March winds

Today it is March 1st, although that won't be the case by the time anyone reads this, so let's just say instead that it is March. March, when, according to legend, the winds blow strongly and, if you are silly enough to listen to the weather forecasters, we are due to have a mild one after our severe ten day winter.

March is turning into a month of significance in my life. On 9th March I will have been in durance vile for exactly 23 years, and that's a long time. I know I say that a good deal, but that doesn't alter the fact - it IS a long time.

Then, on 12th March, I have the Parole Board hearing here in the prison. No doubt I will be subject to a lot of questions and this is despite the fact that there is ahsolutely NO chance that they will even consider allowing me any sort of progression. That simply is not going to happen. They know it, I know it and even the pigeons in Trafalgar Square know it - or they would if they cared at all (and they don't).

I will appear before the Board with my barrister doing his very best to fight a losing battle, and at the end of it he will be reduced to serving me with a few platitudes to try to keep HIS spirits up - mine joined the submarine service years ago. I will have spent a considerable time answering questions, a lot of which will be quite unanswerable really. They will harp on about the past, not the future. Of course I will jerrymander and they will see it as a sign that I am being secretive.

Of course I'm being secretive, I have no choice in the matter. Although I am fully entitled to discuss myself and my own deeds, I have no right whatsoever to discuss the deeds of others, and that effectively means that I have to seem to be shifty, or worse. It is not so much a case of being unable to answer through lack of ability, more a case of protecting the guilty, because this country, in its wisdom, has no statute of limitations and never forgives anyone anything. Like Shylock, they WILL have their pound of flesh.

I think it was Charles Colton who said:

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

The Board will harp on about the past and nothing can he done about that. It is done, over. All we can do is regret it, we cannot change it. Not even God can change the past. All we humans can do is work for the future and ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of tne past.

Then, when the ordeal is over and they, the panel members, go off to their ivory towers, I shall return to my humble abode, courtesy of Lizzie Windsor, and contemplate the matter.

Does it end there? Not likely, because twelve days later I have my Judicial Review in the High Court.

So, March is turning into a milestone month for me, one way or another.

In all of this I will be condemned for the indiscretions and poor choices I made as a callow youth, in "My salad days, when I was green in judgement."

This brings me to another snippet of borrowed wisdom. This time I take it from George Bernard Shaw who died in 1950. He said:

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself anything, is forgiven nothing.

"Besides," he added, "every man over forty is a scoundrel."

The Voice In The Wilderness