Samizdat

I was arrested on the morning of Friday, August 28th, at home, due to Oli’s reporting this email to the police. They initially tried to take me to Stoke Newington police station, which I had previously given a five-star review on Yelp and was therefore looking forward to, but alas it was full, and so we went to a police station further east, called Eastfleet or Greyfleet or some such awful Docklands-y name.

I was thrilled to be given there the same Holmesterne Foods tikka masala that had substantially caused me to give five stars to Stoke Newington. Possibly this was because I mentioned it while being admitted. At any rate they were very nice, and promised I’d be home by the end of the day.

After a few hours napping in my cell (I have found napping an excellent means of killing time while detained) I was taken by Serco van to Barkingside Magistrates’ Court, where a very stern and bald magistrate decided wrongly that my email to Sam Cherny constituted an act of indirect communication with Oli, and so ordered that I be remanded to HMP Pentonville (the gaol of first resort for Barkingside, second resort being the mythic Atlantis that is Thameside, a private prison where one is served plover eggs and pudding wine by liveried unicorns).

I arrived at Pentonville at perhaps about 6 p.m., and was immediately taken into a small waiting room in which waited a Chinaman, crouching with head in hands. He was clearly more despondent than I. Trying to be friendly and comforting, I asked him why he was there, and he rattled off a story very similar to mine (this was to become something of a theme), except that he had no family or support on the outside. His mother (or was it his father? I forget) had died, and he had no other family in the country. A girlfriend had accused him of stalking, harassment, assault, treason, Geneva Convention violations, genocide, and so forth, and he expressed horror and bewilderment that he was being imprisoned on her mere accusation. I could quite understand his consternation, and said so. I had no idea what else to say.

At length the door was unlocked and we were taken to an innermore room, where our clothes and other identifying effects were abstracted from us and we were stripped (behind a curtain, mercifully) to be checked for drugs. I have since learned that the contraband economy in prison is so vast and lucrative that people get themselves admitted to prison principally to smuggle contraband in. I was also told that the prison guards (‘screws’) are on the payroll of the smugglers, though they were evidently not on my payroll, for I had to jump up and down naked and undergo an X-ray scan in case of drugs squirrelled or swallowed.

(Mind you, they don’t check your shoes. They check inside them, but they don’t check them. If I were a hardened criminal, I would cut a strip out of the soles of my Doc Martens and put my iPhone, shiv, strips of spice, bank notes, &c. in there. There are no NLJDs or anything that sophisticated. The system seems to rely on an airport-style full-body metal detector at the front door – which can be functionally defeated by a belt buckle and a shrug – and then later on the aforementioned X-ray procedure, which seems to scan the thoracoabdominal cavity for swallowed drugs, not the shoes. I have also always felt the hair/scalp would be a good place for certain things, I suppose mainly packets of drugs, because that seems grossly undet-checked also. Oh, the things one learns from being pointlessly arrested…)

After this, I was given a translucent bin bag containing: prison-issue tracksuit (7 apiece for 7 days), naff light-blue plastic bowls; the worst electric shaver I have ever encountered and hope never to encounter again; little plastic sachets of shampoo; slightly larger squirty sachet-like things (of the sort one gets with watered-down health or protein yoghurts) of body wash; smaller paper sachets of sweetener (88% maltodextrin, 12% sugar), tea and coffee whitener (I was later informed that it was a good thing I, a vegetarian, wasn’t imprisoned earlier, for these apparently formerly contained pork fat), and spray-dried coffee marked “SPRAY DRIED COFFEE” in diagonally repeating Times or Times New Roman; other miscellaneous goodies.

Then we were taken into a canteen, where friendly kapos gave us some deceptively nice prison slop of the sort one might have received at Theresienstadt, and which was similarly misleading as to what awaited us later on. This Early Slop™ consisted of: some sort of hot food in a Camden-Market-esque rectangular crinkled metal container with crinkled-in white cardboard lid; a slab of pleasant-enough cake; some Rice Krispies (or rather CRISPED RICE, no ™), which I later learned was meant to be the next morning’s breakfast, but which I foolishly took to be a slightly strange late-night snack; a small cardboard carton of UHT milk such as one might get at a state primary; crisps of a brand I don’t now remember (Sun-something? not something one encounters ‘in civilian life’ so to speak) but which I recognised from various courthouses.

Finally there was an induction ceremony undertaken with a prison officer, in my case a pleasant lady who was probably a lesbian. She told me I would be given vapes, and permitted me a ‘welfare call’ to my mother. I (Theresienstadt again) informed my mother that it all seemed lovely, there were vapes, and I was quite sure I’d be fine.

For my first three nights, from Friday evening through to Monday morning, my cellmate was David Majewski, a Pole in his twenties from Enfield who had been asleep on the canteen floor while the rest were pacing around. When we were led to our tiny cell on the fifth floor, he immediately curled up in a ball on the lower bunk (prime real estate), shivering and occasionally coughing and twitching. After some time gathering the strength to ask, I enquired: “I don’t suppose by any chance you’re withdrawing from opiates?” “Yes”, came the answer. Heroin to be exact. Feeling like a mother cow, like Menelaus standing over Patroclus in my top bunk, I summoned a nurse and said I was worried about him – that I felt he ought to be given methadone, that unmedicated heroin withdrawal is dangerous (it is not, really, but I remembered it and esplanchnizomēn).

