This is the website of writer Tim Lenton. I have worked most of my life as a journalist, during the latter part of which I wrote commentary columns for the Eastern Daily Press, based in Norwich, England. I am also a poet, a walker, a chess player, a driver, a husband, a father, a grandparent, a guitar player, a reader, a TV watcher, a pensioner and a Christian, among other things. I like to look at things sideways and not go the same way everyone else is going. I love Norfolk, Scotland, the coast, mountains and almost everywhere I find myself.I like freedom and hate the nanny state.

Radical new education ideas

Philosophy for children? They think, therefore they learn.

Yes, even primary school children.  Click here.

Quotes

We are none of us infallible – not even the youngest of us.

W H Thompson

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

Michael Crichton

I always think when I'm driving around locally, that if I drive at the limits that the roads used to be set at, I am pretty awake and alert and things are happening.  The very few times I have travelled an entire journey at the current limits, I swear I cannot remember half the trip because I have literally just switched off and started staring out the window. Perhaps I have a low boredom threshold which means that I crave speed like some sort of addict?  Or perhaps it's just that I am human and, like all humans, cannot be bored out of my skull while very little happens very slowly, without wishing to escape to a better place in my head.

Paul Anstey

Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.

Steven Wright     

If we were less arrogant we might see ourselves for what we are – children sent on an errand, who first forget our instructions and then realise we have forgotten the way home.

1. Lindsay Clarke
   

2. 
   

The children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.

1. Salman Rushdie
   

I was much too far out all my life.

And not waving but drowning.

1. Stevie Smith
   

2. 
   

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

1. Voltaire
   

2. 
   

3. Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while, then a layer of scum floats to the top
   

Edward Abbey

“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, while we were underneath it?”

“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.

A A Milne

It is never too late to give up your prejudices.

H D Thoreau

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde

Hypothesis establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use  popular language, if you make the same guess often enough, it becomes a Scientific Fact.

C S Lewis

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticise it.

Pierre Gallois

Unlucky too long

The importance of being lucky in sport is often underestimated. We prefer to think that the best player or team always wins, but they don't. 

In tennis a bad line call can change a match; in football a wrong decision by the referee is frequently crucial; and in cricket especially batsmen are at the mercy of the umpire's eye.

Commentators wax lyrical about a batsman who has scored a couple of hundred when he was in fact dropped on 2 and wrongly given not-out on 6. On the other hand a batsman who is mistakenly adjudged lbw for a duck has "failed again".

The first man should really have scored 2 or 6, and the second might have gone on to a magnificent 200. 

We are told that this kind of thing "evens itself out" – but does it? Maybe some brilliant players never made it because they were unlucky for too long...