Excuses, Not One

Excuses, not one.

David has begun serving his sentence.

He fills the days by reading.

Big novels were great.

That's Paul Hodgson, David's nephew.

Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace, you'd look at it and say, right, that's two weeks, 1,500 pages, that's two weeks done, which is quite a weird way of viewing things.

Books become his clock.

I don't think it was quite a literary retreat, but it is a kind of way of dealing with stuff like it.

He always surprised me how much he had read and kind of how important that was to him.

Outside, life carries on.

And so does David's mum, Dolly.

She spends her time hunting down books for David and visiting him whenever she can.

Through it all, she's convinced her son is innocent.

Dolly was always searching for some book he wanted and, you know, again, quite weird, her walking around going to the French bookshop or whatever and trying to buy a copy of Baudelaire or whatever, you know, not kind of what most cons were getting passed across the table.

Inside, David builds his own kind of classroom.

We have one of his prison notebooks from Wormwood Scrubs.

Every page is filled with new words, handwritten definitions and notes on things he wanted to learn.

Empirical, based on observation and experiment, not on theory.

Meiotic, serving to bring out a person's latent ideas to clear consciousness.

Ontology, department of metaphysics concerned with the essence of things as being, abstract.

But books and bravado can only take you so far.

Beyond the page, the cell walls close in.

David's then-wife Kaz visits often.

Visiting was once a month and I had to get a job that I was a temp at so I could have the times off.

to go down to see him, because he was in Maidstone for a while.