He was given 10mg on that first night, which I considered punitively low (my friend Roman had been on 100mg when he was using heroin, and I had known others on doses as high as 160mg – 10mg is barely anything). He was then given 20mg the next day and 30mg the following day, which conversely struck me as a dangerous ramp-up considering the pharmacodynamics of methadone, and which called into question the expertise of those giving the drug, in my view. Incidentally, “meds” in prison seemed always to mean methadone, and the queue for the ‘medication hatch’ reminded me of the old ‘queue of the damned’ at Boots when I was briefly prescribed it myself. They were quite surprised when I turned up to collect my eczema creams. I would like to say the man greeted me with little paper thimble already in hand, but I cannot honestly recall.

Anyway, David had the opiate-eater’s parasitism, autism, and wont for theft, and on Sunday morning he was threatened with stabbing after stealing someone’s fan from his cell. The fan wasn’t taken into our cell. I noted that its owner came into our cell to check for it and asked me – he had never met me – whether I had seen the fan. He seemed to trust my answer that I had not. David had evidently sold it on for caps (vape cartridges – the informal currency) and thence perhaps for something else. He soon acquired spice, apparently the customary drug in prison, a synthetic cannabinoid taken for the same reason as quetiapine and everything else: to knock one out. Bertrand Russell I think described the function of alcohol drinking as temporary suicide, and this seemed very apt to the function of spice in English prisons.

On Monday morning, 31 August, David was taken at long last to the detox wing, and I was taken down to the second floor of the induction wing to the cell of Jack Cleall, whose own cellmate had also been taken to the detox wing. Jack hailed from Romford-ish, out in Essex. He was no stranger to His Majesty’s hospitality, having made previous visits on account of his dangerous driving, and having once led police on a high-speed chase from Romford to Southend. Nevertheless, this was his first stretch for a domestic: slapping his girlfriend after she had attacked him with a knife.

Jack had type 1 diabetes. I knew of the vagaries of type 1 diabetes thanks to Oli, who is a type 1 diabetic. While Jack was pissing, I regaled him with the etymology of diabetes as conjectured by Aretaeus in the second century (“passing through” of nutrients into urine – “a kind of melting of the limbs and flesh into urine”). His subcutaneous insulin syringes had been confiscated because he was considered a suicide risk, a rather preposterous measure considering he was left with plug sockets and a bunk bed almost tailor-made for hangings (I heard of two Epstein-style bunk-bed hangings in my time at Pentonville and Wandsworth).

Around noon, he summoned a Caribbean to complain about this and to ask to be taken to the nurse. The Caribbean (who was very friendly) refused to take him to the nurse, saying that he didn’t have time, but engaged us both in a half-hour conversation in which he sought to have us concede that it was fair enough that he shouldn’t take Jack to the nurse. (This was a common theme in prison. I later mused to Jack that “fuck you” would be easy to accept, but “you must understand, fuck you – can you see why I’m saying that? you understand my position, right?” left one feeling a bit like the Melians felt towards the Athenians in Thucydides.)

At one point the Caribbean asked us, in a friendly, hands-outstretched manner, what he was meant to do to unwind. I asked him if he’d considered beating his wife. He laughed (thankfully).

That night, after staff again refused to take Jack to the nurse to administer his insulin and check his blood glucose, ketones, etc, he decided to exercise his ancient and god-given right of repeatedly kicking our cell door to create an enormous racket that the prison staff were forced to confront. I considered this just (prison is not without justice, though usually to be found on the wrong side of the cell door), and recalled how, in my campaigns against Damien and Oli, the fact of the racket had eventually come to displace the reason the racket needed to be created. So I supported Jack.

He told me from long experience that eventually, if one fought off the regular prison guards, there arrived men clad in black who were not to be fucked with. This time the men clad in black arrived, but Jack explained himself reasonably to them and they took him to the nurse. So Men In Black: 1, Plain Old Screws: 0.

On Tuesday morning, 1 September, I was awoken quite politely at 6 a.m. to be taken to court – the wrong court, as it turned out, specifically Barkingside Mags (whence I had come) instead of Westminster Mags (whither I was, by the Crown and my poor hapless solicitor Mr Hussain, strictly purposed).

This sparked a useless ~30-hour excursion and my long entombment in a downstairs cell at Barkingside (one is stored downstairs and, if taken up to court, displayed on the side, peripheral to the proceedings, mostly silent and behind a Plexiglas screen, all of which is rather apt to how one feels), at the end of which I felt like Pound at Pisa – “the raft broke and the waters went over me”.

But first I shall discuss the beginning of that day.

After our quite polite awakenings, we were taken to a holding pen, one of the same galère in which I had met the Chinaman, and to which we were taken after a sort of reversed version of the induction process – perhaps more apt considering there appears to be more contraband within these prisons than without them. There I met a 19-year-old black teen called Mansaray, whom I shall call Tupac Mansaray in recognition of his rather cool bearing.

Tupac Mansaray was in there for life, for murder, but was quite diffident and easy to like. He commanded the quiet admiration or awe of the room, since most of us were there for less serious things. He said that he was being taken to court to stand trial for ancillary offences such as firearms offences, which he reckoned was because the Crown was trying to hedge its bets in case he was paroled for the murder conviction – they really didn’t want him out, he reckoned, and that seemed plausible enough, not least because he, like many of them, had a very good barrister (so he said and in a manner that inclined me to believe he knew whereof he spoke – high crimes, it seems to me, attract good barristers no matter the defendant’s means).

