Court out

A conclusion has been reached.

I am pleased to announce that today, after a painful and presumably wearisome trial, the jury in the Carlisle court has finally reached a verdict.

The three defendants have been found guilty on all counts.

We have all been believed.

I am very glad that we have been believed, not least for the obvious reason that we were telling the truth. However, one of the ways that people defend themselves in court is to try and make anybody who is contradicting them look unsavoury, and unreliable.

I think this is perfectly fair, because of course anybody might be telling lies, except the Queen, obviously. If you are defending yourself it is eminently sensible to make a jury wonder how truthful your accuser might be. All the same, it is very horrible. It is not nice to tell the truth and to have somebody make you feel so confused about it that you start to wonder if you have gone mental and just invented your whole life.

The jury decided not to think that we were mental. They decided, unanimously, that all of the accused were guilty.

I was astonished to discover that I felt as though a weight had instantly been lifted from my shoulders. I had not even known it was there, but even whilst I was on the phone I felt lighter and more upright.

It is a relief. It is a colossal and massive relief.

It has been churning along in the background occupying my thoughts for ages, like a jackhammer outside the bedroom window that the workmen forgot to turn off before they went home for the weekend. I have not exactly thought about it all of the time, but on and off, the way worries do when you can’t do anything either to make them get better, or to vanish.

I am not just relieved, I am also a bit sad. There is no good outcome to a court case like that. We have talked about it again and again today, and it is hard to feel jubilant about people who have done things so awful that they are going to go to prison.

They are all going to go to prison, maybe for a long time. The judge has told them that they must prepare themselves for custodial sentences.

This will not happen for another month. Once that is done, then I will be able to tell you about what they did, but it is probably better not to write about it until it is finally over.

We think that we will go to the court to hear the sentencing.

Then it will truly be finished.

You would not think that such a distant thing would take up so very much of a person’s day, but somehow it has. I have spent a very lot of time not doing anything useful at all, but talking and wondering and thinking and going over and over the time in court, again and again.

However, you might have noticed that I have not been entirely idle.

There is a Difference to these pages.

If you usually read the Diary by first going to the Home Page, the one with all the pictures and a list of the most recent twelve posts, you will find a new addition to the side of the page.

There is a little tab which says Bygone Years, and underneath is a list of, well, bygone years.

It enables you to find any diary entry from any day you like, ever since I started writing, six years ago.

Hence if you are unexpectedly gripped with curiosity to discover what I might have been doing on, for example, the eleventh of May in 2017, you can click your way to that date and simply find out.

I expect you are all overwhelmed by the usefulness of this.

I most certainly am, and have had to be very self-controlled about not wasting the entire afternoon scrolling with great interest through the various carefully chronicled events of my past life.

I have discovered that I have done almost nothing of note whatsoever for the past six years.

Creating this took me, and my computer-literate friend, much of the morning. Computers are jolly difficult, and I was very grateful indeed to have a friend who was very much better informed than me. I would never have thought to write [<4h/a>] anywhere at all.

I do not remember if those were the exact words he used, but it was something like that.

We have installed both a Plugin and a Widget, and now stepping into the past can be done at the merest click of a mouse.

I am also pleased to announce both that the dogs indigestion seems to have recovered and also that the first of the lettuce seeds have sprouted.

We will be self-sufficient in no time at all.

I haven’t taken a picture. Oliver took this one yesterday.

It is a picture of a brain cell made out of lettuce leaves and pecan nuts.

Education is a wonderful thing.