Best laid plans and all that…

Hi everyone

This was not the secret email I wanted to send you.

I have managed to break my right wrist. It’s going to take a while to heal. I am right-handed.

I had hoped to be able to bring you daily reports from the ongoing public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. Phase 5 and 6 begins on Tuesday.

I am experimenting by writing this newsletter using the native MacBook voice control and dictation software.

It’s quite intuitive but it’s still going to take a while to learn. The voice recognition side of things is brilliant but it completely ignores the editing instructions and just put things like “full stop” and “Delete that last word” directly into the text which hen have to manually delete with my functioning hand. Humph.

Formatting these newsletters can take a lot of time (and tedious mouse-clicking and dragging and dropping) at the best of times. Due to my injury I’m not sure I’m going to be able to provide you with the service I had intended.

My plan was to write a blog post every day I was at the Inquiry which would be every day it was sitting other than those days in April and May I am undertaking a live event.

That said, I only broke my wrist this morning, and I’m on pretty heavy duty painkilling drugs which might be clouding my judgement, and so it may be that things get less painful and I get better at using this dictation software over the next few days.

Whether I will be able to travel to London to be in the hearing room during the Inquiry or whether it’s better or easier for me to stay at home and watch it on YouTube, commentating from afar is something that I’ll have to experiment with.

I think I’ll probably still go – after all, there’s nothing like being there, is there? And it might teach me the value of brevity.

If I am capable of putting together a functional workflow to send missives from the Inquiry (whether I’m in the room or not), using my mouth and left hand, then you’ll get the newsy blog post the moment it has been put live, and sometime afterwards you’ll get a newsletter alerting you to the blog post, adding anything extra worth telling you.

This is what I did during Bates versus Post Office at the High Court in 2018 and 2019 and it seemed to work.

Although then I had the use of both hands.

As you might be able to tell I’m quite annoyed with myself.

Thankfully my upcoming theatre tour dates are unaffected, though I won’t be driving to them, and there may be slightly less wild gesticulation whilst I am on stage than before. Apologies to fans of wild gesticulation.

The Post Office Tapes

I have been working with the investigations team at ITV News on a series of pieces involving recordings of senior Post Office executives being given information about miscarriages of justice which their CEO and media/public affairs/legal teams proceeded to deny for a number of years. Due to other commitments I have not been able to front the investigations but I’m very pleased with the results.

You can see the most recent piece here and I would urge you to tune into ITV evening news at 6:30pm this evening for more.

My arm is throbbing so I’m not going to attempt to do much more today. I will try and send you another newsletter next week and I have a better idea of how much out of whack this is going to put me.

Housekeeping

Apologies to those who received a blog post alert via email recently which required you to enter a password. It was a sent in error. Please ignore. Thanks to those who alerted me.

If you are not already signed up to receive blog post alerts then I recommend you do so by going to postofficescandal.uk and putting your email address in the relevant signup box. This is a free service, which, along with the website itself, is powered by your donations. All future messages will link to a published blog post and will not require you to enter a password. If any do, I’ve messed up again.

Thanks to everyone who has signed up to receive these newsletters in recent days despite the lack of activity. I am extremely grateful. Please do reply to this newsletter and tell me your connection to this story. Given my incapacitated state I can’t promise to reply but I promise it will cheer me up to read some correspondence.

Please, though, do not send any messages of sympathy. I’m feeling enough self-pity as it is. I would far rather you told me I’m an idiot and demanded a refund, especially those of you who may have donated recently in order to read my dispatches from phases five and six of the Inquiry.

We live and learn.

Keep well,

Nick

Post Office Scandal – The Inside Story

In April and May 2024, I’ll be visiting various theatres in towns around England in the counties of Cheshire, Shropshire, County Durham, Dorset, East Sussex, Devon, Cornwall, Essex, Oxfordshire, Worcestershire, Hertfordshire, and Surrey, including my home town of Walton on Thames.

At each venue I’ll be joined by a former Subpostmaster (apart from Walton when Second Sight’s Ian Henderson will be in the chair). There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions and learn even more about the scandal.

All the dates and box office links are here. Please do have a look, see if there’s a venue near you, and if you fancy it, book a couple of tickets. Please also feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends who may live near a venue!

I’ll be around after each show in the foyer or bar and look forward to saying hello if you can make it.