A wonderful evening with a terrific speech about Longford (who I believe was one of the greatest and most noble men of the last century) by his biographer Peter Stanford.

Sadly I missed saying hello to Edward Montague who I hadn't spoken to for 35 years.

The only depressing thing about the evening was the age of us attendees. Virtually everyone was over 60.

Why is it that the younger generation - unlike the young Longford - don't seem to care about human rights, common decency and tolerance, let alone redemption?

New Bridge was the original founder of Inside Time, the prison's newspaper with hundreds of thousands of readers - many of them a captive audience - for whom I proudly write a monthly column.

You can read it by going to www.insidetime.org