I put it to Tupac – what I believed – that there is murder and there is murder, and that killings in the context of a game to which both parties had consented are plainly not outrages in the way that, say, BTK’s murders in Kansas were outrages. There is a difference between a duel and a hunt, in short. Tupac seemed glad of that distinction, and to agree.

I found myself doing a lot of this kind of moral philosophy in prison. It is wanting in the English penal hamartiology.

It was also there, in that dread waiting room, that I met Jordan Stephens, a plump and affable young Essexman who was to accompany me to Barkingside. He had formerly spent ten months in prison on remand for a dispute with his ex-girlfriend (his ‘baby mama’, this being the one thing such men appear to call their girlfriends when they are not using their preferred and more general term ‘missus’ – I found both rebarbative, but kept that opinion generally to myself), and this time was being held on recall after texting her the single word ‘Mol’ (Molly – her name). For that high crime he had spent seven weeks in prison on remand, and was finally sentenced that day to one final week, after which he was to be released.

Late that evening, Jordan having had his trial and I having spent about eight hours alone in a cell on the brink of a psychotic break, a Serco van arrived to take us back to Pentonville, along with Mohammed, a gentleman in some kind of immigration-related Heisenstate awaiting resolution (wave function collapse?) by the Home Office. But, five to ten minutes away from Pentonville, on the Caledonian Road, our privatised Hessian gaolers were informed that Pentonville had closed for the night (one had thought the point of it was to be closed always), and that we would therefore have to go to Walworth police station. There we went, with much grumbling from the Hessians, and I appreciated this rare moment of late-night exhausted camaraderie between us and them as we all bemoaned the absurdity and uselessness of Pentonville.

As we arrived back at Pentonville, the gaoler to whom I was manacled during re-entry had some trouble taking the handcuff off me, so I assisted him by simply slipping out of it (a perk of being very thin), which caused some panic/amusement.

Incidentally during our re-induction to Pentonville I encountered a solemn East African Muslim whom I shall call Abdulhakim, because he was probably called that or similar.

He fixed me with the dour, humourless gaze of the East African Muslim, and asked: “Brother, what are you in here for?” (Despite our gaolers’ best efforts to forbid it, this remained a most popular question.) I explained, or should I say I began to explain, for when I reached the words “my boyfriend” he backed away in evident horror and cut me off, telling me, of course in the distancing third-person hortative modality, that “people here don’t want to hear about your sexual relationships”.

He himself was in there for some kind of killing, or so I had overheard, though when I said ‘killed’ he blanched and muttered something about “an accident” which I greatly doubted.

The following morning another probable Somali advised me to swap out ‘boyfriend’ with ‘girlfriend’ when telling my story. This sage advice was subsequently endorsed by:

• an official from the ‘Opus’ nuthouse service
• my solicitor, the lovely Mr Hussain
• my aunt
• my mother
• (sheepishly) a lovely lady GP at Wandsworth

Who was it who conjectured that this was what Proust had done — the Albert-Albertine theory? I knew not, for I had no Wi-Fi.

Either way, as it would have played merry hell with any explanation of Oli’s childhood, I did not follow the advice.

I should note that the white working-class English prison population was fine with my gayhood. Every white working-class English prisoner has a gay uncle, it seems. Thank god for the Gay Uncles®. The Muslims are another matter, and there I think dear old Lars might have had a point.

Another thing of note that occurred during our re-induction to Pentonville was my encounter with a lovely black lady, or girl (she was quite young and spry), who repeated the induction interview I had been given the first time (lots of questions about whether I had imminent plans to kill myself and so forth). When I explained why I was there, she was shocké et amusé as people usually were (except of course Abdulhakim), and even more so when, on asking whether I had received special educational support, I answered joshingly that I had gone to a private school, in case that counted.

Jack was very impressed that I had briefly gone to school with ‘Harry Potter’ (Daniel Radcliffe – he and I overlapped only very slightly at City) and said he’d tell all his friends when he got out about this fascinating acquaintance he had made.

More generally there was a sense that I didn’t quite belong. It is strange to find oneself in prison and surrounded by people — including the guards! — telling one one has done nothing wrong and shouldn’t be in prison.

I repeatedly asked people whether they wanted to fight, as having a fight was on my prison bucket list, but disappointingly nobody did. A couple of people tried to discourage me from asking.

I also met during our re-induction a chirpy Essex-London young man who offered me salt to put on my food. Prison food is strangely unsalted. It is much better with salt.

He spoke the usual East London Demotic Pidgin, which I found incomprehensible. I would stand among men of various creeds and origins – white English, blacks, swarthy Hispanics, etc – unable to understand a word, while they appeared to understand one another because they all spoke this very fast and slang-laced pidgin that prevailed in Pentonville. Perhaps this was because Pentonville drew from easterly courts. There was a large Essex / London eastern exurbs intake. People at Wandsworth were far more comprehensible, I found.

He also remarked at one point on how things had been “when I was in Isis”. Surprised by the conjunction of this and his freckles and chirpy east London accent, I enquired “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria?”. This triggered a great gale of laughter. Apparently it is a prison.

I spent Wednesday evening back on Pentonville’s induction wing (‘fours’ this time – floor four – the weird terminology reminded me slightly of my Etonian friends with their incessant B-block/F-block/etc nomenclature for the form system), sharing a cell with Jordan who had accompanied me on my fated anabasis to Barkingside.

Jordan was on citalopram and, if memory serves, quetiapine – seemingly the standard fucked-over male prisoner regimen, and remarkably similar to the chemical cocktail pumped into ‘troubled’ ex-servicemen in the States. He nevertheless managed to spend approximately every waking moment, and many of my sleeping ones, on the phone to his ‘missus’ (suppressed grimace).

