Well, hello secret emailers,

I am sitting in my house looking out over the suburban idyll of Walton on Thames surrounded by scattered paperwork, bank statements and receipts. I am meant to be do something with all those things but, as the undisputed King of Procrastination, I have found something better to do, which is update you all on the latest with the Post Office Trial.

First off – hello and welcome to all the new secret emailers who have joined in the last week – it has been fun data-inputting so many email addresses to the subscriber base. Well – not fun, but satisfying. We have a proper army of readers now and I remain enormously grateful to everyone for their donations, big and small. Your money is the reason postofficetrial.com exists and I am so grateful you have given me the resources to report this story.

It has certainly been an interesting week. The newspapers picked up on the Court of Appeal decision against the Post Office on Friday 22 November, which Computer Weekly, the Law Gazette and Post Office Trial reported on the same day.

On Saturday 23 November the Mirror ran an “exclusive” report on the story.

On Tuesday 26 November, the mighty Convenience Shopper covered the decision.

Then the Shropshire Star, which has been diligently following Tracy Felstead’s story, wrote its report on Thursday.

Yesterday, on 30 November, the i newspaper ran a superb double page spread.

And whilst at work on Friday, just before it all kicked off and I had to hare it down to London Bridge, I had chat with a very nice man, Jon Ungoed-Thomas, from the Sunday Times, who said he would be doing something on the story today, which he has.

I am delighted. Post Office Trial was always designed as a crowd-funded resource, and whilst I am sure the hacks who are now interested in this story are building their contacts and doing a lot of their own research, all the ones I have spoken to have been very complimentary about the blog and the content on it. To repeat – without your donations, Post Office Trial would not exist, so thank you – you are helping ensure important information gets into the public domain.

Mediation. Ooh… Mediation

Every time I see that word I get Roy Castle in my head singing the theme tune to Record Breakers with the word “Dedication” replaced by “Mediation”. Now you can too. You’re welcome.

The Subpostmasters and the Post Office went into mediation talks on Wednesday and Thursday this week. It is a highly confidential process. If either party leaked anything about what happened, the whole process could collapse. I can confirm it happened. Beyond that I have no idea what was said or what went on. I called a source close to the process on Friday to find out what I could find out. Unusually, his phone went to voicemail. He texted back saying there was nothing he could tell me at this stage.

I suspect it won’t be long before we find out if mediation talks are going to continue or not, but until that process comes to an end we are unlikely to know much more.

Lost Horizon judgments

Although the Horizon trial judgment failed to make an appearance in November, it has to come soon.

The managing judge, Sir Peter Fraser, once suggested it might be in the hands of the parties in October. He last intimated it would likely be with the parties in early November.

Before the summer, when the route towards the third trial was being plotted, his Lordship said the parties would definitely have his Horizon judgment by the Case Management Conference on 4 Dec. That’s in three days. So we’ll see.

Finally, I have changed the sender of this email from “Nick Wallis” to “Post Office Trial”. I just thought it would be easier for you to spot and a better bit of branding. You can still hit reply to this email and it will still go straight to my personal inbox. It’s taken a long while but if you now search “Post Office Trial” on google, the top two results will take you to the website – again an indication that more people are reading it and linking to it.

I am indebted to the army of subscribers who either send me the links to all the articles about this story or tweet them up using the hashtag #postofficetrial. Without your input I wouldn’t spot half of them, so thank you. Please do keep sending me anything interesting you have to say about the ongoing litigation or the wider story in general. I am sorry if I don’t have time to respond, but believe me I do open and read every email.

I hope you have an enjoyable Sunday, and thanks for reading!

Nick