Heaven

DAY 136 SATURDAY 1 DECEMBER 2001

4.19 am

I lie awake for hours, plotting. Although I’m currently revising the sixth draft of Sons of Fortune, I’ve come up with a new idea for the ending, which will require some medical research. I will have to seek advice from Dr Walling.

10.40 am

It’s just been officially announced that Mr Lewis will retire as governing governor on 1 January. I go over to the unit office and pick up a labour board change of job application form. If I’m not going to be hospital orderly I’ve decided to apply for his job. (See opposite).

12 noon

Doug tells me that he’s going to try another ploy to get outside work. He has a friend in March who runs a small haulage company (three lorries), who will offer him a job as a driver. The only problem is that he doesn’t work out of Boston, which is one of the current specifications for anyone who wishes to take up outside employment. However, Doug’s wife Wendy will meet the potential employer today and get him to send a fax offering Doug a job of driving loads from Boston back to March. We will have to wait and see if Mr Berlyn will sanction this. I refuse to get excited.

2.00 pm

I walk down to the football field and watch NSC play Witherton. We lose 5-0 so there’s not a lot more to report, other than it was very cold standing on the touch line; the wind was blowing in off the next landmass to the east, which happens to be Russia.

7.00 pm

I sit in my room reading This Week, an excellent journal if you want an overall view of the week’s events. It gives me a chance to bring myself up to date with the situation in Afghanistan, America and even NSC.

Under the heading, ‘A Bad Week’, it seems that a Jeffrey Archer look-alike is complaining about being regularly stopped by the police to make sure I haven’t escaped. ‘It’s most unfair,’ he protests, ‘it’s ruined my life.’ The paper felt his protests would have been more convincing if he hadn’t travelled down to NSC accompanied by a tabloid to have his photograph taken outside the prison.

9.00 pm

I visit Leon in his room on the north block. His fiancée has told her father that he is in Norway on business, and won’t be returning to England until 21 December, the day he’s released from prison.