I took advantage of this opportunity to ask him to ask her to please text my mum — I was still on a ‘restricted PIN’, as it is called, unable to call her without undergoing a two-week process of approval which I, expecting to be out much sooner, had not yet actually bothered to set in train — and tell her that I was alright.

Very soon we had a reply from my mum, who was very grateful to hear from her/him/me. She (ἡ μισσυϛ) had meanwhile heard my story, receiving it with the usual bewilderment (“shouldn’t be t/here” &c.), and jokingly texted my mum to ask what she thought of Oli (“we’re not fans”).

Relayed also was my description of our gaolers as ‘incomprehensible fuckups’. I remember this because I had to spell out ‘I-N-C-O-M-P-R-E-H-E-N-S-I-B-L-E’. My mum replied “that sounds like Sam!”.

On Thursday morning (September 3rd), I was again awoken at 6 a.m. and shipped off to Westminster Magistrates’ Court (second time’s the charm!), where I was denied bail – or rather the ‘change in circumstance’ of my family and lawyers’ proposed more stringent conditions was not deemed to be legally adequate to trigger a reconsideration of bail.

So it was that I, having arrived finally at Westminster Mags, was finally sent to Wandsworth (W.M.’s gaol of first resort).

I was excited to be sent to Wandsworth, where of course Jack Amery was hanged after his dad Leo’s mental-health defence failed (attn my mum!). I quote Leo’s epitaph:

At end of wayward days he found a cause –
Twas not his country’s – only time can tell
If that defiance of our ancient laws
Was treason or foreknowledge. He sleeps well.

I later heard some cells retain the original trap-doors and ropes once used for hangings. I like to imagine Jack Cleall eventually finding himself in such a cell, still without his insulin syringes.

Intake at Wandsworth was an excellent sample of the prison system:

• Roberto, aged 43, who resembled my beloved late friend Lars Newbould, and was not discernibly Italian despite his name.
• Mr Price, aged 58, bluff and sweet and avuncular in a slightly twinkle-in-the-eye, knowing way, who didn’t know about prison and happily soaked up my and another’s advice without much amour-propre; he lived mainly in Dubai and made a living producing the ink used for labels on the insides of clothes, he told me. He resembled a benign old gent wearing a slightly oversized silicone mask of his own face.
• A black man called Mr Morris – I shall call him Tupac Morris, because he was quite cool. He had been trying to calm his drunk, angry girlfriend when she called the police; on sobering up, she firmly maintained he had not harmed or wronged her, yet he was prosecuted and denied bail.
• Another black prisoner, about 33, due to be released that night. He had been charged with kidnap and GBH, had managed to get it reduced to attempted kidnap and ABH, and counted that as a good result. (I asked if it was kidnap of his own child; he said “no”, so I remained unsure of the nature of what happened.)
• A younger English boy (early-mid twenties) whose name I didn’t catch, who had been fucked over by his own father in more or less the same way I had been by Oli. His dad had assaulted him constantly – battered, I should say – and when he had become old enough to stand up for himself physically, his dad used the law instead. (In fairness to Oli, he endured a similar childhood at the hands of his poor tormented mother.)

I joked to Tupac Morris that English Boy had pipped him to the post in the Great Fucked-Over Tournament, though English Boy disagreed once he heard Tupac’s story.

Tupac, for his part, was almost delirious from his effort to make any kind of moral sense of his predicament. I counselled him that he’d be better off regarding it as insusceptible of rational moral explanation — just a contingent historical-bureaucratic nonsense, like the Holocaust or the HSE.

Roberto and Mr Price too were utterly bewildered to find themselves there, as one might be who found himself caught and dragged into an industrial lathe. The lathe doesn’t know him. The lathe’s is not to reason why. There is no appellate lathe. The lathe lathes. That is all.

My first night at Wandsworth, that of Thursday, September 3rd, was spent on its induction wing (this time ‘E Wing’) with my new cellmate Aaron O’Dell.

On the outside, Aaron was homeless and addicted to heroin (smoking, not injecting). He had asked the judge for as long a sentence as possible, to which the judge replied “no, I decide how long your sentence will be!” (this reported by Aaron with that peculiarly endearing suppressed pride I associate with my old flatmate Chris Leydon).

He had grown up on the Gascoigne estate in Barking, and was rather surprised to learn how much I knew about the Gascoigne estate in Barking, for Oli-related reasons. Aaron had lived in Rookwood House, which he said was one of the last buildings to be taken over by the Albanians.

He was meticulously tidy (‘OCD’, he said, in the standard psychiatrised jargon of 21st-c institutional Britain) and taught me various tricks, ways to reuse disposable prison containers to store things (“everything in here has a use!”), and so forth. I deeply liked Aaron.

While watching ‘Deal or No Deal’, he delivered an extended skit about how much better it would be if the contestants were people like him: “£60? yeah, gimme that!”, “dealer? what dealer?? where’s the dealer???”, etc.

He also introduced me to our next-door neighbour, an Australian bloke (definite bloke, or possibly chap — actually chap probably better) he knew from the outside, who bore a distinct resemblance to the late Heath Ledger. He seemed used to that observation and said they were brothers. I have no idea if that was a joke, a lie, something in between, or actually true.

