Hangin' out wit da fuzz...

Its been a wierd few days. Earlier in the week, I was in the prison service's equivalent of a twilight home hanging out with geriatric lifers. Small talk isn't easy when you're banged up with sweet looking old grandads who've bumped off a hockey team full of wives and girlfriends between them. All the usual tried and tested questions like "have you been anywhere good lately?" don't go down too well with people whose last taste of freedom was outside Manchester Assizes in 1962. The lowest point of the day was getting locked in the loo ("you can't be too careful miss" said Officer Screw) and then getting forgotten about for half an hour. After that I knew just how Yvonne Atkins felt when Fenner left her to die in the hanging cell in "Bad Girls". Later that day, I got dragged out to a karaoke evening by a mate of mine. What she didn't tell me was that the bar had been taken over by off-duty police officers. The sight of the constabulary's finest warbling their way through "Power Ballads volume 1" will take some time to erase itself from my memory. I was genuinely fascinated by their musical taste - Celine Dion, Showtunes, Irish rebel songs and Elvis all sung properly and in tune by people who had clearly been practising for weeks was not what I expected. If they put the same effort into catching burglars as they put into karaoke, the Daily Mail would be thrilled. I got talking to a few of them which is always tricky. It's safe to say that the old bill generally aren't keen on lefty lawyers, so I had to work out whether to tell them what I do for a living and be a complete pariah for the rest of the evening or just lie. I decided to take the coward's approach and say I worked for the Inland Revenue. Unfortunately, I then got cornered by a Chris DeBurgh fan from the fraud squad who had a long detailed question about VAT fiddles. In the words of the News of the World reporter at a wifeswapping party "I made my excuses and left".