Paula Vennells.

 Subject: Paula Vennells.

We rarely run our lives with the forensic intensity of an AI algorithm. We have off the cuff conversations, we have emotional and analytical changes of mind as we continually take in new information and start to reason differently as matters change.

Perhaps Chief Executives are paid so much money because they can form a line of reasoning and hold that line over decades as part of the boardroom stance.  If most of your utterance over decades had been recorded in minutes and in correspondence, including the more informal email then to pick a trail through these thousands of incidental conversations and executive directions is mind blowing especially if, as Chief you wear your personal hat as well as that of the company.

Listening to another day from Paula Vennels answering the drum beat of questions from Jason Beer KC as he pursues her memory of events one must remember he has had a team of legal beavers scoping word by word, line by line documents unearthed not only from the Post Office but also from emails written by interested parties concerning the postmaster/postmistress scandal. The callousness of the Postoffice legal team in pursuing individual postmasters we are asked to accept as, that’s what legal eagles do, they tear apart the words and the characters of those they are ‘employed’ to oppose and those at the top of the tree get very well paid for this service although there often seems very little recognition of the circumstances of the twisting of truth required at the time.

As CEO Paula Vennells’s  job was to run the PO, an ailing organisation, (jettisoned for that reason from the Royal Mail itself) back to health and report her activities to the Board. The specialities departments, Legal, Finance, Public Relations, Human Resources and most importantly in the issues surrounding the Horizon Computer system used to keep track of the Daily Cash transactions carried out by the staff within the Branch, the Dats Processing experts who monitor the computer system.

Her reliance on these departments for feedback is normal procedure in a large organisation and the harrying of Ms Vennells by barristers who if they cast their minds back to previous cases they have contended must blush to think of their involvement in skipping over an over the involvement when perusing a line of questioning of someone who had had hands on involvement of a crime.

And so the slight of this diminutively dressed woman has appeared each day in the bear pit of a televised kicking, for which no doubt she is responsible by having to wear two caps, one with responsibility for the success of the company to its shareholders and the other, as the most senior day to day executive who responsibility was also to the employees of the company. Of course she might argue that the postmasters/ postmistresses were in part independently self employed in the role they performed but in effect they were employees. Her testimony has been littered with claims “that I didn’t know “, “I should have asked”, or “I don’t recall” and it is for this obfuscation that she is challenged now. How could she say she didn’t know that uniquely, the PO were the prosecutor and judge and that the fault in the computer program was perhaps not a fault but the direct interference from an outside terminal which altered the balances and presented the postoffice staff with a fait accompli, that they balance the books with their own savings or face imprisonment.

She stands indicted at least with been incompetent but perhaps in turning the PO around from a large loss making organisation to one which was making reasonable profits is what her employers employed her for, including incidentally  the only shareholder, the government, that of healing a sick organisation.

The prosecutions of post office staff  were in clear view as was their inability to question the veracity of the evidence in court. Where are the executives of Fijusi the company who owned and designed the computer to have a back door by which financial transactions could be altered. Where are the judges and the barristers who proclaimed a crime had been committed when all paths led to the malfunctioning of the Horizon program.

Instead we haven’t thrown off our penchant for the stocks in the market square where innocents and those guilty could be used for the public indulgence in bashing the weak.

Of course the enquiry only highlights the divisions in our society.

I well remember my shock in having the scales removed from my eyes on returning to this country, of the indifference given towards sectors within our society, between the bosses and the workers, between those who feel they are in control and those who are controlled. There’s a schism running through our society, ‘a them and us’ mentality and nothing more illustrates this than the Post Office expose.

Thump, the news paper drops in through the letterbox.

 Subject: Thump, the news paper drops in through the letterbox.



I have always, from being a young man thrived on the discourse of news in the newspapers. My dad was an avid quality newspaper reader abet he prejudiced this with his political leaning as a socialist. He was also somewhat prudish in that the more solicitous papers were never taken and I wonder what he would have made of the free- for-all market place we see today, never mind the strange turn of events on Eurovision. In those days your home was truly your castle, what came in was what you wanted to come in, in other words you didn’t have much but you had the choice to say no.

The political flavour of a paper was what many people chose as they settled back to have their views reinforced by the columnist and above all by the editor. These editors and owners of print were often the movers and shakers of political thought as they sort to persuade you of the rightness and wrongness of political debate. Parliament was the arbiter but the dissemination was the job of the newspaper.

As with so many things in those days class determined your interest and finance and the spoils of taxation determined the way you thought. On the one hand if you were a Tory you had sufficient disposable income to decide where and on what you spent your money if you were a socialist you simply leant your ear to hopes and promises.

There was always a sense of the irreconcilable difference but at least ‘hypocrisy’ was treated with disdain. That is until Rupert Murdock came on the scene and started the mass manipulation of minds and where truth and falsehood became blended into a saleable commodity and eventually we, the public, ended up where we are today in a totally confused world of media confliction. People are confused with the brash denial by government ministers of what we believe is the truth and then, reinforced with a ministerial round of contradiction in the full glare of the headlights, black becomes white.