Aaron had strung up one of the ubiquitous soon-ratty threadbare orange blankets on the shower rails that (I noticed afterwards) existed around toilets at Wandsworth but were seldom used. It was just as well that so many prisoners were opiate addicts, because defecation in a cell toilet was an awkward social ritual that was, after all, probably best done weekly or elsewhere.

The Sunflower Wing (of which more anon) had a separate toilet in the shower room, a welcome innovation and one to which I repaired as often as possible, indeed for any kind of waste excretion, having myself a certain pudeur about these things, or more than some of my cellmates did. If cellmates defecated chez nous, I ritually wrapped my head in one of said orange blankets and plugged my ears, which probably helped establish me as Neurodivergent™.

I suppose I must address also the question of masturbation. Here there was a surprising (and welcome) lacuna. I was aware of no masturbation, aside from ostensive masturbation among perverts such as my later cellmate Kong’s previous cellmate Captain Underpants, of whom more below. I wonder at this. It is not what I expected. Perhaps the libido diminishes in captivity.

And of course there is then the question of male situational homosexuality, of which I was also aware of none, though some later cellmates joked insecurely about the possibility once they were aware I was gay on the outside. Actually, I shall dog-ear this point and return to it later, because it is an interesting one.

On Friday morning I was taken to Wandsworth’s medical centre to be checked for HIV, hepatitis A or B or C or D or something, and probably syphilis and gonorrhea and God knows what else. They didn’t even know I was gay, I don’t think. My mum had me vaccinated for all the gay diseases – thanks Mum! – but they persisted anyway. I never got the results, come to think of it, but I should hope they’d find a way to get the message to me if I had HIV. Then again, my iPhone is still in Pentonville because they didn’t find a way to get that to me, so: who knows?

While waiting to be tested for ¡All The Claps!, I bumped into Mr Price from induction, who’d been paired up with with a quadriplegic paralysed from the neck down, in prison for assaulting his girlfriend. Wonders never cease. I suppose he must have rolled at her.

Anyway, Mr Price’s new stationary companion had had two previous cellmates. The first slit his wrists. Bled out. Died. Gone. Second attempted to hang himself, failed, somehow got into a fight with Mr Quadriplegic – again I am unsure how this man keeps getting into fights – and was carted off to the nuthouse, or perhaps the hanging cells.

When I was there, the code blue alarm sounded a couple of times, so suicide seems to be quite a popular means of passing the time, perhaps second only to television. Actually, I heard the suicides often happened when people’s TVs were taken away, so there you have it. TV #1, suicide #2. Spice #3, maybe. Quetiapine, zopiclone, etc. Zopiclone tablets (‘sleepers’) were prescribed quite liberally by the nurses at the medical centre and traded for other things, like vape caps. I had encountered zopiclone enough on the outside, and didn’t like the weird metallic taste it leaves in one’s mouth if one doesn’t neck the tablet fast enough, so I steered clear of this and of prison psychotropics generally.

Aaron told me later that day that he had two daughters by different mothers, one 2 years old and the other 9. He had been denied custody or contact with them because he was an addict, on the theory that one must demonstrate capacities before being entrusted with them. (This is the wrong way around in my view, but anyway.) He told me that when his first daughter was born, he was in terrible withdrawal, but he didn’t go out to score. He just lay there in the hospital with his daughter in his arms.

Around noon on Friday, 4 September, there was a knock on the door and Aaron was told to gather his belongings, for he was being moved to another cell. This kind of abrupt ending never ceased to be unsettling and quite sad.

Just before the knock, I asked him who he’d like to play him in the BBC drama that I expected would eventually be made about my experiences, telling him I had already cast Andrew Scott (“no offence, I’m sure he’s a lovely guy”) to play Damien. He said he didn’t mind.

In the following 12 hours, Mr Ledger traded with me his cell’s phone (which he didn’t need) for a vape ‘cap’ (cartridge) (these were the unofficial currency of both Wandsworth and Pentonville, and possibly of the British prison population at large). He also asked me for some of my prison-issue Hydromol ointment. He was sweet, kind, and always smiled.

After an evening spent savouring my short-lived aloneness, I received a further knock at about 9 to 10 p.m., and in came my new cellmate, Mustapha Hosseini, who was very quiet and who obligingly took the top bunk (woo! Sam the dominant male!).

I learned the next morning that he was a German of Iranian descent, with a mother in Iran who spoke no English and proved very hard to arrange a phone call with. Charged with drug offences in Germany, he had been arrested here in the course of an attempted escape to Canada. He was to remain in Wandsworth for 10 days and then be extradited to Germany. He spoke nearly no English, and, when I asked if he’d been arrested at an airport, didn’t recognise that term. I elaborated: “On a plane? On a train?” “No, on water – mit Schiff.” (Fortunately I had a smidgen of German, courtesy of my grandma.)

Mustapha reacted with confusion and horror to most prison food, and possibly most English food (fair enough), handing or scraping over to me variously: muesli, several pasties, hash browns (expressing confusion as to whether these were meant as food), veggie sausages, and a bottle of blackcurrant squash. He had eaten nothing in the previous two days, and only a little that day. I wondered if he was perhaps awaiting trial on quite serious charges, and if this better explained his abstemiousness than did his faith, for he prayed very little and much less than the tediously solemn East African Muslims I had met during intake.

Speaking of those East African Muslims, I must tell you of one in particular, who had immediately got to business praying to Mecca in a seemingly random direction while in the waiting room during the first stage of intake. I asked, in a tone of slightly exaggerated harmlessness and inedibility, how he knew in which direction Mecca faced. He gruffly replied that he just knew. Roberto and Mr Price, my English bloke peers, meanwhile studied their shoes with great seriousness. I then observed silently as, after we were taken upstairs, he prayed again in a direction that, if my dead reckoning of the staircases was correct, was about 90 degrees counter-clockwise from the direction in which he had prayed originally.

