The end of an era looms....

Biggest and most eagerly awaited news of the last few months has now broken - I am to retire from the Police. So after 27 and a half years, on June 27th 2011 I will become a pensioner. At the age of 51 that could be daunting, but it is actually something of a rare privilege in these times of squeezed pensions. It will give me a release from most of the pressures which have been building over decades, and provide a whole new set of possibilities for me. To get things in perspective a little, I have suffered a fair bit from all the things I have seen and felt over the years, though I know that others have seen and done things worse than I have, and of course outside my career there are members of the other emergency services and of course the armed forces who have all manner of traumas thrown at them. But these things can only be judged subjectively - different things affect different people in different ways.
Anyway, plan number one of the new era has to be to knuckle down to writing the sequel to 'Prisoners Property and Prostitutes'. Now there's a challenge, but all being well I can pull some strands together from the multifarious ramblings that fill a number of notepads around the house, and make some coherent sense of them. Watch this space, as they say, but not until I have been on a sailing trip from Lerwick to West coast Scotland in late June. I can't wait, work can!