The Snow Turns To Ice

Our street gets very little sun, and the snow is still with us, now refined into hard, slippery ice. Last night, around midnight, we listened for 15 minutes or more as a guy tried to free his car from the parking place it had been frozen into.

A lot of the neighbours have fairy lights in their windows for the Prophet's birthday. There's one window that's all blue, another that's all green.

Nakisha came round again last night because her parents had gone missing and weren't answering their phones and she was feeling panicky alone in the house. We managed to locate her mother. She'd dropped her telephone in a shop, then put the battery back in the wrong way. An uncle is dying, the family is gathering round and Sam had been out, later than usual, running errands for the sister who is feeding them all.

Alan Turing

Quite right too.

Retrospective pardons should only be issued where there has been a miscarriage of justice- where new evidence proves that a person was innocent of the crime for which they were convicted. This isn't the case with Turing. As the law stood then he was guilty as charged. As the law stands now there is nothing to pardon. How can the Law pardon a person for doing something that is no longer a crime? By changing the law we have already exonerated him- just as we have exonerated all the witches we hung and all the kids we transported for stealing loaves of bread. 

Turing's conviction is an historical fact. Nothing we do now can change what happened. It cannot make Turing any less of a victim or the Law that pursued him any less cruel.  If the people who harrassed him were to say they were sorry it might mean something, but they're all as dead as he is. A very bad thing was done to a man who was both a scientific genius and a hero of the Second World War. We should have been feteing him; instead we drove him to an early grave. It's a blot on our history- and we're going to have to live with it.