This is not tonight’s diary entry. That is the one that you get to if you click on the date at the bottom on the left
This is Saturday night’s diary entry.
I have just discovered that this entry was written but somehow did not make it to the website. That would explain why people were telling me that they could not see Saturday night’s entry. I assured them that it was there, and that it was just a fault with the login.
I fibbed. I wrote it but somehow left it lying about on my computer.
I have just found it now. I am very sorry. To save this happening again, I have just been through the rest of the week’s untitled posts and written the day on them, to avoid me becoming any more confused.
Belatedly, here it is.
When you have read it, don’t hesitate to click on to last night’s as well.
I think that life has all spun a bit out of control, like the sort of washing machine that crashes about noisily and rattles its way across the kitchen, instead of sitting quietly purring to itself underneath the drainer.
Today, we needed to re-establish ourselves as the pilots of life’s aeroplane. It is better to be the pilot, soaring loftily through blue skies, than to be the people underneath running about frantically as it starts to billow out smoke and plummets towards them.
I know these are a mixed up combination of metaphor and simile and contrasting imagery, for the purists among you. This is because I wanted to create subconscious feelings of chaos and many different things happening at the same time.
Also I liked both images and couldn’t make my mind up which one to use.
Either way, I have been making a bit of a pig’s ear of sailing tranquilly through life’s challenging waters, and need to do something about it.
There, have some more.
Nobody gets chucked out of the prison service after three and a half days. The astonishing thing about it all, as Mark pointed out, philosophically, was that I was actually expecting it.
My lack of employability did not come as a surprise to me, nor, by the sound of things, to anybody else.
I am going to be unemployed for ever.
Apart from the taxi, obviously, but that is not really a job. Nobody ever says: “be in at nine o’ clock and make sure you have polished your boots.” I only turn up when I feel like it or have run out of money.
There is something to be said for that.
Certainly, sitting here on the taxi rank next to Windermere, writing to you and listening to the world wagging past me, there are worse things.
Everybody in the prison service had already decided that I was posh because I came from Windermere, and one staff member sighed, and said that he didn’t suppose I needed to work really. I denied this hotly, and explained how expensive school fees were, but he just rolled his eyes, it might have been the wrong thing to say to convince him that I was a fully qualified pauper in my own right.
Now that I am home, and unexpectedly free, we decided, over this morning’s coffee, that we would set our lives in order.
It is nice to have coffee together. I liked being in the camper van by myself as well, because I could have a second cup of coffee without needing to mess about filling the jug again, but it is reassuring to be with Mark.
I wanted to tidy up.
We had become very chaotic. The children had gone back to school and left things all over the place, and then I had gone off to HMP Slade and left things all over the place, and then I had come back from HMP Slade and left things all over the place, and all the time we were all gone Mark had been leaving things all over the place because that is what he does.
The house was a clutter of abandoned mobile phone chargers and prison boots and leftover nails from the shed roof and chewed bits of dog bone and fuel receipts and tubs of setting soap.
It would have been embarrassing if we had been expecting visitors, which fortunately we weren’t.
Today, we restored order.
We tidied and cleaned and swept.
I hung up my newly-washed prison uniform and wondered vaguely what I ought to do with it.
We cleaned the bathrooms and put fresh sheets on the beds.
I threw away the week’s accumulation of post. There was lots of it. There were catalogues and letters encouraging us to get our boiler serviced and letters from amazingly foolishly reckless people who have written to Number Two Daughter trying to encourage her to get a credit card.
Fortunately she knows herself too well.
I kept an eye open for cheques just in case, but there weren’t any.
We washed and hoovered and scrubbed, until our house started to feel friendly again.
The rest of our lives might be a bit uncontrollable, but all of our shoes are in neat rows in the cupboard.
