Trying hard not to think of your Christmas and New Year

Christmas and New Year and outside you remember the festivities, the kids singing carols and the decorations, and I think of the time we went off to the ballet - an old married couple, I thought, as we sat there holding hands and remembering not to clap till everyone else does. And friends round for meals and happy get-togethers of the family. Me as Santa with cotton wool stuck over the top of my beard.

I loved all that and I miss it terribly and I don't let myself think of it.

What I am thinking of is getting a move to a different nick. I've been here so long and I have a new gentler category and I should be in a place where there aren't new people arriving and making everything, well, unbearable.

I don't want to sound like an old grouch - I'm not really one - but when you get new people around whining about how bad they've had it, and they'd not even had a year of it, let alone been unjustly convicted.

So I keep waiting for replies from Shepton Mallet and Newcastle. I had my heart set on Maidstone. Sounds strange, doesn't it, to think a geeza could have his heart set on a prison.

But Maidstone would've been handy for everyone and people say it's got a positive attitude there. I was getting such good noises from that particular one that it seemed certain they would take me.

But wasn't it Tchaikovsky - whose music we enjoyed at the ballet, me and Anita that time - who said that Fate keeps getting in the way of what we want. And Maidstone turned out like that. After expressing an interest, after encouraging me, they suddenly declared, 'Oh, but we don't take lifers.'

I wanted to reply, 'But what about innocent, unjustly convicted lifers who are cast into prison while my wife's killer is out there enjoying everything I am denied?'

Then I tell myself off for the negative thinking. Got to be brave, Self. Got to make the most of our time in the world, Me, even if we are in prison.
- Roger Gordon

Links:
Tchaikovsky
Shepton Mallet
Newcastle