Is it possible to have too many books? When it comes to moving house, as my brother is about to do after some 40 years, the answer is a resounding yes. But in normal circumstances, it is a comforting thing to see the number of bookcases in a house increase, even when they are not being used as a backdrop to a Zoom conference.

So I was more than happy in the past few weeks to obtain three new books from fellow Norfolk writers who I have had the honour to be associated with over some years.

One is Shifting Sands by Godfrey Sayers, who is probably the most reliable source of information about the history and geography of North Norfolk to the west of Salthouse. He has lived in the area since he was a child and has wide experience of walking and fishing (professionally) there. His latest book, a follow-up to the very impressive Once Upon a Tide, looks at the rise and fall of the Glaven Ports, what happened to the coastline there over the centuries, and why – as well as what might have happened if different decisions had been taken.

Like his earlier book, this one contains many examples of his paintings, for Godfrey, as many of you will know, is also a first-rate artist as well as a renowned campaigner for the environment and a bit of a minor prophet when it comes to what might happen next. A book well worth reading if you have any interest in the area and want to know more about its obvious beauty.

The second and third books are about chess – a world away? Not really, because the attraction of chess is its wild beauty. Not easy to convey to non-players, but once you are grabbed by it, it never lets you go.

I have known Mike Read and David LeMoir for many years. David is editor of the Norfolk chess magazine, En Passant, as well as being a very strong, exciting player and a brilliant writer about the game. His latest book, Chess Scribe: a 50-Year Anthology, is particularly compelling as it looks back over a whole lifetime of his chess writing, coming up with many famous names along the way.

I especially enjoyed the section on Owen Hindle, probably Norfolk’s strongest ever player, as well as, scattered through the book, many games from friends I have fought with over the years, especially those at the Norwich Dons Chess Club.

One thing I would have liked is an index, just to check that my name didn’t crop up anywhere, but why should it? If it did, I would have to mention it, which would be embarrassing. Mike Read’s name does crop up, of course, as he is, with Owen, another very strong Norfolk player who is internationally recognised.

He has recently published his second book – another collection of his correspondence games which this time includes draws and defeats as well as victories. It’s called Triumph and Disaster and, as with his first book containing 120 of his games, it has the outstanding merit of being attractive to read. Mike has the gift of making his games, which are often complex, easy to understand for lesser talents, but still compulsive for strong players.

All of these books are available from Amazon. Do not buy them if you are about to move house.

There was nobody in the cemetery today. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I’m sure there were a large number of bodies in the cemetery, because that is what it’s for. But there was nobody above ground, apart from the maintenance staff.

You may think this is a strange thing to be remarking on, but it was a sunny day, though a bit chilly, and during the various lockdowns we have been enjoying over the past year or so, the number of people walking round the cemetery has grown gradually, until last week we were remarking on how many there were.

The Rosary, as I have mentioned before, is a beautiful place to walk round. It is hilly (for Norfolk), wooded and beautifully laid out – in that rather unusual way that makes you think subliminally that it hasn’t been laid out at all.

It is easy to see why it should attract people who want to walk for exercise (what other reason could there be?). At the outbreak of lockdowns, hardly anyone was there. Then gradually people noticed it, but it never became crowded. Crucially, dogs were banned, and still are.

So why nobody today? Because today people can go to non-essential shops. There are queues outside Primark and Debenhams. The roads are full of traffic. And of course if you can queue outside a shop or sit in traffic, why would you want to walk round a cemetery?

I sometimes think there are two different human races, and I don’t mean a sprint and a long-distance. There is the race that will stand in long, cold queues for non-essential shops, buy a dog during lockdown, drop litter without thinking about it, and rush out to the pub and sit outside in a bitter wind drinking a pint, just because they can today and couldn’t yesterday. And there is the other race.

It would be invidious to say one is right and the other is wrong. I wouldn’t say that, obviously. But there is a gulf fixed between them. Isn’t it remarkable how different we are?

I know what you’re thinking. You like dogs but don’t stand in queues. You like pubs but don’t drop litter. Perhaps I’d better rethink it. There must be an equation that solves it. Let’s put Sage on to it, do some computer modelling and invite a few research studies.

I know what will happen. We’ll end up with several million human races – or mutations or strains, as they will be called – and we will need another lockdown to cope with it. That’s when I shall head back to the cemetery, possibly for the last time.

Don’t get me wrong. I happen to believe that the COVID vaccine is an excellent thing, created in the main by beautiful people with the good of mankind at heart. They have worked hard, often at personal expense, to save many people’s lives.

