I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, although from reading the small amount I had read about him I expected a reasonable and certainly efficient person. The man I met was extremely pleasant - one of the nicest people I have encountered in many a long year. He is a man of my own generation, being a mere year younger than me and could therefore fully appreciate the fact that I have become a grumpy old man, albeit one with a sense of humour.
I think the best way to describe the day - he was here all of the afternoon too - would be to say that we spent as much time simply chatting in a social sort of way as we did discussing the matters in hand. I think we found ourselves in accord on so many areas of modern life, and while we were chatting he fitted in his questions unobtrusively and expertly and made his notes.
As he said himself, I may not like everything he has to say about me - nobody ever agrees with everything - but I do expect that his final report will be extremely beneficial, probably even more so than the report already produced by the Prison Service.
I left the visits area at the end of the afternoon's session feeling as though I had enjoyed a good day with good conversation. Of course, I was brought back to the mundane incompetence of prison life almost instantly because the visits people thought that I was still a Cat 'A' prisoner. I have been a Cat 'B' now for a year and that simply isn't enough time for the facts to filter down to all departments. They quite simply do not communicate with each other.
That fact became even clearer on arrival back on the wing because I was given two documents. One was a lot of rubbish to tell me that they want to assess me for a CALM course. The other was my latest OASYS documents in which they are still stuck in 2005 and don't even know that I have completed the assessments for everything and have no requirement for courses.
Oh dear, it's not at all easy dealing with intransigence like that.
The Voice In The Wilderness
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