Jury service

Today we got a missive from the council about updating our bit of the Electoral Register. And it being my birthday today, I know that I am now 76 and perhaps exempt from jury service.

From my background in demography I am also familiar with the concept of a reference date when you ask people how old they are. We used to go to some trouble, for example, to convert age at death to age at the following mid year (June 30th), when population estimates were updated. Or age declared on a census form.

However, the present form said nothing about that, although the date on the letter is a few days before my birthday.

Google was surprisingly uphelpful about the matter. As were the various government web sites that I tried. And the one call centre I tried to phone was experiencing a high volume of calls and you may be waiting some time. Which I was not going to do.

But I had learned that jury service was quite hard work, requiring one, potentially, to put in eight hour days. And be in some Crown Court at an unpleasantly early time of day. And not to fall asleep - which might be construed as the serious offence of contempt of court - which has always seemed to me a bit unfair. It is not something one has control over - although I have read that the better judges keep an eye on the jury from this point of view and take a break when the nodding starts. In any event, I decided that I had done enough public service in my time and went for the opt out.

That is to say going to the website provided for the purpose of amending your entry, up to a point, anyway. But this did include jury service and hopefully I will never be asked and never have to engage with the clerical apparatus of the Justice department.

Oddly, neither BH nor I have ever been asked in the past.

PS 1: I suppose 'engage with the clerical apparatus of the Justice department' is a bit old-speak, this being prompted by an early morning engagement with the computer apparatus of the Highways department. This being prompted in turn by an earlier text message telling me that I had just paid a DART charge - all of £3.50 - when I have been nowhere near DART for ages. Specifically, according to my telephone, since September 2023, when the charge was a much more modest £2.50. Furthermore, when the brain came online, I realised that DART only knows about our old car. Is someone still driving it? Are bad people using the registration number to confuse pursuit by the forces of law and order? So I dug out my credentials and logged on. On the second attempt, I get to the right place and, without much fuss or bother, I am able to delete our old car and add our new car. So hopefully that is that and I can just write the £3.50 off. Not worth spending (now scarce) quality time on.

PS 2: government does not seem to be very confident in its computer systems, or take much pride in them, as they all seem to be described as 'BETA' these days, which in my day meant under construction and likely to be full of errors.

PS 3: a little later: I now have a flurry of emails from DART. They seemed to have twigged that something is not quite right.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Oates. He was away for some time too. Eton and cavalry.

Reference 2: https://pay-dartford-crossing-charge.service.gov.uk/landing.