zone, you might say. I was also rather surprised to hear a former motoring correspondent having anything to say in favour of 20mph limits, but I expect he had a Damascus Road conversion. In reverse.

There is, as any competent driver knows, little to be said in favour of 20mph limits, their only saving grace being that they are rarely enforced, thus acting as advisory signs, which is fair enough. In fact there is an argument that all speed limits should be advisory, as travelling at any given speed – or above any given speed – should really not be an offence in itself. 

Speed does not kill or even injure: collisions do that. So the real issue is responsible and skilful driving, with punishable offences being dangerous driving, reckless driving and careless driving. But the kind of frightened society we live in does not care for that and uses dubious statistics to twist its judgements. When I was growing up, I was told that there were lies, damned lies and statistics, and this is still true. But now it masquerades as science, and we love it. We prefer it to visible policing, which used to be a real safety measure. But that was in the days when the police said openly that you didn’t learn to drive well until you’d broken the speed limit. Oh yes they did.

What worries me is that someone will institute a method of monitoring all car speeds from a distance, and we will abandon all reliance on driving skill, allowing drivers to be fined or banned for arbitrary reasons, irrespective of how well they are driving. 

What exactly is wrong with 20mph? The same thing that’s wrong with driving too slowly anywhere. It’s polluting; it uses more fuel than is necessary; it distracts the driver from paying attention to the road; it lulls you into a false sense of security or makes you impatient, depending on what sort of person you are; and if deprives you of momentum, which is vital for avoiding danger. It means you spend a lot of time braking, which is when you are in the least control of the car. 

Many, many speed limits are too slow. I have just returned from Derbyshire, which has a more or less ubiquitous and idiotic 50mph limit on the open road. I followed a driver for many miles who kept rigidly to this limit – except that when when he went uphill, he reduced his speed to as little as 30mph. He also wandered all over his side of the road. Going too slowly means you are not in control of the car: you assume the “authorities” must know the right speed, and you don’t need to think at all. That is when accidents happen.

Slow speeds are demanded by local pedestrians because they see drivers going quicker than they are, and they assume that therefore they are going too fast. No, that’s not very bright, but we don’t live in a very bright world. They also never seem to notice how it’s more difficult to cross a road as a pedestrian when all the traffic is going at the same speed, with no gaps.

It’s April 1; so this could be a gigantic April Fool joke, or a rant by a boy racer. Sadly it’s neither: it’s the reaction of an experienced OAP driver to another money-making scam. 

Unfortunately statistics show that 90% of readers will have been brainwashed into thinking all the above arguments are absurd. I made that figure up, of course, but it’s about right. 

Happily I shall not live long enough to see the 10mph  limit or the return of the red flag. I  hope. 

There was something on the pitch. All right, there was a ball and there were 22 players – all moving around at various speeds and not achieving very much, especially the ten in yellow and green and their goalkeeper in pink. The additional man in black seemed a bit put out to be there and kept running round and awarding free kicks, which is what you would expect. It was a normal match day at Carrow Road.

But there was something else on the pitch, and an official-looking man ran on to try and get rid of it. He failed, rather miserably. It was a feeling Norwich City supporters knew well.

There was a blackbird on the pitch. It was near the Barclay End, and it wasn’t doing much, although it was in plenty of space. No-one kicked the ball in its direction for a long time; in fact nothing much was happening at all. Supporters in the Barclay End were growing fond of the bird. It looked as if it might do something interesting, but nobody passed to it. It was almost as if they were avoiding it.

After some time, the bird flew – not very high, but up the pitch towards the River End, where it settled in a suspiciously offside position. The Barclay End started a new chant: “We want our bird back.” The River End looked smug, as if they had taken advantage of the transfer window in a particularly cunning way. VAR said nothing.

We assumed the bird would take its leave at half time – perhaps fly off in the direction of the dressing room, or even the river. But it stayed, and no-one tried to eject it. I think someone had realised that it might be a good idea to keep the City supporters distracted.

So the bird stayed at the River End. I would like to say it almost scored, but it simply got in the way of a corner and scuttled off towards the halfway line. After a while we realised that it was not making any productive runs or creating any openings. There was a risk it could get trodden on. The same went for the entire team, really.

I don’t remember the score, but the bird survived. The team probably won’t.