Friends, Football and Fings

I shan’t mention the football. I mean everyone will know we’re through, so why go on about it? But it makes you feel good doesn’t it? Isn’t it weird how everywhere goes quiet when there’s an England match on telly? And to be playing Germany on Sunday – brilliant!

I’ve got so many draft blogs in my blog file, bits and pieces of this and that and now I can’t remember which bits I’ve used, so if I ever repeat myself please forgive me.

Just let me say in this house a typical conversation with me goes:
Me: “Would you like tea or coffee?”
Other Person: “Coffee please.”
I put the kettle on . . .
“Erm? Did you say tea or coffee?”
“Coffee please.”
“Right.”
I reach for a mug.
“Um, was it tea?”
“Coffee.”
It can go on like that for some time and chances are the poor person will end up with tea anyway – or nothing at all if I get distracted, which isn’t unheard of.

So, a word about writing friends – that is friends who are also writers. Quite honestly I don’t know where I’d be without mine. In fact when I think of all the years I had no writing friends at all, I wonder how on earth I kept sane without anyone to talk to about it all.

While I was staying at my son’s house last week, during one very long night when I was awake worrying and checking my phone every five minutes, there was a sudden rustling and a weight landed on the bed.

It was their little black cat. She stomped on my feet for a moment, purring like mad, then she walked up my body and curled up on my chest, purring and rolling round and rubbing her head against my hands and face.

She is like a small version of my cat Gizzie and just as gentle and affectionate as he was. I could almost feel the worry seeping away and I calmed down enough to go to sleep. Amazing isn’t it, the calming power of animals.

Made me realise how much I miss having a cat around the house, but I still don’t think I will ever have another cat. Unless . . . no, my mind is made up. No more cats. But then . . . no really, I’ve decided.

I’m reading The Empty Chair by Jeffery Deaver at the moment. Like all his books I can’t put it down. I’m even reading it in the mornings when I should be getting dressed.

And yesterday my daughter gave me Julian Clary’s Devil in Disguise which I’m itching to read.

Finally got round to watching Pierrepoint, a film we recorded months, possibly years ago. It wasn’t an easy film to watch and as often happens I was scuttling off to the internet afterwards to look up Albert Pierrepoint to find out more about him.

I am generally opposed to the death penalty because too many mistakes have been made in the past. Not only the wrong people being hanged, but it happens to this day that people are released from prison having been jailed years before for something they didn’t do.

One of the hangings shown in the film was of Timothy Evans who was executed in 1950 for the murder of his daughter. Three years later, the real killer John Christie was executed for the murder and Timothy Evans was given a posthumous pardon. But that doesn’t give the guy his life back.

To have your daughter murdered and then be accused and found guilty of the crime when you know you are innocent – can you imagine the hell that man would have gone through knowing he would die while the real killer was still at large? And all the time suffering the pain of losing his daughter?

That was always my main opposition to the death penalty. But also someone has to carry out these executions and become legal killer and that someone has to bear the burden of that.

So yes, I am still opposed, but then again I see what some people do, the terrible, foul cruelties they carry out and I think that there should be a death penalty. But it is not a matter I would ever want to have to vote on.

Remember Jeremy Bamber? Ever visited his website? I can't get the hyperlink to work, but it's his name, dot com. Makes very interesting reading. The case is currently being reviewed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

There, I went and got all serious didn’t I? You see once I start I can’t stop, so I’ll shut up now before I go off on something else.

But before I go – if you’re writing for magazines it’s time to be thinking of colder days and darker nights which is my excuse for adding this picture. It’s my very much missed Gizzie the Mo, the softest floppiest most cuddly cat I’ve ever known.