Once, on Saturday, the chaplain came around to ask if Mustapha was Muslim (how did he guess?!). Mustapha said yes, of course. The chaplain then said he would put him down for Friday prayers, which I had to translate (“Freitag” followed by a little “🙏🏼” gesture). He then asked me “is Friday?”. I explained “no, Saturday — Samstag”. So he was not very oriented in time, let alone in space.

I asked him where he was from in Iran, and said I knew something of Iran because my sister’s girlfriend (he didn’t bat an eyelid at this, though possibly because he didn’t understand a word I was saying) was from Tehran (“tə-RAHN”). He reacted to that last word: “TEHR-AHN”. I remain unsure whether he was answering my question or just correcting my pronunciation, pleased to hear a word he knew.

It was also during this quiet, Mustapha-laden stretch that communications from outside began to percolate through the slow, waterlogged toils of the prison system. My mother sent an email urging me to take a place on the neurodiversity wing if offered, noting that, whatever my aversion to institutional labels, it would be a far more amenable environment. My Aunt Ud wrote to say she was dropping off clothes and books, recounting news of my cat Pig (whom she has cared for for some years) sleeping in a newspaper box in Harrow, and echoing (my aunt, not Pig) Mr Hussain’s legal advice to keep my head down and say nothing of my schooling or my sexuality (viz Abdulhakim supra).

At midday on Saturday, 5 September, my mum having used her doctorial powers to leave a note to the prison staff on my NHS record which a friendly South Rhodesian nurse had picked up (she and I had already made common cause over my grandpa’s experience of growing up in North Rhodesia and boarding in Johannesburg; possessed of a friendly, efficient Boer manner, she hooked me up with mometasone ointment and was sympathetic to my cause), I was transferred to the Neurodivergent Wing – more properly the Sunflower Wing – where I settled into a cell, alone, at the end of the wing.

(When Aaron was taken from me, he was expecting to go either to the detox wing or to this neuro wing. The alternative possibility was of course one of the general wings, riven by drugs and gangs. When I got to the neuro wing, the first thing I did was ask if Aaron was there. He was not. I was pissed off and embarrassed by this. Aidemon. That is all I will say.)

The whole wing was one short corridor, comprising maybe 10–15 cells and 15–20 prisoners at that point. Partly it was under-full, but also some prisoners were not felt able to share a cell, sometimes because of their crimes (as with Stephen, of whom more below), and sometimes because of how they behaved on the wing.

One example of the latter was the initial cellmate of 25-year-old Huck Kong Hughes, known to us all as Kong, sometimes King Kong (though he slightly resented this and it was limited to those who knew him well). Kong had several times awoken to find his cellmate (whom he had given the generally-preferred bottom bunk as a kindness) standing next to him, eyes level with him on the top bunk, and with a hand down his tracksuit bottoms. Understandably discomfited by this, he asked for a new cellmate.

So it was that I was moved to Kong’s cell, while Captain Underpants was moved to my cell, alone. Mildly peeved by the loss of my own cell, I joked that perhaps C.U. had merely been conspiring to render himself un-cellmate-able and therefore be given his own cell.

A gypsy (whereof more infra), Kong had previously robbed people at hammerpoint for their Rolexes in Mayfair. He said this when I mentioned having lived on Bond St with Damien – it was his only acquaintance with the area. He had got off because he had a good barrister (cf Mansaray, Tupac, J Crim Hist 2026). What had finally elicited his imprisonment was that he had an argument with his mother, punched a door, and caused some other damage, albeit not to her. He was locked up on remand awaiting trial. I mentioned that I expected my trial to fall apart, and he said hopefully that he expected the same. I said “I don’t know”, but privately suspected that was much too optimistic.

Kong was sweet and somewhat altricial, but also was on olanzapine and therefore sleepy much of the time. One day his olanzapine ran out and I was thrilled when he developed hives, which confirmed my expectations of what olanzapine withdrawal (the drug being antihistaminergic among many other things – a so-called MARTA, a multi-system sledgehammer) would look like in its minor aspects.

I introduced him to chess, which we played at first on his prison-issue laptop and later on a chess board in the common room. He picked it up remarkably quickly, except for the knight, which baffled him and which he persisted in moving in strange directions in which strictly one cannot move a knight. I suppose the logic of the knight is slightly complicated.

In exchange, he introduced me to a wonderful noodle marque, the great Ko-Lee GO Noodles Xtreme HOT & SPICY FLAVOUR.

After he gave me one of his packs, I strode into the common room and announced to him, his friend Stephen Willoughby, and another that these were officially the greatest of noodles.

They were amused, as often they were.

Kong and Stephen were both gypsies, and there was a bit of a gypsy mafia on our wing. Stephen, with Kong as second-in-command, ran the wing’s servery with a great proprietorial air, frequently doing battle with our greedy, slightly parasitic, bespectacled black prisonfellow Michael Bogle (in for shoplifting), who tried whenever he could to circumvent Stephen’s control of the servery and so procure for himself toast outside licit hours. On one occasion Michael succeeded in persuading one of our gaolers to let him into the servery, only for Stephen to detect the breach and sternly admonish both gaoler and Michael.

