Last night, I received a particularly welcome text from our Italian friend down the road whom we happened to encounter, albeit briefly, yesterday on our trip down the hill. She wondered if she might come round this afternoon to pay is a social call which invitation, I was all too eager to accept. I cannot now remember if she has seen the latest addition to our range of furniture - the latest leather sofa which I bought and is decorated with a throw with the Harry Potter shield, escutcheon and motto, the carers claim as their own as they always seem to love sitting on it. When the carers were new, I used to see if they could translate or at least make a stab at translating the motto embroidered into the throw which is the official motto of Hogwarts "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus," four words in Latin that translate to 'Never tickle a sleeping dragon. 'While this is solid life advice, this seems odd to make the official motto of a school. My idea as to why the founders chose this as their motto is that they chose it as an inside joke. There are four words in the Latin motto, and each word represents one of the founders of the school, and/or the House. The whole elaborate joke is because J K Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, stated that she always found it boring and wrong that so many schools in our world have vague mottos that sound impressive but have no practical advice to offer to their students ('Reach for the stars', for example) so she wanted to substitute something that was at least vaguely useful. We would say, of course, in these days and times to 'let sleeping dogs lie' Of course, I shall try this out on our Italian friend when she pays us a visit and her Italian might help her make at least some progress in translating it. Part of my getting up routine is to go into the kitchen and make myself the obligatory cp of tea with which to wake myself up and I also enquire of 'Alexa' (smart speaker) what the weather is going to be like during the day. Yesterday, I was informed that it was 1° and would settle in the range between 0°-4° which sounds suitably wintry. As this blog has been going for several years now, I decided to look back exactly a year only to discover that I had written that 'today is a beautiful spring like day' and the same was true the year before that as well, but I could not bear to go back yet another year. In Spain, there is often a period in mid-February where the weather is known as 'febrero loco' (crazy February) when the weather is often quite mild and unpredictable, and a period of quite fine and sunny weather is fairly common. Thursday is my shopping day and the sitter is one of the young (male) twins who always gets on very well with Meg and vice versa so this always puts me at my ease when I am out of the house for about an hour and a quarter.
As one gets older, I suspect that there is a tendency to suspect that 'things were better' when we were younger but then things have moved on since our youth. Nonetheless, I heard a statistic yesterday that made me think. The recall population - the number of prisoners sent back to jail after release - has more than doubled in the last decade and now accounts for around 15% of the total number of people behind bars. If people re-offend, then they should evidently be back in gaol. But evidence is building up that ex-prisoners are being sent back to gaol for sometimes administrative reasons, such as missing an appointment with a probation officer - or even not reoffending at all but not showing the probation officer sufficient respect. That massively overworked service is finding it easier to manage its workload by just sending people back to gaol. Andy Keen-Downs CBE, CEO of Pact (Prison Advice and Care Trust), said: 'These alarming new figures are yet another indicator that reveals the scale of the challenge facing the prison and probation system. Steadily rising recall rates over the last decade have been a significant factor in driving the prison overcrowding crisis that faced new ministers when they took office last summer. Those who pose a danger to the public should go back to prison. But too often, people are recalled on minor technicalities or because they don’t have the support they need - they may have missed an appointment or have nowhere to live. We should consider returning to the system that required a court to recall someone to prison rather than an overworked probation officer.' So I ask the question whether re-offenders should be returned not to gaol but to what used to be called bail hostels. Inspectors concluded that there are not enough hostels in the right places, and this reduces the chance that rehabilitation and resettlement work will be effective. Many residents are placed away from their home areas. There is a general shortage of places, leading to more people being sent to wherever a place is available. A number of residents have spent years in prison and their rehabilitation needs are complex, and in most cases better addressed in the community in which they intend to live. This is particularly true for women. So, the more general question that I ask myself is that in the past, there used to be half way houses e.g. approved schools for delinquent children, convalescent hospitals for the not very ill, as well as the bail hostels themselves. It seems that these half-way houses are disappearing rapidly in our society and there seems to be very much an 'all or nothing' in our hospitals, schools and prisons. Should our national policies be thought about anew. To return to the case of the prisoners who reoffend, then they constitute about a third but the other two thirds (10% of the prison population) could surely be monitored in bail hostels rather than returned to gaol for years on end?
Our Italian friend had a sudden domestic emergency this afternoon which needed a plumber so to our mutual disappointment, she could not call around. But we spent the afternoon watching a production of Mozart's 'The Magic Flute' from the Paris opera house. I do not always attune to the Masonic overtones of 'The Magic Flute' but some of the singing and magic-like scenes are enthralling.
© Mike Hart [2025]