In the BBC show which I finished listening to this morning, one of the first people that was in touch with Nick Wallace, the reporter, sounded to be of Indian extraction. I think her background played a part in her naivete that the system would initially be beneficent, then that the system would discover the truth, when in reality the system put her in stir. She was pregnant and innocent.

I was very disappointed in the denoument, in that the Post Office was not really severely fined, the hundreds of cases where people were found guilty were not delineated and dismissed, though this was on the horizon, and as far as I could tell the miscreants and liars behind the depositions of the Post Office didn't get hauled over the coals.

It made me think about the great differences between America and Gt. Britain. I can't speak for the actual lay of things, but the English seem to think they live in a land of whales and mice, Americans think they live in a land of bears and wolverines. In the former, the little guy barely has a chance and is lucky to get out alive, in the latter the wolverine is a lot smaller, but figures with teeth and gristle he can brazen it out. It may have ramifications with our respective attitudes about firearms as well.

I also believe that Americans of the U.S. persuasion don't understand that the English Post Office is not like the United States version. The PO in England and other Commonwealth countries was historically kind of an amalgam of IBM, the Bank of America, with government connections. It is not only huge, everpresent, but is in the imagination omnipotent and incorruptible. It was almost a manifestation of the Almighty. I don't think that is as true today as it used to be forty years ago, but it's still a major institution.