Previously: Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4, Pt 5.

It’s an epic yarn, and there is still so much untold around this story, but I need to try and wrap it up it before the anger and resentment bubbles up and the story just descends into a shouty rant. And it wouldn’t be much of a tale unless I can somehow polish it off with a happy ending.

The ending is a happy one because I am still here, writing these words with the experience all behind me. And it could have been a lot worse; I could be protesting my innocence from a jail cell, like so many others have. Sussex Police have a pretty poor record. They were, famously, the force responsible for the wrongful conviction of Sion Jenkins, who spent 8 years in jail as an innocent man, accused of murdering his step-daughter Billie-Jo Jenkins, a case which still remains unsolved. His story should make anyone count their blessings. Sussex Police officers also shot dead a naked man in his bed in 1998. Another guy whose innocence (for he was innocent) was ultimately irrelevant.

According to the league tables, Sussex Police can boast a staggering 643 complaints per 1000 officers (source) which, along with their 23% detection rate, makes them one of the worst performing police forces in the UK. Whether there is comfort or despair in the fact I am likely not the only one to have suffered at their hands I don’t know, but at least one can say they are consistent.

But I want to try and find some positives in my experience. Clearly, it has changed me, and changed my philosophy on life, which is what I intended to write about in this post. But I have realised that this part of the tale is already well told. Last year I wrote a post about Paul Auster, where I touched upon the motivations behind the writing of this blog (every blogger is allowed at least one of these posts in their lifetime). It seemed strange to me that I had so easily overcome an extreme introversion to suddenly want to thrust my writing into the public sphere. This was my conclusion:

I think what I am doing with a blog is objectifying my thoughts, experimenting with a new way of looking at myself, asking what I might learn if I were to see myself as “a stranger”, or an “imaginary being”. You see, over the last two years I have been living through a very strange situation, one that has completely changed my outlook on life. It has forced me to examine myself in greater detail than I ever have before, re-evaluate my moral standpoint and made me question myself and my place in society. I’m not talking about fatherhood this time; it’s something I haven’t blogged about yet, as it’s all a bit close to home at the moment. But I’m sure I will soon, as I seem to have no issue with laying myself out on the slab these days.

With hindsight, it seems perfectly natural that being placed under such scrutiny, and having my privacy taken from me, may give context to a lot of what I have written in these pages. And that, perhaps, this whole blog has actually only had one subject all along.

Is it at all surprising that I should have written at length upon the subject of Universal Automatism, an entirely fatalistic philosophy of a perfectly deterministic universe, during a period when I felt I had little control over my future? And was being under such pressure for a prolonged period what lead me to the point where I could even propose a scientific argument for the impossibility of free-will? My musings upon the stupidity of society, the craziness of UK Drug Laws, the easily misinterpreted messages left in our data trails, how one’s image can be abused in the wrong hands, as well as the sheer existential pain of over-thinking everything, might make more sense knowing they were written while a team of detectives had my life under the microscope, with gigabytes of my private data being scrutinised by strange eyes. The paeans to my firstborn are probably quite typical of new fathers, but perhaps made more pertinent having the threat of losing access to my new family hovering over me.

You see, this is what I have concluded: the way I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb was by exorcising it, by writing shite like this. Diffusing the pressure with a problem shared, even if I wasn’t allowed to be specific as to the real matter on my mind.

Which leaves one question.

Everything is back to normal; I no longer have the threat of my life being blown apart. The fear that put my life into focus these last few years, that gave me this clarity of thought, that I had to work so hard to build into my life, is now gone. My business is booming, and I’ve got a stack of new ideas brewing. I’ve a family to take care of, with my second child on the way, which is going to bring with it a whole new set of challenges to be overcome. I have a very full dance card for the next few months.

My question is, have I got anything left to write about now?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 8:13 pm and is filed under criminal justice, introspection, philosophy, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.