The servery was regularly confused by my vegetarianism, serving me halal meals instead on the apparent principle that it must be more or less the same (?). I am not a Muslim and do not eat meat, but I will say one thing for halal slaughter, which is that the animal must be killed by a serious, devout person saying the name of God. In other words the animal must be killed by someone, not something, and certainly not a process, a system, a framework, or a protocol. Halal prisons seem to me an idea worth investigating.

Stephen was in for over ten years (in actual expected years, not nominal ‘years’) after beating to the brink of death a man who molested his three-year-old daughter. I gave my frank opinion to Stephen that this was fair enough and that he shouldn’t have been in there, triggering an argument with another prisoner, Toby, a slightly dweeby but portly (everyone was portly) white guy in his twenties or thirties with a slightly “I have a law degree and know some things but will help you out” air to him, who explained patiently to me what the law said, while I tried to explain to him that the law was fucking daft, which he patiently and benevolently refuted by telling me the law said the law wasn’t daft (sigh).

I further expounded my theory of Stephen’s crimes when we were visited on Wednesday, September 8th, as we so often were, by the condescending benevolent upper-middle-class female Borg sent to educate the masculinity and justice out of us with ‘coping strategies’ and ‘walking away’ and so forth. I asked them whether my friend Lars should have ‘walked away’ when Serb snipers (hunters bussed in from Serbia proper for a nice sporting weekend, with darker and murkier reports of some ‘big game hunters’ flying in from abroad for this most dangerous game) were shooting civilians in Sarajevo. Lars in fact didn’t walk away — he darted among ruined buildings and between windows and vantage points and successfully shot and killed one of them, a day he described as one of the happiest of his life.

I asked whether Stephen should have walked away, whether we all must walk away, and what kind of world such semperexambulance would produce. I said the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 was ridiculous, explained the history of hybris, iniuria, and how the crime of assault was derivative of dignitary torts rather than the other way around — and, I would like to think, gave some succour to Stephen under that dreadful UMC female nose-sniffing onslaught.

We were also told the four ‘A’s of stress management. What they were I am pleased to report I don’t remember, for what I wrote down was:

• assault
• actual bodily harm
• Acuphase
• androsity

While I am here, I would not say prisoners took the view that nobody should be punished. I would say they had a harsher view of justice than most people on the outside. The standard Prison View™ was something like:

• sex criminals (serial rapists, sex murderers, child molesters, &c.) should be hanged
• most others should be whipped
• they themselves should be whipped gently, or not whipped

The traditional compact in England is that one relinquishes the right of vengeance to the King. What happens when the King does not exercise that right? I don’t know. Stephen happens, I suppose.

Apropos of ‘neurodivergent’: I took the view that this was a role we were expected to play, and so I tried to play it and to explain to others that they were required to play it. We had not been placed there because of brain scans, and it was made quite clear that violence, aggression, drug-taking, etc would result in our being taken off the wing. The compact was that we remain Mostly Harmless™, and, if we did, we received an Xbox 360 (with FIFA and Forza Horizon – mostly FIFA was played, but, having no understanding of football or FIFA and a deep nostalgia for Forza Horizon which I had played ambiently as a teenager, I preferred the latter), Therapy Dog (a Dandie Dinmont he-terrier named Potato, usually called by the apparent hypocoristic Spud, who was engaged in a long and Bogle-like quest for biscuits despite his owner’s heroic attempt to impose a diet), and general treatment as patients rather than agents or subjects. I was happy enough with this deal, as was my consultant psychiatrist mother who I suspect understood this but probably wouldn’t have described it quite so baldly.

Nonetheless, ‘neurodivergent’ did officially have a broad meaning and there were some who were probably quite genuinely neurologically divergent, for instance our wingmate Griffin who was morbidly overweight and had that slightly captive-bolt-stunned obtundedness and look of ultimately benevolent slight mischief that I associate with Down syndrome and such, though it wasn’t Down in his case. Possibly it was antipsychotics, but I suspect something of the perinatal-hypoxic-ischaemic flavour. When our lovely gaoler Mr Singh (an enthusiastic and athletic Sikh) challenged him to do sit-ups, I briefly wondered if it was decorticate posturing. (I hope he doesn’t read this, but I expect probably, like disconcertingly many people in prison, he cannot read. This I note as a reflection on our country and not on them, though in Griffin’s case it is perhaps not only a reflection on the country.)

We were also given laptops on the basis of a similar compact.

I confess that I lied in signing it, for I of course immediately began work on my memoirs, which I accordingly titled ‘Samizdat’. I lost the work when I left, but kept the title. (Sam-izdat, get it?)

I should also note that Aaron has a CVE to his name from finding holes in these Coracle laptops during a previous stay on the Sunflower Wing.

One day, after watching ‘Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’ on our Xbox and flat-screen TV (ah, to find oneself in the neurodivergent elite!) we were asked a series of questions about the film, which was apparently required so as to transform cinema into an Officially Sanctioned Edifying Activity™ in the eyes of prison management. Somehow these culminated in the great question: “What is your greatest regret in here? What would you have done differently?” I answered honestly: “Nothing.” Then, on a whim, I said that I regretted not following my grandfather’s advice to his daughters (“marry a fat man who whistles”) and instead chasing dark and brooding types. But I didn’t regret that, not really.

No, I regret that Parliament erred in 1861 and 1997, that Oli’s grandfather (Anthony Babington Wilson of Bradford-on-Avon, Som.) molested his daughter, and that Damien gravely failed Oli when he was at a moral turning-point. That is the extent of my regrets.

