My fortnight spent an unpleasant world.

Dear Reader.


Sorry, I've been away for about a two weeks now but now everything should be all back to normal. I've been on jury duty and since I'm not allowed to talk about the trial/trials I was on (good god I'm even editing about that) I'd spend too much time working out what, of my six hours a day I spent at court, I was allowed to talk about. There are some things I can tell you though.


The first is this. It's tedious. Almost by definition. Jury duty is a large room of people desperately trying not to talk about the most interesting thing they've heard that week.


The second is that its incredibly unpleasant. You enter an unpleasant world where people do things so terrible that if someone is found guilty of committing them then society chooses to remove their most basic human rights. You would almost hope that the things that they did were things you wouldn't want to hear about.


The third is that people lie. its a world where one party says that things happened one way and another party says that it happened another way and only one party can be found right therefore if one is right then the other isn't and is lying and if you pick the wrong one then you've done something terrible.
If the person is guilty and they go free then a horrible human being has gone unpunished and is potentially free to carry on committing their crimes until they are caught again. If they are innocent and they are imprisoned then a, if not "good" then at least normal human has been unjustly punished for no good reason. Both are terrible and every person in that court room and in that jury are, to a certain extent guilty of something, but they will never know if they were right or wrong. And they shouldn't. All they can say is that they tried.


The fourth is this. I don't ever want to talk about it. If you ask me I'll say I can't tell you and if I could I wouldn't. it is not something you brag about, nor is it something you think "oh good this'll make a good story one day" before you even suggest that.


The fifth is something I'd imagine you can already guess. I don't want to do jury duty ever again. I didn't enjoy it, it isn't fun in any way, in fact it's the opposite of fun, its incredibly serious. However I do think it was important that I did do it, I don't regret it, it taught me allot about the way things worked.


I didn't need to go on jury duty to be able to tell you these things if you'd thought about it long enough you'd be able to work it all out for yourself but this is all I'm going to say about it.