I am strongly in favour of vaccination, not least because it protects people other than the vaccinee. I think we should be prepared to put up with discomfort, and possible mild side-effects, if it helps prevent the spread of what can be a very nasty disease.

But this does not prevent me from having slight misgivings about vaccination in general, partly because I do not understand it. I am not a biologist or a chemist, or a doctor. I certainly don’t think it contains micro-chips designed to control our lives (one off-the-wall conspiracy theory), but does it have a prolonged effect on our immune systems and our DNA? I have no idea. Is vaccination generally behind the many and varied mood disorders, like attention deficit disorder and types of autism, that seem so rife in children nowadays and were notably absent in my schooldays? Or is this total rubbish?

What exactly is being injected into us? I don’t know. Even those who do know may not understand completely how it interacts with all the other stuff in our bodies, but it is a question of proportion. Prevention of COVID is an important, possibly vital, thing to be able to do, as was prevention of smallpox, polio, measles and other once-feared illnesses. It seems worth the risk. That is the best I can say, and so that is what I do say.

What I do not say is that we should create a society where these things cannot be questioned. To dismiss everyone who does not want to be vaccinated, for whatever reason, as “stupid anti-vaxers” and to deny them a platform is the first step (maybe not even the first) down a slippery slope.

Some people have very weird ideas. Take Galileo, for instance. We are at liberty not to believe them, but if we deny them access to publicity or publication, we may be refusing to believe something that turns out to be true. Science changes day by day. If we refuse to read about anything except what is generally accepted, that is anti-science, not the other way round.

We are dangerously close to taking this position on climate change. When was the last time you heard anything other than the “official” position on climate change from any major news outlet? And yet very many scientists have different ideas. I may not believe them, but I want to hear them. No, I am not a “climate change denier”.

To shut out dissenting voices opens the door to a totalitarian society. One commentator from the transport sector sees a real risk of “environmental totalitarianism” in a post-pandemic world, “bypassing any democratic process….The costly climate agenda is all about controlling you, not the climate.” 

Similar threats to freedom occur with movements like Black Lives Matter (of course they do) and the no-platforming of people with controversial ideas at universities, not to mention the refusal to let high school pupils learn about blasphemy. I am against blasphemy, by the way.

Propagating violent views is one thing….. THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED TO AVOID CAUSING OFFENCE. IT MUST NOT BE DEBATED IN ANY WAY.

If you are, like me, an avid watcher of old movies or a keen gazer at old photographs, you may have been struck by the way 2021 seems in one respect to be heading towards the past.

To see the resemblance you must steer clear of shopping centres. They tend to be on the empty side. But riverside walks, woods, parks and beaches are, in my part of the world anyway, surprisingly busy.

Obviously they are frequented only by local people exercising in accordance with Government regulations – the temptation to remain law-abiding is almost irresistible, I find – but they still seem to be much fuller than they were a couple of years ago.

Recently I watched Brighton Rock, a film set in – you guessed it – Brighton, in 1948. This was unusual in that it was filmed with hidden cameras, featuring Brighton residents and tourists engaged in their day-to-day activities, unaware that the 25-year-old man in a hat rushing through their streets and looking ten years older was in fact playing a 17-year-old hoodlum in a Graham Greene story.

Don’t be put off by the age problem: it’s a great film. But what impressed me as much as anything was the number of people in the streets. The streets were packed. And if you look at old real-life pictures and films, you’ll find the same thing. Everyone is out of doors.

Why? Because something is missing from their lives. Television.

It was only recently that I realised how much time I spend watching television – mainly dramas and documentaries. It is not because I’m bored. It’s not even because the Government wants me at home, where it can keep its eye on me. It’s because I really enjoy dramas and documentaries. Well, most of them. I try not to think of what I might accomplish if television didn’t exist.

If I had been around in 1948 (actually I was – but only just) I would have been out in the street. True, they had radio, but it wasn’t that exciting. So why stay at home? There was a big world out there to explore. Well, biggish.

My childhood days were like that, and I suspect it may happen again. When the restrictions are relaxed people will be so relieved that they will rush excitedly outside, form crowds and start interacting like mad. We won’t be able to move for people, and they won’t even be part of a protest. Television will be moved to the back shelf.

Am I mad? Possibly. “We are all born mad. Some remain so,” as Samuel Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot. (Good drama. If it were on television, I would watch it.) But you can be mad and right at the same time. Anyway, watch the streets, especially if you live in Brighton. And keep an eye out for hidden cameras.

