It’s all downhill from here

First of all – an apology. I will not be sending you this many emails in one day again.

I felt I should try to get an email out after the morning session which was frankly a complete nightmare as I was starving and I only had one hour to dive out of court, get queue up to buy some food (from a healthy fast food shop nearby – betroot salmon spinach wrap and an energy bar made of cardboard, dried peas and glue), wolf it down, talk to some claimants, photograph Alan Bates from the JFSA, knock out a few words and then get back through security in time to sit down for the afternoon session.

Then after the afternoon session finished I thought it would be a sensible thing to do to send you a compendium of the tweets I sent throughout the day.

Your feedback on that would be gratefully received. After all, tweets tend to make the most sense on twitter. Perhaps I should leave them there?

If so that would leave you with two emails a day during this trial, my dear patrons. One official one which is a re-post of whatever I put up on postofficetrial.com and then this secret email. Is that enough?

I know today was a special day because it’s the start of the trial but I am cream-crackered. I now have a better understanding of why this trial is only sitting 5 hours a day, 4 days a week. The sessions themselves require a huge amount of concentration which then beget more work which has to be done around the session hours.

Having said that it was great to meet new claimants and say hello again to so many people whose stories I’ve filmed and recorded down the years. It was also genuinely fascinating to hear the arguments which the JFSA and Post Office are relying on it court. Discussions about the meaning and inference of words are very much my thing. I realise at this level it can get a little bit esoteric for some and when the protagonists disappear into case law I do get a bit lost, but anyway… my job, as I see it, is to pull out the stories from the session as they happen and never forget there are real lives under discussion and real hopes hanging on the balance of the outcome.

Please do keep continuing to spread the word about these blog posts and emails – and if you only signed up today – thank you! Your contributions allow me to keep reporting this extraordinary story. I’ll be here long after those dilettantes from the FT have left the courtroom for more glamourous pastures. (there were two FT reporters in court today – two!)

Please do also keep emailing your responses. I am grateful for the feedback, even if I can’t reply to every missive.

And thanks for being a secret emailer. Let’s do it all again tomorrow.