I have just finished reading Jeffrey Archer's first volume of Prison Diaries. It covers the 22 days he spent at the High Security Prison at Belmarsh, South London. Of course now I am hooked. It is inevitable that I shall either purchase or borrow the second in the series (if I can find anyone who will admit to owning it.) Lord Archer is amazingly quiet at the moment. Presumably this is to do with still officially being on probation or something. He served slightly more than half of his four year sentence, and no doubt has to be seen to be no further trouble in this latter part of his official sentence. I have stated elsewhere that I have never read anything he wrote – that may not be true, because it may be that in my youth I read Cain and Abel, which I now believe is one of his titles. If that is the case, then he is able to write a cracking good story. Back to the Diaries – they are compelling because there is little in the way of self-pity, though he holds no punches when it comes to insisting that he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice – particularly with regard to the severity of the sentence. More interesting, from my point of view, is the way that he seems to have been able to relate to the other prisoners and to have been allowed to tell parts of their stories.
It only serves to emphasise for me that I too, want to write. only I do not want to be put in prison first. Sometimes being a minister feels like life-sentence enough. I have spent years trying to alter the stereotypes that many people have fixed in their heads. But I sometimes worry that this only serves to convince them that maybe I am an OK person, and that it is somehow all right to leave God in the background, because God loves them anyway. The trouble is that people in the church resist change, and people outside the church have changed so much that we are talking a different language.
Oh well – it just means learning the language.
Give me a high-five dude.