I may have mentioned the Rosary cemetery. When I “took my exercise” there during the first lockdown, it was almost always deserted. Now, word seems to have got round, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because thousands of people are reading my posts. Perhaps people are getting so bored with their daily street walks or the overcrowded riverside gangways that they’re looking desperately for somewhere different that can still be described as “local”. Eventually they stumble on the Rosary. They strike lucky.

As we ease into spring, the Rosary is probably at its best. New blankets of crocuses appear every day, among many other spring flowers – snowdrops, primroses, daffodils. You know the sort of thing. Pretty irresistible.

However, unlike many others, I don’t think our appreciation of this phenomenon has suddenly arisen because our lives have slowed down, allowing us to appreciate nature more. Either you appreciate nature or you (inexplicably) don’t.

Most of us love nature, and we don’t go out of our way to ruin it. As I tiptoe between the graves, I try hard not to tread on any tiny shoots. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Nevertheless, there seem to be people who are so focused on themselves and their own convenience that they really don’t care about their surroundings.

I’m not talking about the highways department. I’m not talking about car drivers, or dog walkers, or climate change deniers, or anti-vaxxers or secret huggers, or elves and fairies.

I’m talking about ordinary people who could have an immediate impact on the environment by simply refraining from one activity that has a huge negative impact on city streets and country verges. I am referring, of course, to dropping litter.

Do you actually know anyone who drops litter? Nor me. But it happens on a huge scale, all the time. The Rosary seems to be an exception, and I wonder why. What sort of people don’t go there? People who regard cemeteries as gloomy and forbidding places? People who aren’t impressed by trees and flowers? I was going to say dog walkers, but that’s just me being prejudiced. Maybe it’s people who just don’t notice their surroundings, or are frightened by the whole concept of death, or by the invisible “big picture”.

Somebody left an embroidered notice on one of the seats in the Rosary. It reads: “Not to ruin the ending for you, but it will all turn out ok.”

It is this kind of optimism – some would say reality check – that makes us look round at what I like to call Creation, and want to enjoy it. You don’t have to call it Creation to enjoy it, but it seems to help.

During the first lockdown of my life, last year, everywhere seemed empty. When I took the car to the chemist’s to pick up a prescription, there was almost nothing on the road, and hardly anyone walking either. It was weird, and quite exhilarating. For a while.

This time round we know all about lockdowns. When I go out for my daily exercise (you know, the sort of thing we always did every day and need to keep doing, ho, ho), I can hardly move for other people doing the same thing. On the roads there is loads of traffic – all of it no doubt on essential business.

I read about people travelling vast distances to do trivial and ridiculous things and wonder why I don’t take my wife over to North Walsham – a distance of about 15 miles – to put flowers on her parents’ grave. Such an action would not precipitate any increase in coronavirus infection, but it might attract a fine from some over-zealous marshal or police officer “only doing their job”.

So my parents, buried only ten minutes’ walk from my home, get all the attention. Dead lucky.

Yes, our almost daily wanders to the cemetery, by the river and round the cathedral close are never lonely as a cloud, but packed with bursting bubbles of eager walkers, or runners, or cyclists. Fair enough. I can hardly complain about people doing the same things as I am, even if far too many of them have dogs.

Covid is worrying, of course. What really worries me, though, is the number of people who will flock to our coast and other beautiful spots when the virus eases its grip, and the law is relaxed. I have a feeling my usual favourite haunts will be overflowing with strangers who still can’t get on a plane to Tenerife and have to go somewhere.

There is a whole bloc of people who have to go somewhere. I call them the Restless Ones. They can’t stay home for more than a few days without feeling the urge to go on “holiday” – if only in a tent, or only for a day or two. They bundle all their children into a car and take them somewhere that used to be lovely.

Someone once said (I think it was Jerry Seinfeld) that there was no such thing as fun for all the family. They refuse to believe this.

The problem, I’m afraid, is not people going to beauty spots. The problem is the number of people going to beauty spots – people who would in the normal run of things be out of the country. This is a serious problem. What if air travel doesn’t resume for years? What if these people suddenly realise that the country they live in is full of undiscovered, stunning countryside and excellent restaurants?

I may be vaccinated and optimistic about our ability to cope with the virus, but I can’t help fearing that I am nevertheless going to be overwhelmed – not by illness but by other people.

The other day I happened on a TV documentary from 1957, shown by the ever-delightful Talking Pictures channel, which ran through what happened at Covent Garden from midnight till mid-morning the next day.

Sound enthralling? Surprisingly, it was. But what struck me most about it was the expertise of the workers. They knew exactly what they were doing, and how to do it….and at considerable speed.

