On Saturday I had the immense good fortune to attend the opening night of Salisbury Playhouse’s own production of Breaking the Code about the mathematical genius Alan Turing. Turing played a pivotal role in wartime code breaking at Bletchley Park, developing what was eventually to become the forerunner of the computer and set the theoretical framework for computer science and artificial intelligence. It is claimed that his work shortened the second world war by up to two years and saved millions of lives.

The play contrasts this unrivalled act of service to the nation which, due to its secrecy went unrecognised for so many years with the indignity, shame and humiliation he suffered when he was prosecuted in 1952 for ‘gross indecency’ which in those not so distant days was the legal consequence of a consenting homosexual relationship. In order to avoid prison, he agreed to a rather dubious hormonal ‘cure’. He committed suicide in 1954 and was eventually posthumously pardoned by the Queen in 2013.

The play is entertaining, engrossing and moving. A credit to the theatre; if you only see one thing there this year, it should be this. It gave me much to think about and left me with one rather uneasy feeling. The injustice meted out to Turing was appalling, made all the more shocking through its contrast to his wartime service. The policeman in the play made the point that in prosecuting Turing, he was only doing his job; there was no public outcry at the time; Turing’s prosecution was one of many.

My unease is this: what do we take for granted today and consider normal and self-evident for which subsequent generations will hold us to account? At one time it was a heresy punishable by death to claim that the earth went round the sun; the slave trade, responsible for the deaths of as many people as the holocaust was defended by politicians and religious leaders as the natural order; children died in pits and chimneys; animals were tortured in the name of science – to pick a few from the past.

Future generations will surely hold us culpable for endangering and impoverishing their future by our callous disregard for the environment and wanton destruction caused by fossil fuels. ‘You mean you actually took a plane trip to another country just for a couple of weeks in the sun when you knew that by doing so you were destroying the planet….’

It was heartening to hear that the Scottish parliament has taken a UK lead to make corporal punishment illegal. We are on the cusp of this change. The news was punctuated by parents claiming that smacking never did them any harm and that it was their parental right to assault children. But history is against them.

But what about the things we just can’t see…