Chocolate Old Fashioned?

I am usually an Islay malts man, which is a long way from bourbon, but Woodford Reserve with chocolate, chocolate bitters, and a chocolate straw intrigued me, and it did not disappoint. A half bottle of good Malbec then washed down a confit duck leg cassoulet with smoked bacon, butterbeans, tomato, Tempranillo, thyme, rosemary, and a herb crumb. But after that, it was time for a double espresso rather than for a red cherry whiskey sour, since I needed to go back to Durham Crown Court to answer a single charge of having published six blogposts, of which two did not exist, two did not say anything like what was alleged, and two had nothing to do with anything remotely pertinent.

Around three o'clock, we were finally sent home, as the Prosecution's star witness had not only failed to turn up, but had proved impossible to contact all day. He had been suspended from the Police, but like the judge, I could not see how that precluded his appearance as a witness in a criminal trial. It was not even as if he needed to ask for time off work. Still, home we all went. No more restaurant views of the Cathedral for me until after the bus strike, I expect.

It took the Police two months to arrest me, but to this day no Police Officer has ever set eyes on any of those posts, since I was arrested and charged on simple trust in the word of the complainant, a former Police Officer who claimed to have been shown them by person or persons unknown, and on whose credibility alone depend all of my previous convictions, among much else. At the time of writing, that is the Prosecution's own position, also in writing.

This, this, this and this still apply. In 2021, I did enter guilty pleas, on advice that I should have ignored. It is the biggest regret of my life. I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged. Who says otherwise? Tell me a name.

In 2020, there were no fingerprints. They could not produce the envelope. They said that they had lost it. They were allowed to present some sort of reconstruction, featuring reconstructed prints that may or may not have been mine or any of millions of other people's, if they had been originals, which they were not. This site has linked to Matthew Franklin Cooper's longer than any other has, and he would make a very good fit for my thinktank, for my weekly magazine, for my monthly cultural review, and for my quarterly academic journal.

But all of that was barely part of the Crown Prosecution Service's case. It had told my brief that it was going to drop the whole thing on the first day, but instead it introduced the propensity evidence on which alone I was convicted by a jury that had been explicitly directed to "disregard" the concept of conviction beyond reasonable doubt. That direction made it into Peter Hitchens's column, and while I ought not to discuss private correspondence, he told me that he had heard of two such cases that week. I do wonder whose the other one was.

Thus, the State made itself dependent on the credibility of my latest accuser, whom the Police take so seriously that it took them two months to arrest me, and whom the CPS takes so seriously that it requested in open court, to my solicitor's delighted amazement, that I be put on unconditional bail. I remain on unconditional bail.