I also watched an episode of Grand Designs in which a young man who had recovered from a brain tumour, and his wife, who had many medical problems including recurring skin cancer, took on the immense task of converting a massive barn into a superb house despite minimal finance and in the face of huge practical difficulties – many of them created by planning officials.

I wouldn’t have started the project , let alone finished it. If I had started, I would have given up at several points. But it was a triumph.

And these two programmes made me think about the B Ark. This was an invention of the brilliant Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The B Ark, a huge space vehicle whose residents chose to believe they were the cream of their planet, Golgafrincham, had been fired off to search for a new inhabitable planet.

In fact they were a collection of the most disposable inhabitants of Golgfrincham – marketing executives, PR consultants, telephone sanitisers, bureaucrats, politicians, planning officials and so on – who would really not be missed.

I have always seen myself as a B-Arker. I mean what use is a writer, journalist, poet…? Put me in Covent Garden and I would be lost. Ask me to build a house, and, although I am adequate at small DIY, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start – or the energy to do it.

Our society, unlike that on Golgafrincham, really has this all wrong. We praise and promote the academics, historians, professors and high-earning “elite” and fail to see how much more valuable are plumbers, electricians, nurses, care workers – even when the truth stares us in the face.

The Education Act of 1944 was supposed to put this right, creating schools which specialised in promoting practical skills – you know, the skills vital to our survival. What happened? Technical schools were looked down on, underinvested and seen as a home for people who weren’t good enough to make the academic grade.

One of my favourite comic strips, Dilbert, puts it very well in an encounter between Dilbert, an engineer, and a new employee, who says: “Hi. I’m very smart, but I don’t know how to do anything.” Dilbert replies: “Where did you get your PhD?” New employee: “I didn’t say I have a PhD.” Dilbert: “You kinda did.”

The current pandemic had thrown a spotlight on people who do really useful things, and do them very well. I would like to think that this realisation of who is really valuable to us all will result in a rethink about the structure of society, and where the big money goes.

But I bet it won’t.

I am not one of those who semi-amusingly use Facebook to blame the Tory government for absolutely everything that goes wrong. I am not a Socialist Worker, though I know one and like him very much. I do not pull down statues. But I would like to see change in the area of valuing the right people, and I think many other outwardly conservative people would like to see it too.

I’ve just come back from the Rosary again. During the covid restrictions, I have become well acquainted with this hilly Norwich cemetery where my parents and grandparents are buried. It’s only just round the corner and makes an easily accessible walk, even at my age.

It’s also hauntingly beautiful, with ancient gravestones buried in brambles, a tangle of paths leading nowhere in particular and the resting place of city dignitaries gone by marked with quiet signposts.

As well as my parents and my father’s parents, it holds two uncles, three aunts, the church leader who ministered in a mission hut that stood on the site where I now live, and the pastor of Surrey Chapel, the church I attended in my youth.

It also holds many of those half-remembered men and women who worshipped in and ran that undenominational Chapel, which once loomed large over the space between Ber Street and Surrey Street but became dwarfed by the incongruous Norfolk Tower. It was then demolished, its striking structure in the proportions of the Old Testament Tabernacle giving way to a department store car park – another kind of tabernacle.

It rose again in a different form in the shadow of Anglia Square, and is now to be demolished again whenever a plan for the Square and the refurbishment of the area gets the go-ahead. Another incongruous tower? Almost certainly.

But what of the Rosary? It continues in its semi-wild state while being carefully tended by council workmen, one of whom we have got to know in the past months.

I have seen it in all kinds of weather. It is a place to relax in warmth of spring and summer; to explore gently in autumn and to set a brisk pace through in winter. I have seen a deer there, and magpies and jays are frequent, as are squirrels. There is the occasional cat, but happily no dogs: it is one of the few places you can walk without being pestered by “friendly” or noisy canines.

There are many stories here, a large number of them untold. There is the rail crash, the fairground accident and the premature death of two teenage lovers. Many other premature deaths too, but a surprising number of people who lived to a ripe old age – people who had never heard of coronavirus, or Spanish flu, or even a world war. So near, and yet so far.

I was playing rugby at school when this huge boy about twice my size came bearing down on me with the ball. I wasn’t sure whether to tackle him or not. It seemed a life or death question. In the end, I think I tried to trip him up, which is apparently illegal. But at least I survived.

I seem to remember that he continued irresistibly down the pitch, with much smaller boys parting like the Red Sea before him until he fell on the ball under the posts. Rugby was his game.

I was not keen on rugby. But as nearly all the boys preferred football, the school made us play rugby quite often. I think it was supposed to be character-forming. Or maybe they just didn’t like us.