Our minds are not built to cope with this dystopian nightmare, the Orwellian concept of sowing fear by misrepresenting reality is not only by the Chinese or the Russian but by our own people, each morning as we eat our Kellogg’s.

The faces which make a crowd.

 Subject: The faces which make a crowd.



I wonder if there has ever been a more downcast mood in that Mother of Parliaments, Westminster as the Prime Minister , grim-faced  related the findings and the indictment of the medical establishment. His inclusion of members of both sides of the House in their tardiness to until now redress the crimes but for decades, even admit they took place.

The revelation of Josef Mengele style experimentation on young kids is almost beyond belief but we are being encouraged to believe any type of unthinkable these days.

Human life has a wide range of values and receives most support from the save life at all costs brigade of kind hearted Samaritan, to the almost callous ‘collateral damage’ appeaser. From the ultra liberal to the ultra religious, the anarchic social movers and shakers, to the pessimists who would bring Sodom and  Gomorrah down on the heads of almost everyone.

For once the gravitas of Parliament was captured by fine words but only after decades of turning their back and refuting the obvious, “there never are those so blind as those who fail to see”, but as the moment passed and the bickering resumed and the mental impasse of years of unresolved argument reasserted itself into tribal lines drawn to supplant where once there was a semblance of some sort of ‘conviction’ to politics.

On another tack the investigation into the Post Office’s treatment of its postmasters and mistresses drags on. Witnesses are placed on the stand and poked and queried by the KC into the why and wherefore their actions, so many decades ago, were cruel and uncomprehending. Some are light footed and, as Oscar Wilde observed, some do it with a smile and some with a withering look” but whilst some are righteously sure of their actions, some are just plain dim,( or feign stupidity) as was today’s  witness. She took the stand and proceeded to deny that she understood the questioning, a sort of “not me Gov” act ensued as the rapidly frustrated KC posed his opening question only to be faced by an equally trenchant “ I don’t remember”, or “I don’t recognise the document, what does it say, what does it mean”. She was not a high flyer, her job it seems was to have been a liaison between a number of post offices seeing they followed procedure and so her testimony whist not so important,  back in the day it was used to falsely imprison one of the postmistresses.

The evils we place on the shoulders of our forebears

 Subject: The evils we place on the shoulders of our forebears

The prefabricated scandals continued to churn off the UK production line.  This morning it was the blood contamination scandal, a week or so back it was the sub-postmasters scandal, amongst a long litany of other misdemeanours such as the wholesale phone tapping to elicit stories for the press.

It seems there are no depths that highly placed people won’t stoop to avoid being caught out and, with the weight of the legal brief behind them, they often win their day in court. The Hillsborough disaster was another dark day for officialdom and the thread which runs through them is the contempt those in power have for the common man.

I suppose that I as an individual can make these claims openly in our society is at least some sort of testimony to the freedoms we have unlike China or Russia but the report out today regarding the known contamination of blood products we bought from America to treat haemophilia patients in the 1970s  and the follow up amongst HIV patients in the 1980s where that cohort of homosexual men amongst who HIV was spreading, were looked on in askance  as hardly worthy of treatment and who could be used as guinea pigs for treatment. I remember the fear of HIV being transmitted, toilet seats, hand shaking, the HIV patient became the equivalent of Hindu untouchables and were feared and detested in equal measure. Princess Diana  did a great deal to break the taboo on her trip to Africa seen cuddling a young HIG infected child in front of the cameras.

Our ignorance might be forgiven but the doctors and health officials never, nor the politicians who were briefed by the medical profession and so their refusal to take action on the importation of contaminated blood must have been, in no small part due to prejudice. The phenomena of gay people went against the values of common decency at that time particularly, when portrayed in the clubs and pubs of Soho where the extravagant flaunting of male upon male sex made many ‘straight sex people’ bork at the sight and there was deep prejudice in much of society.

Rightly / wrongly a great wrong has been done and today we are left wondering at the inhumanity of that time  . But of course in todays world, ‘children sent up chimneys’, the ‘death penalty, the malingering effect of slums and the ‘work house’ are now behind us, although no doubt’, were in their time simply features of the social landscape which bewilderingly is ever evolving

Retirement, time on our hands and the consequences.

 Subject: Retirement, time on our hands and the consequences.



Why do the minutes, hours, days, months and years seem to go by faster after you retire. When you’re working there never seems enough time to do the things that need doing and one of the pleasures in retirement is that possibly, for the first time you yourself prioritise what you feel is important.

There are those retirees lucky enough to visit countries across the world for which they have an interest, there are hobbies to take up and there are commitments to both family and also to people less well off or in poor health who benefit from the time you invest in their needs rather than solely your own.

