Language can be used for love or hate. The choice is ours

THERE I was last week in Court 5, the traffic offences boutique, clutching my receipt, ready to prove I’d sent €500 to a charity of the judge’s choice after my last visit to his emporium.

Before you think I mowed down an eighty year old grandmother of ten on a pedestrian crossing, I plead innocence. And absence. I was out of the country when my car did the bad thing it was filmed doing. I ended up in court, not for reckless endangerment of road-users, but for reckless endangerment of the bureaucracy. I forgot to respond to the garda notice, which included a blurry picture like a pre-natal scan of my car doing the bad thing.

Nonetheless, I had ended up – earlier in the year — in front of a judge, who told me to put €500 in the poor box for a nominated charity. I thought I should have been allowed to select my own charity, but I wasn’t going to give His Honour an argument. I just wanted to locate the poor box and see if it took credit cards and how would it handle an offender who didn’t know their own PIN number.