Flapping

When I get out of bed tomorrow morning I will not get back in it again for a whole week. 

By the next time I collapse between our sheets, my world will have changed. I will not be merely a taxi driver with an attitude problem. I will be a trainee prison officer. I will have a Ministry Of Justice email address, a payroll number, and some boots.

I hope they are comfortable. I am worrying about the boots. I have got some sheepskin insoles but they will only be any good if the boots are big enough. My feet have become disproportionately lumpy as I have become old, and I am concerned about the well being of the knobbliest bits. Blisters can spoil the loveliest day. 

I have had some spare moments in between customers this evening, and have occupied them researching the prison governor on Google. 

I did not find very much. It looks rather as though he did not exist before he was a prison governor, perhaps the sort of person whom the Home Office keeps in a cupboard until their time arrives, and is then wheeled out to run a prison, whilst at the same time giving incomprehensible, non-committal quotes to newspapers. 

I am absolutely no wiser as to what sort of a person he might be, not that I suppose it matters. He seems to have had no say whatsoever in my employment so far. It looks as though he just requests more staff and the Home Office just send him a job lot of whatever they happen to have kicking about in boxes in the store room. He obviously doesn’t get to say: “I could do with three or four big rough blokes for bad days, and a couple of quiet girlies to read bedtime stories to the new arrivals who are missing their mummies.”

Indeed, if the newspaper articles are anything to go by, it seems that prison governors tell the Home Office that they need more staff, and the Home Office laughs mirthlessly and tells them they will have to make do with more prisoners instead. 

I will probably never meet him anyway. I do not think that prisons are all that egalitarian. I imagine that being a prison governor is a bit like being the Queen. It is your prison, and everyone else is so far beneath you that their own social distinctions, from your lofty perspective, like whether or not they are an officer or a prisoner, are so small as to be entirely irrelevant.

I think I am nearly ready to go, at least in the sense of having packed everything and planted the last of the crocus corms in the garden. I could not usefully comment on whether or not I have achieved the right state of mind to go, because I have got no idea what the  most appropriate state of mind ought to be. I am entering into a land of total mystery.

I spent the day doing last minute things, like making sure I have packed enough socks, then realised this afternoon that we were almost out of biscuits again. I am flapping about everything at the moment, and so completely panicked about making some more. Mark said that I need not worry, because if he needed more biscuits then he could always make some himself.

This surprised me, because I had no idea that he could do this, but he said proudly that he had learned to make flapjacks at school, and so in an emergency he would not starve to death in the least. 

I am not sure what I think about being surplus to requirements. 

Maybe once I have gone they will all work out that they don’t need me for anything anyway.

What if I don’t like being in prison and come home, and they all liked it better without me.

Oh, goodness, it’s an awf’lly big adventure.

I might be flapping.

Have a reassuring picture of a soothing candle.