The question of size in sport is interesting. It seems to me that over the course of my life, the more successful sportsmen seem to have got much bigger. I used to enjoy watching rugby, as opposed to playing it, and at the time wings and centres were normal-sized – sometimes even small – as opposed to the great hulking forwards.

That is not true now: everyone on the field is huge, and great emphasis is placed on aggressive physical behaviour. This, together with the fashion for random penalties at scrums and ridiculous rolling mauls – which are just legalised obstruction – has turned me off.

Football is much the same. Physicality is much praised, and free kicks are pretty random, even with VAR – particularly as VAR still depends on judgement of grey areas, and not black and white.

You might think that cricket , without much physical contact, would rise above the search for something bigger, and so would sports like tennis and golf. But this is not true.

Think the impressive Freddie Flintoff and Sir Ian Botham, but think even more about the weight of cricket bats, which has increased so that you only have to get a nick on the ball for it to go sailing over the boundary and score “the maximum”, however bad the shot. This gives rise indirectly to reverse sweeps and that shot where you paddle it over the wicketkeeper (and the rope). That’s not beautiful, and not the cricket I knew and loved – perhaps because I was a bowler.

Golf clubs and tennis rackets have also developed into tools of fearsome power, so that weight beats skill in many situations.

I hope I am not being sizeist. I have nothing against big people, but I don’t like the idea that being big immediately gives you an advantage. I’m sure the odd rule change could put things right, unless you indulge in basketball, which is beyond salvation. Meanwhile, I shall continue playing chess.

Until recently, fighting whatever attacked us was straightforward. When London, Coventry or anywhere else was being bombed, we could see what was happening, and we could take action. People banded together, hugged each other, commiserated and cared for their neighbours. Back when the Vikings raped and pillaged, we could see the threat. Even the plague was easy to see. More recently the results of violence have been visible, if not at first hand, on television or online. Before that it was clear in the bodies of the injured, or their failure to return.

Now we have something attacking us that we cannot see. We are specifically forbidden to band together and hug each other, and we are prevented from doing what seems instinctive. Even worse, we are about to be faced with a remedy that we cannot see either. Most of us have only the most superficial knowledge about vaccines.

Today a leaflet came through my door alleging that Covid-19 vaccines are not licensed, and so manufacturers have no liability if something should go wrong. The UK Medicines and Healthcare regulator apparently said as recently as October that a high volume of adverse reactions was expected, and Robert F Kennedy, who admittedly is an American, has said that the type of vaccine being used “represents a crime against humanity”.

None of these things is necessarily true. They may be true but with a wrong emphasis, or they may not tell the whole story. The problem is that the figures the Government and its scientists give us is misleading at best – ever since they decided that having a positive Covid test and then dying meant that you died of Covid – even if you had no symptoms and were knocked down by a car a month later.

There are influential people, well qualified and with no apparent axe to grind, who are extremely concerned about the way Covid-19 is being tackled. They are easy to find on the internet; so I see no reason to go into what they say here. Most of us will dismiss what they say as “conspiracy theories”, which is fine and sensible – unless of course there is a conspiracy.

When I worked at a journalism training school, we used to advise our recruits that they should “never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity”. This is a good test to apply to conspiracy theories – or to the way that a government or scientists behave when faced with something that could be described as a pandemic – but again, what if there really is a conspiracy?

When some people said the Nazis were systematically killing Jews, was this regarded as a conspiracy theory and dismissed by all right-thinking Germans? A large number of fashionably left-leaning liberal Englishmen and women thought the idea that Stalin could be killing people in labour camps was absurd. A lot of us were suspicious when we were told that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

So when does a conspiracy theory become a reasonable doubt?

Being reasonable people, we like to think that that politicians and scientists are reasonable too. We like to think they are making the best possible decisions for the best possible motives. But what if they aren’t?

If people in some kind of authority insist on something for long enough, they find it hard to admit they might be wrong. This is what is known as a universal truth. Tolstoy said: “Most men (and women), including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

Academics and experts know this very well. Fred Heffer wrote this week: “The easiest and least stressful path to success is to adopt the status quo viewpoint without question.” If there is a consensus on something, it is much easier to attack people who query it than let people think there might be something to talk about. But of course all science makes progress by challenging consensus.

It’s not easy, is it? We want to act in a way that helps others and helps ourselves. Getting vaccinated is clearly the “right thing to do” because it could save people’s lives. But people say that it’s not that serious: Covid-19 has a 99% recovery rate. This may not be true. It may be 97%. Or if you personally die from it, 0%. In your case.

After that, things become very clear.