Time takes on a different meaning when you retire. The impetus to be somewhere at someone else’s beck and call is missing but so is the commitment to be part of a team achieving a wider aim. The sense of belonging is emulsified by this lack of a common agenda, your four walls at home become increasingly your boundary of experience and you are in danger of being minimised by this lack of a alternative perspective. Health is the final abettor of how well your retirement pans out, all the riches in the world can’t compensate for disability issues, even those tours become a chore if your mind is taken over by your painful knees rather than the view.

The substance of most lives has been, up to retirement the type of work we do and those fortunate enough to have the skill to intuitively work from home they can still thrive with the achievement and the money a successful occupation brings but for most of us it’s a matter of keeping the garden ship-shape and negotiating the supermarket isles with the stability a trolley brings.

We do of course have a great deal of time to reflect and judge and in this confusing world where so many of our values and beliefs have been highjacked and the supplanting of concepts which border on being influential as to who we are, seem an infringement to that person. If all we believed in previously, be it gender recognition, personal discipline, the very actuality questioned of what we see with our own eyes, as Artificial Intelligence re-scopes our conception of reality. How will future generations live in a world which, like Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead at the same time. When faced with large-scale unreality we become mentally unwieldy and fair game to unscrupulous gamesters like Donald Trump. At least in Russia and China we are told what to think which removes the psychological turmoil of believing we have choice.

Identity and how it defines us.

 Subject: Identity and how it defines us.



Who are the people willing to die for their identity whilst we manoeuvre ours away in a market free for all.

 Are we proud to be British or would we rather bequeath that title to who ever turns up and claims it. 

Does the sense of many generational links within the community not out-claim someone who has only just arrived, sometimes without any papers or proof of lineage somewhere else. Is the land we occupy and have done so for a number of Millenia not worth fighting for and if needs be, dying for, especially since the carefully contrived British culture is ever more at risk from pressure groups who belong to much more authoritarian cultures than our own.

We seem to be intent in throwing the British baby out with the bath water, unheard of in Chinese, Russian and Islamic cultures where nationhood is valued above all else.

One of the characteristics of recent British culture is to continually look elsewhere for our lead and following, to preempt and mollify conflict by continually playing the good cop irrespective of what it does to our standing in the world, we have become appeasers rather than being prepared to hold our feet to the fire when principles are demanded.

Of course there are many parts of our inner cities which bear no resemblance to the 40s/50s and 60s, having taken on a hybrid culture which varies even from street to street. These areas are as racially divided but without any governing ethos other than the violence of the gang and the weapons which defines them.

Cultural precedence is the balance between each citizen in a defined group and their standing amongst other cultural groups. When in a significant minority their place and aims should be that of the minority not that of a challenger and certainly not demanding rights over and above the indignant population. As visitors into our culture they should not seek to trash our way of life or significantly change the norms of our culture by imposing theirs.

Of course this poses the question, “have we not trashed our own culture in our craving the god of Mammon”.

How to understand just one life.

 Subject: How to understand just one life.

Understanding anything is a marvel. Understanding hides under acres of misunderstanding and rests on many more acres of unploughed, unexplained conjecture. Our lives are buffeted by the winds of chance which, as in the game of ‘pitch and toss’, depend on a mixture of luck, inertia and an over simplified belief in our control of such events.  From birth to death we try to predict our passage by attempting to recognising its phrases, including the failures and end up hopefully celebrating some sort of progress.

 Progress it appears is the lightening rod by which our lives are written and by which we are judged. It’s the old measurement of double entry book keeping, debits and credits, without which, according to the bookkeeper, we amount to nothing. It’s always sad that we are often only remembered by the size of the house of the badge on the front of the car since these speak of other successes and not necessarily the things we actually value. Value, that great imponderable, so maligned by some as superfluous and by others as the only judgement worth noting. Blaze away on a roulette wheel hoping to win your way out of the conundrum or find and have explained just one nugget of information which might be important. Rather engineer your own answer than going along with the crowd accepting their interpretation of what life is all about.

Today in India my son Andrew travelled back into antiquity celebrating Saka Dawa, the the birth of Buddha, his enlightenment and his death. A moment in the calendar which  fuses time and establishes the change in mankind’s destiny. Festivals of devout believers take it upon themselves its celebrate   that  part of history which is relevant to to them.  A Buddhist celebrates, Saka Dawa or  Easter for a Christian used to be special but , for many in the UK, the relevance is now,  are the supermarkets open or not.

Each culture has its Dawa or celebratory  month, its exclamation  to what it feels is is relevant, since relevance is the mortar which holds society together and even if we are in a "society of one" you need some sort of paper trail to make sense of it all.

History can be a private thing since it’s ours individually which we reflect upon, not the ‘Big Bang Bosh’ of the history books but something much more seductive, an event or a series of events which only you can relate to and a few others find interesting.