Peter Rhodes on juries, on tumbleweed and on holiday
The sky seems to have forgotten how to rain but the fates still have a sense of humour. As drought stalks our brown and parched land, Chancellor Rachel Reeves chooses this tumbleweed moment to unveil an £8 million programme to protect us from floods.
In all my worldly travels, I have only once seen anything resembling tumbleweed as it formed itself into windblown grassy globes, bounding along the street. In Wolverhampton, since you ask.
This will be the last column for a while as I'm on holiday in Beer, south Devon. Looks like a heatwave, according to all those sunny symbols scattered across the Met Office forecast like a plague of sunflowers.
Meanwhile, in the other world, the working world of pinstripe suits where nobody wears Crocs or starts the days with an all-day breakfast, a review headed by a judge recommends that some defendants should be offered the option of trial with or without a jury. Amen to that. Few things in this country make me as ashamed as our gridlocked justice system which can now take four or five years to bring serious cases to trial, causing enormous stress for all.
Some judges take the view that juryless trials would be “undeniably speedier". They are certainly worth a try in the few remaining years before artificial intelligence surely takes over the whole criminal justice process and courts are finally spared the embarrassment of hearing evidence from people pretending to remember things that happened half a decade ago.
Alas, I have broken the first rule of holiday reading by opening the book a week before leaving for Devon. It was such an inspiring and beautifully crafted little volume that I whizzed through it last week and now have nothing to read on the beach. I should have done what I did once before: pack something intense and challenging, a classic that you've somehow never found time for, and don't open it until you've fully unpacked at the seaside. Thus, a few years ago, I spent my Devon time devouring J D Salinger's bleak American classic, The Catcher in the Rye. I turned the last page feeling a much better and more learned person but within five minutes I couldn't remember a single damn word of it.
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