Thursday

Dear all my readers,

Hello.

I am including you in the hello even if you are somebody wicked who has hacked into this account.

If I have not included you on my list of approved readers then you are very naughty. This is a private website and you are not invited. Go away and do not read any more.

Dear the rest of you.

I have had the most astonishing of days.

As you all know, since you are approved readers, over the last few days I have changed this website from a public one to a private one. Only people I know are able to read it. One of my friends, who deserves all of our grateful appreciation, has gone through it all and sealed it so that it is personal and private to us. I can write to you, and you can read it, and anybody else is cast out into the outer darkness and can get lost.

There were about a thousand people who read this, on and off, over the last few years, and it has been hard to filter through who is a genuine reader and friend, and who is not. With some regret, I decided I would limit this to actual friends only, and nobody else.

Several people have asked to be allowed on to the site who I have not recognised. I have emailed them all, in case they were an acquaintance I ought to know about, and asked for a bit more information, but none of them have responded.

I felt very uneasy about this.

At lunchtime I checked the Diaries website and made absolutely sure that it was a private site, open to all of us and nobody else.

When I came back after lunch I was summoned to the Deputy Governor’s office.

The union representative was there as well.

I was told that I was being suspended from HMP Slade for a month whilst they investigated my diaries. They are worried that I might be a security risk or that I will bring the prison service into disrepute.

This is all very well, except I don’t think that they have actually read them.

I do not know how they will investigate, because it is all private now. Nobody who is not a rascally hacker can get into them, and indeed several people who have got proper passwords are finding it difficult, including me this morning.

At first I thought that somebody must have cleverly hacked into the site and read the diaries, because I could not imagine that they would send me home just because I am a person with a website,  but my security-minded friend looked, and said that they had not.

The Union representative suggested that the Prison Service could not reasonably object to me writing anything until they had actually read it.

I wondered if they might ask to read what I have written, but they did not. The Union man said that I ought not to give it to them anyway. If you can’t find something no matter how hard you try then it is not really public.

I have been sent home.

Apart from the astonishment of this, I will probably manage to live with it. I have not been a prison officer for my entire life, and am sanguine about not being one for a bit longer, especially since it appears that I am still being paid to be one whilst they think about it.

Number Two Daughter, you were almost right, I lasted three and a half days. For those of you who bet on two, you were close.

The Union representative said that I should not worry about it, so I won’t.

I went home, where Mark poured some wine, and supportively laughed and marvelled at the whole thing.

You couldn’t make it up.

And I didn’t.