To labour and to wait

Yesterday, July 27th, I was called to the office and when I got there I was handed a letter which I had originally sent out to Andrew on 3rd July, twenty-four days earlier. I was informed that Security had stopped the letter from leaving the prison on the grounds that it named members of staff. All I had done was quote the Parole Board document - but it's all academic now because times have moved on considerably. At least the envelope came in useful to send out another letter to him, this time without making anyone nervous, hopefully.

In fact, yesterday was a bit of an interesting day, as days go in the Lazy L. Someone from the Tactical Management Team came to see me (they are the mob who deal with transfers) and it was a very pleasant and hopefully reliable young woman. I won't use her name for two reasons - the first being that this place would start to panic again and the second being that I don't know her name anyway. The outcome of our little chat was that there was no question of me being sent anywhere other than to an open prison - which one is the only question.

She went off about her business promising to send my details to every open prison in the country, although I have no idea how many there are - as I said to her, this is all new territory to me. So, my details are going out to every open jail, and she also said that North Sea Camp had requested my medical details so they must be considering taking me already. I also sent the Governor of North Sea Camp my CV yesterday and asked him to accept me, so that can only help.

What it all boils down to is that I will stay here until I find a place to accept me, it's as simple as that. But I have to be where I am going by September because that is when my intervention time is supposed to commence, on the instructions of the Secretary of State for Justice. I am due twenty-six weeks of interventions and I think that is me and The Wallace sorting out details of my resettlement into the community, that type of thing. Then in April of next year there are another twenty-six weeks for parole reports to be written by North Sea Camp (or wherever I happen to go to) ready for the Oral Parole Hearing scheduled for September 2012. That's only fourteen months away and, provided that nothing goes drastically wrong, it will, in effect, be my release hearing.

Let me put it this way - this Christmas should be my last in jail, and even this one could be spent on home leave.

There's a lot to be done between now and then, of course, and it all starts with this place getting mobile and getting me moved to an open prison. I keep coming back to North Sea Camp, not because of any particular reason other than it is the one which The Wallace thinks is ideal for me and I don't know any others. I don't even know where North Sea Camp is beyond the fact that it is on the Lincolnshire coast near Boston and is partly to do with land reclaimed from The Wash.

Ha! I've got this mental vision of them dragging a lump of land out of a washing machine, drying it off and saying, "That's not a bad bit of land - we'll build a jail on that."

So, that's the position - once again a case of hurry up and wait. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.

Old Harry certainly knew what he was talking about all right - he must have spent time at the Lazy L.

The Voice In The Wilderness