The principles of totality turn on the actual experience of a series of custodial sentences, not the after-the-event back-dating of a sentence. A period of approximately two months at liberty between custodial episodes is not a 'very short gap' requiring the totality principle to treat the periods as effectively continuous. The failure to back-date a sentence so as to wholly subsume an earlier sentence imposed for separate offending does not of itself amount to appellable error.
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