by
Frank Hatton

Many years ago, my wife and I used to take our holidays on the eastern side of England, in an area known as East Anglia. This is a part of our country that is criss- crossed by waterways, and provides a wonderfully relaxed vacation. You start by hiring a boat, and stocking up with the necessities of life like food, booze, and the right sort of friends. On the boat, you have a TV, a fridge, an oven, bathrooms, bedrooms, everything in fact to make life comfortable, plus the addition of some glorious countryside and wandering waterways. Imagine if you will, waking up early on a glorious summer morning, jumping into a shower, and getting into some comfortable clothes, and while the rest of the folks are still sleeping, you start up the engine, cast off the moorings, and chug gently down the river. Nothing is moving, and the silence is almost deafening. After about an hour or so, your friends start to stir, and move around. given a little more time, you will get the wonderful smell of eggs and bacon wafting up to the area where you are dreamily steering the craft down the waterway. You find a picturesque spot in which to moor up, and eat a leisurely breakfast, and as a complete change from the normal hustle and bustle of life, you find that the only priority you have, is to find a good pub by lunchtime, and please believe that there are many of these scattered along the river banks. Sounds good doesn’t it? Now, while you are drifting gently along the beautiful river banks, you see an endless number of houses and bungalows with perfectly manicured lawns finishing at the edge of the river. The folk who live in these houses are sitting out in their garden, watching you and the rest of the river folk go by. I really envied these people, and always felt that my Utopia would be to buy such a property, and spend my years of retirement, sitting on my lawn, and waving to the folk on the river as they went on by. Not any more!!! With the deluge of rainfall we have had during this last few months, and the flooding of the riverside properties, this dream has fast faded, and my main ambition now is to live on a hill, (which I have achieved) well away from the water. Even the houses perched on a clifftop are no longer safe. Many of these have found that the sea is causing erosion of the soil, and the gardens and even the buildings are falling into the sea. Even worse is the fact that you cannot get insurance for these clifftop, and waterside properties now, so when you do run into trouble, you have no financial recompense at all. So, while the rest of the real estate is rising by around 7% each year, the sky high prices of the waterside and clifftop properties is falling dramatically. Actually, I was recently thinking about how our ambitions and lifestyle change over the course of the years. I would think that my wife and I followed the normal pattern. in that we started our married life in rented rooms, and struggled for some years to accumulate sufficient money to buy our first small house. Then came the birth of our children, and gradual increase in the size of houses as the quantity of money came easier. Ultimately, the children grew up and left home to make their own lives, and of course we found that we no longer needed the large house, so, we sold up and bought the dream bungalow, and settled back to enjoy the period of retirement. Now, in looking at the folk living around us in this area, and how the advancing years versus the labour involved in keeping the garden looking reasonable, and the other jobs that keep cropping up, we can see the next move will be selling up yet again, and moving into a small apartment. It’s really like going around in one big circle isn’t it? Although, I do hope I have not given any negative vibes in this,...... I have truly enjoyed every part of the circular trip, and very much look forward to the rest of the journey. Y’know, this thing called justice truly is a wondrous thing!!! Many times have I read or heard that the law is an ass, but of late this observation has taken on a much greater significance. We had a guy who was mentally, shall we say 10 cents short of a dollar, who was arrested on a charge of murder,..... and this took place 27 years ago. Now because the poor soul was mentally below normal, the police found that they were able to obtain a confession of guilt from him, and he was duly tried for the crime. At his trial, he protested that the admission of guilt was obtained under duress, and he was innocent, but, to cut the story short, he was tried on very flimsy evidence, and found guilty. He has always protested his innocence throughout the years in prison, and because of his failure to admit to the crime, he has never been eligible for any form of parole, or reduction of sentence. Now, after years of campaigning, and the production of evidence that the original police investigation failed to uncover, he has been released from prison, and it is almost certain that his conviction will be squashed. That my friends is after 27 years in clink for a crime he did not commit, and has always said so. In comparison to this, we had a particularly nasty murder committed by two eleven year old boys, who sadistically tortured and beat a little two year old boy to death. They have now served just short of eight years in a young offenders institution, and are now going to be given fresh identities and financially assisted to set up life in another part of the world, because the authorities feel it would be wrong to transfer them, now that they have reached the age of eighteen, to an adult prison, because of the trauma they might suffer. Methinks I might have a stronger wording for ‘the law is an ass!!!!’ ‘til the next time, Frank Hatton

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