Don't get me wrong. I am not averse to bad weather at all - I quite like a bit of cold, it reminds me that I am still alive and that my circulation is still working. But I don't like rain. It leaves a feller pissed wet through, uncomfortable and feeling that the best place for rain is on postcards. However, if this was Ethiopia then a person would pray for the very thing I am slagging off.
The alpacas and pygmy goats are doing well, or at least they are still alive - which is more than the idiot trying to annoy me will be if he doesn't bugger off and get a job. (I shouldn't say such things - it's bad for my sentence planning.)
No further news about the parole hearing as yet but, like everything else in the prison system, it's only a matter of time.
Next weekend I am off out for the day, but there is nothing of any consequence planned beyond getting a decent lunch and buying myself a suitcase in preparation for going off to that den of sin and iniquity which is the hostel.
So, here I am, December 30th, just one more day to the start of yet another year in durance-vile, as the poets would say - but this one will be the last one. I often had my doubts that such a day would ever arrive, but it has. You can break the clock but you cannot stop the time.
2013... It all started in 1986, and that's a long time in anyone's calendar. Am I resentful about it all? Of course I am - time can't be recovered, it's the one thing we cannot avoid, the passage of time. Ever since the very first creatures crawled out of the primordial swamp and developed the ability to think, they have tried to find ways to stop the time, to retain the elusivenes of youth, but so far everyone has failed. We see it all the time - creams, unguents, draughts of the elixir of life and all the rest of it. None of it has done a blind bit of good because sooner or later along comes the Grim Reaper with his weapon of mass descruction and, before we know where we are, we are paying Charon for the ride across the river - and let·me tell you now, he doesn't accept bus passes. Still, that's a long way off. 1've got no plans in that direction, not for thirty years or more yet.
2013... A new year and a new start for all of us and, although I am fully aware of the fact that my time in prison is all but over, there are an awful lot of people I will be leaving behind me when I go - as I have seen many others go, of course, over the years. There are so many good fellows in jail - the Ordinary Decent Criminals or ODCs (as opposed to the Fiddling Fraternity). I am certain that many folk will recoil at me using such a term, understandably, but there really are a lot of decent fellows in jail - Ordinary, Decent, Criminals. Some have enormous numbers of years ahead of them. It will be a long time before they find themselves in the same position I am in now, but they will, they will. There are some, of course, who even I wou1dn't let out under any circumstances, but let's not go down that particular road, not just now.
What I really want to do, I suppose, is wish everyone who reads me a very prosperous and happy New Year, and I mean that sincerely, not just words that we all say by rote, I really mean it.
So, let's see how next year turns out. This one didn't tun out too bad at all really. Happy New Year.
The Voice In The Wilderness
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