Recorded account: G. Idris

— You want me to say what the reconciliation is for. I will say what it does, which is a different question and the one worth asking.

— It is very humane. Everyone is very humane. That is the part I would put a line under. I have watched this institution separate people while remaining perfectly polite throughout, and I want to be clear that the politeness is not decoration — it is the mechanism. Nobody has to say a hard sentence out loud, because the books say it for them.

— Here is mine. In 1993 I found my name in a Thursday ledger, at a house I will not embarrass, for an evening I did not attend. I was two hundred miles away and I can prove where I was, and I have never claimed anything more mysterious than that somebody wrote the wrong name down. It happens. Clerks are tired.

— What I objected to was what happened next. I asked for it to be struck out. They would not strike it out. They entered my objection beside the attendance, in the proper hand, with the date, and they were extremely kind about it, and both entries are still there.

— So the book now says I was present and says that I say I was not. They call that keeping the record honest. I call it a way of never being wrong: if you write down both, you have not made a mistake, you have made a holding.

— I am told the alternative is worse and I accept that the alternative is worse. That is not the same as this being right.

— And no, before you ask, I am not suggesting anything peculiar happened. I am suggesting somebody had a list and copied it badly, and that an institution which will not correct a list has decided that its books matter more than the people in them.

— Print all of that or none of it. I have no interest in being quoted warmly.