I think I asked for the maximum deferral, a year (?) - and the deferred call came within a few weeks of the year being up.
It was a while ago now, memory starts to haze over!
The thing I found strangest was being in the jury room after the trial, with just the twelve of us. We had been given only the vaguest guidelines on what we had to do. We knew we had to appoint a foreman/woman, so we started with that. At the time, I was a volunteer Secretary with the playgroup, so I asked if anyone wanted to volunteer for the role (privately deciding that if only one came forward I'd volunteer myself so that there'd be competition and a chance for debate).
In fact three of the jurors put themselves forward, one of whom was a company director and trustee of a couple of charities, as we'd all discovered during our lunch break chats.
It was patently obvious he was the best person to chair our group, and we voted him in unanimously.
It had already become clear that most of us thought the accused was guilty, and our Foreman asked us all to do a preliminary 'Guilty, Not Guilty' vote - with reasons. However he made us all think harder by saying that he was going to vote 'not guilty' until we managed to convince him otherwise! This was really shrewd of him, and I admire what he did very much. It meant we didn't go into sheep-like herd mode, everyone had to come up with reasons why they thought as they did.
At one point we came up against a point of law, which we weren't sure about, so we asked the judge's advice, which came back very promptly and helpfully.
After three hours all told, we found accused guilty and went back to the courtroom to say so. It was very comforting in some ways to hear the Clerk of the Court read out the list of previous offences that man had been found guilty of (which of course we'd had no knowledge of), and we realised we'd sent down a person who'd had a never-ending string of guilty verdicts for violence and had been out on remand when he committed this one.