I THOUGHT I was long past the stage where anything surprised me. That's one of the benefits - perhaps the only one - of being sixty-plus and extremely cynical.

However, something I read the other day left me gobsmacked. Perhaps I'm not as 'socially aware' as I thought.

A court case involving drugs, led defending counsel to inform the magistrates that his client had become addicted to heroin while serving a prison sentence!

The report didn't indicate whether their worships dissolved into fits of apoplectic rage at that revelation or if it was accepted with the sort of benign indifference which seems to affect our judiciary from time to time.

Did anyone bother to ask how the defendant managed to acquire a Class A drug while doing time at Her Majesty's Pleasure?

Is it handed out at the same time as the porridge and bread and 'marg.' Or are there set recreational periods when everyone sits round in the communal games room and 'shoots up' while dissolving in fits of laughter at reruns of The Bill.

Call me old fashioned if you must but I really did believe that being locked up was meant to be a punishment - not an introduction to the 'delights' of heroin, cocaine or cannabis abuse.

Around the same time as that report appeared, a television programme highlighted the rigours experienced by inmates AND staff at a prison in the former USSR, rated the toughest in the world.

So punitive is the regime - and life imprisonment for capital offences means life, not 10 years - that several criminals have indicated they would rather die than spend the rest of their days incarcerated there.

Contrast that with the 'enlightened' attitudes in the UK where the odd prison riot is used to convey inmates' displeasure at a lack of 'proper' facilities such as, for example, heroin breaks.

Is it any wonder that criminals laugh at the law and policemen and women, doing their 'Canute' against the tide of lawlessness, wonder if it's worth the effort. Riding for a fall ONE of my colleagues arrived in the office the other morning, blue with cold.

He had just undergone a half-hour journey on a Ribble bus, starting at 7.45 on a freezing cold morning.

Apparently windows were jammed open and the inside of the bus was like a freezer. The bus, incidentally, was almost 15 minutes behind schedule.

My colleague pointed out that the general condition of the vehicle was decrepit with the previous night's debris still on the floor,

And this was the very day after Ribble was ordered by the traffic commissioners to take 20 buses off the road for reasons of safety.

It was by no means an isolated incident of ghastly condtions or poor time-keeping on that particular route.

Ribble is run by Stagecoach, the firm which has either gobbled up, or is in the process of so doing, a number of previously council-run bus companies to create a virtual monopoly in some areas.

Maybe it's time to look at the railway timetables.B

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.