Up and walked Mix. This morning there was a little rain in the air, not much but just enough to make it less pleasant to work on a roof so Tom and I agreed to do our own things today. In my case that meant having breakfast in the farm house and then going to the summer house with Mix for the morning. My programme was to prepare the music for Arrochar Church for Sunday and then to email it to Jamie. Then I settled down and completed the book I was reading. It is called ‘Rogue Nation’ and I enjoyed it very much. It was written back in 2009 and is based on the premise that Scotland voted for independence and what happened next. It is great fun and involves all kinds of subterfuge and skulduggery.
This morning we also had another power failure -- the only person it affected here was Olive who was marking examinations on-line. However, Digger fitted up a generator and soon she was back at work. Mum went off to her hairdresser (where there was power as usual).
I lunched in the summer house and found time to listen to the cricket – not the Test Match but Durham who are doing superbly against Sussex. Tomorrow we have one wicket to take and over 300 runs of a lead so it should be a straightforward exercise. England lost on the second last ball against Sri Lanka (just as Sri Lanka would have done last Test had there not been the review system in operation). And, unfortunately (because after England they were the team I was supporting) Italy has been eliminated from the World Cup.
In the afternoon I took Mix for a walk and then had a shower before an early meal in the farmhouse so that I could go off to the Presbytery meeting in Duns. I enjoyed the Presbytery, the main part of which was a report on the General Assembly given by six of the commissioners, each of them presenting one day of the programme. It took an hour in all but was well done.
Back home I watched the News on my computer and Newsnight on television. I suppose the big news of the day is that Rebecca Brooks has been found not guilty in the phone hacking trial and Andy Coulson has been found guilty. It raises questions for me. Rebecca Brooks has lost fully half a year of her life on trial and it must have cost a huge amount of money for her to defend herself. Increasingly it seems that celebrity defendants are being found not guilty. That being the case, it places an enormous pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service to get things right. It is quite something to subject an innocent person to such an ordeal and to turn their lives upside down to the extent that hers has been upended.
The other side of the coin, I suspect, is that many whose lives have been disrupted by the press will not be sorry to see a former editor of the News of the World (Andy Coulson) found guilty of serious wrong-doing. There has been disquiet for years about the way that journalists of some newspapers go about their business and this will be seen as a bit of come-uppance, I am sure. Be that as it may, it is still not pleasant to see anyone’s life come crashing down around them and I’m sorry for them and for their families. I’ve always been glad that Ministers of religion are excused jury duty – I wonder if that still holds good once one is retired?
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