Pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours

Once again I have to report that there is nothing to report this week, although that isn't exactly correct - there ARE a couple of things, the only thing about them being that they all are really negatives, and who needs negatives?

No date from the parole board of course, that would be far too much to expect - after all, I am only five years over my sentence and that is nothing these days. What's five years? There was once a fellow who lived on top of a pillar for thirty years, so five years is a mere bagatelle! I wouldn't like to hang by my thumbs for five years. In fact, let's hang these date-givers by their thumbs for twenty minutes, see if they change their minds about five years being a mere bagatelle.

So, no date from the parole board yet. No sign of me being moved to greener pastures either. Then of course we've got the business of the OASys meeting that was due to take place on the 9th of this month - next week in fact.

I asked, "What's it for? I've had three of them in as many months, so what's this one for?"

"Er, um, er, um," was the answer. "We don't know."

So it has now been cancelled - there will be no meeting.

They don't know what they are doing that's the fact of the matter. The trouble is that none of the departments communicates with any of the others, they are all too busy protecting and defending their own little empires and vested interests. They are in competition with each other so nothing is coordinated and that's why nobody knows what anyone else is doing.

Who suffers? Who's in line for the blame? The prisoner of course, who else?

Those supposedly running these various departments are far too busy making sure that their own backs are protected from their own incompetence to actually do their jobs properly, and as for oversights or checks and balances, forget that.

To move on. It's getting colder. (No doubt the prisoner will get the blame for that as well.) The nights are getting chillier and I have even taken to actually using my duvet lately. I am reminded of the words of James Thomson, a Scottish poet who shuffled off this mortal coil on August 27th 1748. He wrote:

Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come.

And I couldn't agree with him more. Here I sit at night, in my cold cell, with socks on - and anyone who knows me will know that I don't like wearing socks. I like to wiggle my toes as I read or write - it is a sign of quiet enjoyment you see. So I sit here reading or writing or playing games on my playstation or thinking deep thoughts or, when all else fails me, watching the idiot box.

This brouqht me to yet another Scottish poet called James Thomson, but not the same one. This James Thomson died on June 3rd 1882. What he wrote was:

Give a man a pipe he can smoke,
Give a man a book he can read:
And his home is bright with a calm delight,
Though the room be poor indeed.

And that reminds me of something which Henry David Thoreau wrote on the same theme. He wrote:

Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.

Obviously Thoreau hadn't had to sit in a cold cell in the Lazy L and wait for the Parole Board to hand down a hearing date.

The Voice In The Wilderness