Surely there can be few things more awful than to be accused of a crime one did not commit. And perhaps then to be found guilty of that crime and pay for it in prison. If one is lucky then there could be the possibility that one might eventually be exonerated…years later and after enormous legal costs.

The on-going British Post Office scandal, in which hundreds of postmasters and postmistresses were found guilty of embezzlement of funds but were, in fact, victims of a faulty IT system, is perhaps the biggest example of a miscarriage of justice that has ever occurred in Britain. It has deeply affected me, especially when I heard the interviews with some of the victims. The recent TV drama ‘Mr Bates v the Post Office’ has brought the whole sorry saga to the public eye and the return of the CBE award given to services rendered by the then chief of the Post Office has revealed further chapters in this shameful story.

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Quite apart from the colossal unfairness of what happened to so many employees of a much-loved British institution (and one which was the first of its type in the world founded with the Penny Post under Sir Roland Hill in 1840) there remains the fact that very few of these employees have been correctly compensated or had their criminal accusations rescinded. Perhaps as a reminder that the current UK government may still have something of a conscience left the PM has promised to cancel all charges against the victimised employees. An example of an executive decision going against a legal one? Who knows.

My sympathy, indeed my empathy, for the Post office workers is greatly increased by the fact that I too was accused of a crime which I did not commit. It was in 2013 that I received a notice that I was to get myself a lawyer and attend the local courts for trial because I had been accused of theft. I had been accused by a neighbour and the theft was of a window-blind. The neighbour was an English policeman who owned the house opposite me and who came there for two or three weeks annually for a summer holiday. Very rarely the house was let other holiday-makers. The item purportedly stolen by me, a window blind, was damaged and left lying on the road between my and his house. It had been lying there for several weeks and I wondered why the policeman had not placed it in one of his cellars in preparation for its repair.

I could not believe what I had been accused of. However, I thought to myself the policeman must have some good reason for the accusation. Was it a case of mistaken identity? If so why did he not quiz me about the stolen article? Why go straight to the carabinieri and make a denuncia?

One of the worse things about being falsely accused of a crime is that one may start by believing that one really did commit it after all. I began to think that in a moment when my mind might have blanked out I did pick up the broken blind from the road and brought it back home. I even started to look around my house to see whether the object had been placed there. Was it perhaps in the cellar or behind a cupboard? Was I going mad? Could I really have erased the supposed theft from my mind? I was told the accuser had requested a search warrant for my house. I had never been issued such a warrant. The thought of policemen sifting through my belongings and turning them upside down was abhorrent and such an infringement to my privacy.

Could all this be true? I pinched myself. The situation seemed absurd. A British police officer on holiday for a few weeks each year turning against a local resident and teacher of English in local schools in this way? How could the Italian public prosecutor have upheld his denuncia? How could the legal system have believed that the theft of a broken window blind left on a public road for over a month constituted a crime? Was it all because this holidaymaker was a UK policeman? In fact a detective inspector? What was I to believe? My life had turned into a Kafkaesque scenario where no questions were answerable, where the world operated to a different logic.. Who was madder? Me or my accuser?

But worse was to follow. Like the nightmare accusations of the post office workers my own story had just begun.