Twelve Months of Freedom

Richard McQuade QC is a recently retired Judge with a major psychological problem. Once a highly esteemed senior officer of Britain's judiciary, he finds himself unable to cope with the inevitable lack of status and responsibility that he now encounters. He becomes so alienated from the world that he considers taking his own life as a real possibility to stop his mental suffering. He therefore devises an eccentric plan to challenge himself with a different experience every month for an entire year in the hope that this will stimulate him into a state of normality. He meets with mixed success in this morbid endeavour, which both exploits his memory of his past life and exposes him to a wide range of powerful experiences. But events take an unusual and ironic turn at the end of his unusual experiment and challenge the entire basis of everything he wishes for with such conviction.