Knight thoughts.

My friends Glenn and Anne-Marie had taken me for a lovely meal at the pub by the harbour. We must've spent nigh on four hours eating, drinking and telling stories.

Then we called in to my place for a nightcap (which left little in the bottle), and some more anecdotes. I normally drink a glass of red with my evening meal, which is why I use a wine box.

But for my friends, I keep my best wines, which arrive around Christmas time.

Every year Colin sends me six bottles of wine, and they never disappoint. I would like to be able to afford it, but my budget won't stretch that far.

I selected a bottle of Cabalie - a Catalan red made in traditional methods. It was extraordinarily good. By the time I retired the bottle was empty.

The wine must've helped me sleep, because when I woke it was 5 am. The street light had come back on, turning my ceiling into an imitation of the morning sun.

Unusually, I'd awoken from a dream in which I met a character from a previous dream.

We greeted each other like old friends.

This time, he was working on a boat, a pale green painted wooden ketch, from which he was unloading bundles of green reeds.

His black hair had grown a little, and so had his shaggy beard. But he was still wearing his dark blue hand knitted fisherman's sweater.

He told me about his new venture, cutting reeds for thatched roofs, and I wished him all the best of luck.

He asked me what I was up to, and I said I was trying to fathom out what it was that made a lawyer enthusiastically defend a guilty criminal.

Did they enjoy the challenge, was it proving that their intellect and rhetoric was superior to the defence lawyer?

One of my neighbours gave up being barrister to become a surgeon, because he wanted to do good.

At 7:15  I had woken from my second sleep, so I made a cup of chamomile tea and listened to another couple of episodes of 'Ransom man' - about a Finnish hacker.

We all have thoughts that we would never write down. Think for a moment what it would be like if someone threatened to publish all your thoughts and fears on the Internet.

This is what happened when all the data from an online psychotherapy service was hacked, and the ransom was not paid by the Finnish authorities.

In the last episode, the hacker was asked if he felt anything for the people whose lives he had ruined.

He said something like:

they mean no more to me than characters in a book.

I'm sure that we've all, at sometime or other, wished somebody dead. Thought about how the world, or at least we, would be better off without them.

My father was not one to offer gratuitous advice, and rarely chastised me, however, one thing I remember him telling me was - never say anything you would not want to see printed on the front page of The Times.

I guess it's stuck with me, and it helped me to monitor my thoughts and speech, which inadvertently led to me having few regrets.

Many of us have our lives online, carefully curated I am sure, we are all in our glass houses, and should take care not to throw stones.