An at home day of the mundane. Doing chores and ticking them off the “to do list”. The highlight was having two letters in the post, a congratulations card from my son and his family alongside a long letter from an old colleague now in Scotland. So as the dishwasher washed and the tumble dryer dried I wrote a reply. I still use fountain pen and paper for this as opposed to speech recognition software as my colleague uses. I just spell things wrong and construct strange sentences due to my dyslexia, I am not sure how I would cope with a software programme that misinterpreted my words, as I probably would not notice. My colleagues system produced “curtains” for “Schroedinger”, which in the context of knowing whether the cat is dead or alive in Schrödinger’s thought experiment is fairly spooky. Is the software making a prediction about the state of the cat? I do not believe that Windows 10’s speech software is that sentient, if at all. Apart from the joy of receiving a letter and writing one it has been mundane to say the least, right up to making the turkey one pot for tea.

During all of this I played the Argentine Tango music that was played at my civil partnership celebration meal after the ceremony, except for the news. The news was worrying because the newly voted in government are now proposing to extend the power to police to extend pre-trial bail and remand allowing them to extend detention up to three months. The problem is who decides the risk. Of course the argument is that things like the recent stabbing that took place under the policies noses before they shot the offender would be less likely to occur if the police have more powers of detention in the first place. That coupled with the argument that people should not be released before the end of their sentence means greater powers to retain people in custody. I feel vaguely uncomfortable about all of this. I wonder what the safeguards are. I suspect that I am sensitised to the growth in powers to detain specific groups of people as I am currently reading what happens when governments extend these powers and where that can lead to. The issue is and always will be the assessment of risk. Who does it and on what basis risk is assessed is going to be an ongoing debate, or is it? Will those who do it now continue to or will there be some kind of inclusion of public anxieties steered and encouraged by the current crop of politicians? Well that perked up a dull day.