Mr Smith vs The Post Office

The other day I summoned up the courage to watch the ITV dramatisation of the Post Office Horizon scandal.  In the eleven months since its first screening I haven’t heard any suggestion that the drama was significantly inaccurate - I guess ITV’s lawyers will have done their due diligence.  

On one level, it was a superb piece of writing and direction, brilliantly acted: I won’t single out individual actors because they were all brilliant.  It’s a damn’ shame that despite Private Eye’s efforts over the years, it took a TV drama to lift the lid of this egregious can of worms, however, and Post Office management and HMG have blood on their hands such as would the multitudinous seas incarnadine.  The quotation invites comparison of Lady Macbeth and Paula Vennells, and I’ll leave it to others to draw the exact parallels, of which I suspect there are many.  I’ll allow myself one, though: at the most charitable interpretation, Vennells sleepwalked her way to the ruin of hundreds of lives and, oh, by the way, her reputation and that of the Post Office.

I’m struggling to get the story out of my mind.  Perhaps I shouldn’t.  At the time of the action, I was no longer an employee of the Post Office, but I remember the institutional hubris that pervades the script.  A frequently articulated mantra was that ‘the Post Office is a good employer’.  Then as during the scandal, there seemed to be no sense among senior management that the Post Office could do any wrong, but rather that the public should be grateful for its mediocre service.  The portrayal of the investigators and auditors seemed pretty accurate to me.  Some might say that the ID (Investigation Department) were always a bunch of thugs, and I’ve heard it said that it had a spectacular library of confiscated pornography.

By way of therapy, I did a spot of gardening yesterday, doing a pre-winter trim of some of the roses, and planting up some of the tubs out on the steps.  The hanging baskets are down now, and I have a few geranium and fuchsia cuttings in the sitooterie.  The cuttings I took of the New Guinea busy lizzies are starting to root well in water on the kitchen window ledge, so I’ll get them potted up in a week or so.  Storm Bert brought down a couple of sections of the fence and gave another few a distinct list to port, so we have our old friends from the fencing company coming round in a fortnight’s time to estimate.  Forget Christmas presents.

Winter - updated

Though we haven’t yet had the heavy snow that is affecting much of the country, it’s perishing cold.  We’re neither of us starting the winter in the best of shape: Martyn has been fighting a chest infection for a while now, and is on a second course of antibiotics.  It’s probably they that are making him feel so rotten: after a poor night, he went back to bed after breakfast.  I just have a heavy cold, so am merely wallowing in self-pity, as is only right and proper for a bloke with a cold.

On the positive side, having yesterday had to do some shopping, I succeeded in ‘preconditioning’ the car, which was covered in frost first thing, so it was defrosted and warm when I went out.  The process, launched from my iPhone without the need to brave the cold outdoors, takes a quarter of an hour, and uses about ten miles’ worth of range.  Of course, none of the fumes and noise that the same job generates in a combustion car.  It’ll take me years to learn all the car’s tricks, so I’m glad I’ve discovered this one early.

Thinking of the seasons, I recall a German verse, from a souvenir plate, I think:

Nutz die Frühling deines Lebens; Leb’ den Sommer nichts vergebens; Denn gar bald stehst du im Herbste, Und wann der Winter kommt, dann stirbst du.

Loosely translated: enjoy spring, make the most of summer: it won’t be long till autumn, and when winter comes, you die.  It occurred to me, while I was cooking just now, that I spent an enjoyable evening once in Brussels with my old friend Kjell Johnsen, preparing a ratatouille together.  Well, on looking at Facebook, I see that Kjell is no longer with us. Sad: he was a kind, undemanding friend.

Carpe idem, innit?

What passes for excitement hereabouts

We had a pleasant Sunday lunch and afternoon with Sandra: Martyn had found a lamb casserole recipe which looked worth a try, so we got some local neck fillet from our usual butcher.  It’s nice in these days of plastic-wrapped everything to see the butcher return from the back shop with part of a carcass and carve out a neck fillet.  Lamb from Penshurst, less than five miles from here.  Three fillets came to just over a kilo.  Trimmed and browned, then veggies sweated, spices and home made passata added and a long slow cook - and we had a good meal for two left over after we’d served three decent portions.  Pudding used up a lot of this year’s apple crop, so two ingredients from the garden, which is always a comfort.  (I’ll pass rapidly over the fact that the blackberries in the crumble came from Guatemala.)  We had some houmous and tapenade for starters, and although we didn’t grow the chickpeas and olives ourselves, we can at least take the credit for their transformation.

As we sat and digested with a cup of tea, we could hear pneumatic drills going nearby.  Martyn had noticed some neighbours stopping outside Mary and Charles’s, then going and ringing the bell.  They had presumably spotted a water leak, so as it turned out the water company’s contractors beavered away for hours into the night, the water pressure dwindling away meanwhile.  I’d calls during the evening from two elderly neighbours seeking reassurance that it wasn’t just they whose water supply had dried up, so I was able to reassure them on that point, and advise them to fill their kettles from the tap in the cloakroom rather than the mains tap in the kitchen.  Before bedtime the water came on again, and it didn’t take long before it was running clear again.

This morning Charles and a friend were standing contemplating the huge hole outside N°4, so I accused the former of getting bored and deciding to drill for oil.  Remains to be seen what happens next: I guess they’ll have done a lash-up pending a definitive repair.

Modest amounts of gardening: we’ve taken down the hanging baskets, since they were starting to look tired.  They’re in the mini greenhouse pro tem while I summon the energy to replant them.  There’s still a bit of colour in the garden, though I have started to haul out the verbena bonariensis in the hope that it hasn’t seeded too much already.  The little beech is turning into that wonderful palette of colours that comes each autumn, and the cornus are showing the coloured stems that will bring much of our winter colours.  When I was planting one of the Midwinter Fire cornus last week, I could see plenty of bulbs coming back to life.  We just have to get through the dark months now.

First service

A year or so after surgery I’m now on a five-year surveillance programme.  I had a CT scan a few weeks ago, and a blood test to look for tumour markers.  Yesterday I had a colonoscopy, which was altogether less uncomfortable than previous essays in the medium: of course, I could lie on my back for this one, and the man with the long eye had less far to go.  None of the above revealed signs of recurrence, but I’m still on probation for another four years.  Cautious optimism in order.

We’ve hardly seen the sun this month: the anticyclonic gloom has set in good and proper: dreich, damp and chilly.  Still, there’s the odd bit of colour left in the garden, and Ben has (a) cleared out the bed under the garnet acer and red cornus, and (b) brought us a couple of midwinter fire cornus plants: we just need to find room for them.  I just hope the hellebores survive his radical treatment!  Pale pink penstemon cuttings rooted well, so we have passed on a few to Mary down the road: she admired the parent plant when we had our Macmillan coffee morning back in September.  [Proceeds now stand at £1422, by the way!] 

As for politics, we’re both pretty depressed.  It wouldn’t worry us too much if the mayhem could be confined to the Land of the Free, but if the orange one (a) hangs Ukraine out to dry and (b) emasculates NATO, the soi-disant successor to Peter the Great will be emboldened to chance his arm in the Baltic States, Poland, Moldova and goodness knows where else.  Once again, one is grateful to be ancient and childless.