On Tuesday afternoon, 8 September, I left the cell I shared with Kong to share a cell with 22-year-old Finlay Riley, known to me as Finn, newly arrived from E wing (induction) after arriving at the prison on Saturday. He had arrived on the Sunflower Wing after saying he fancied a quiet time in prison where he wouldn’t be at risk of trouble or drugs – these were obviously the magic words, like ‘open sesame’, despite not having any kind of diagnosis or discernible psychiatrised traits. Immediately Finn insisted on tidying up our cell: scrubbing the air vents in the prison windows (comprised of a few double-glazed columns of window, book-ended by two columns with vents).

We then resolved to restructure the cell somewhat. There were two proper free-standing shelving units on the floor, staggeringly heavy (far beyond my or even his capacity to lift one on my/his own, and just barely possible to move a small distance between the two of us) and slightly wider than they were deep, i.e. not rotationally symmetric about the Z axis. These we stacked with the top unit rotated 90° towards the bed, so that it jutted out slightly into the room, but – and this was the main reason we rotated it – left a small strip of real estate atop the bottom unit, parallel to Finn’s lower bunk, where he could put tea or other items.

There was also a curtain rail on the ceiling. To hang curtains, Finn – six foot five – had to stand atop the sink, then climb onto one of the two cabinets (the only one that was movable, the bottom one being affixed to the floor) that we had relocated from next to the bed.

Finally we hung one of our Prison-Issue Orange Blankets™ (viz supra) over the high-up lamp on the left-hand wall, taping one side to the top with some 3M microporous surgical tape that Finn had nabbed from the staff room while in there for his induction onto the wing; the blanket hung loosely a couple of feet down, and we then fastened the bottom to the wall at a few points because the light was otherwise blinding; as it was, it cast a beautiful dappled orange glow over the room, like a Moroccan lamp.

We diced with death that evening. But we impressed one of our African gaolers when he stuck his head through the door – or was it the Caribbean whom Finn nicknamed Mr Sauce, in synecdochic reference to the ethnically insensitive vaudeville routine he performed from our cell door when summoning him?

(Finn observed that our Caribbean gaolers were much friendlier than the Africans. I joked that this was because we had bred the truculence out of the Caribbeans — perhaps a slightly un-PC treatment of the Middle Passage, though folk at Wandsworth were very un-PC on the whole. I remember Aaron, when watching ‘Deal or No Deal’, taking the piss out of a contestant named Ush. I cracked up when he joked that ‘Ush’ probably didn’t even mean anything in their own language — that the mother must have been asked what she wanted to call her child while still recovering from labour, and had coincidentally exclaimed ‘Ush!’, later despairing “I wanted to call her Natalie!”.)

Another benefit of having Finn as a cellmate was that, being 6'5" and enormously lanky, he was able to stretch his arm through the cell door and reach the control box next to the door, thus allowing us to manually enable the vaunted Nightlight Mode™. When combined with the blanket lamp, this created a très chic low-lit ambience, like a Shoreditch bar.

He could also, from this control panel, manually dismiss the bell. This was occasionally useful when we decided we no longer needed room service, though it caused our gaolers some confusion.

Slightly later, Finn tore out a maintenance panel situated behind our cell toilet to create a hidden alcove for brewing illicit prison alcohol. To keep the screws from discovering the breach during routine inspections, I drafted a poster to distract our gaolers, which read ‘NOTHING TO SEE HERE’ in large, friendly green lettering.

It succeeded in its task, for, when Mr Sauce arrived, he took no notice of the panel.

In other graffiti news, there now exists at HMP Wandsworth a single cell, X3–12, which has indited into the top bunk of its bed, in ball-point pen, a single word: Oliver.

Another side plot during this period concerned the effort to contact Finn’s girlfriend, Diana. He had been pacing up and down, disconsolate, fearing that she would be worried for him, while also fearing that she might not be worried for him. (Straight men and girlfriends are a permanent mystery to me.) I quoted Catullus at him – ‘otium tibi molestum est’ – and advised that we attack the problem of renovating our cell with renewed vigour – what I think psychoanalysts refer to as the defence mechanism of sublimation – and this we did awhile, but it did not work forever and eventually it was decided that we would call my mum and have her text Diana.

The problem was that Diana seemed to have ‘block unknown callers’ enabled on her phone and therefore wasn’t receiving the caller-ID-withheld confirmatory phone calls from Wandsworth to have her added to his restricted PIN. If one is on a MAPPA, as we stalkers were, there is a whole great song and dance around one’s becoming able to phone any given number, requiring approval which fast becomes impossible in a situation like Finn and Diana’s.

We therefore called my mum, who said that, having previously been grateful to receive news about me conveyed by Jordan Stephens’s ‘missus’ (…), she felt it was the least she could do to help Finn contact Diana. Finn later told me he loved my mum and wished he had a mum like mine.

She became fast friends with Diana, working with her to set her phone up correctly while carrying messages back to Finn, and ultimately setting up a makeshift conference call by putting her phone (on which Finn was calling) next to my aunt’s phone (who had dialled Diana) so the two of them would be able to talk while Wandsworth slowly processed her requested addition to Finn’s ‘PIN’ (i.e. his account with the prison phone system; his personal outbound number).

Despite the Sunflower Wing’s many advantages, one downside was that there existed only one phone, and in a common room, and so it was vulnerable to surveillance by the Africans. Eventually an African grew suspicious, so I scrawled my phone PIN (61537564) and my mum’s number on a piece of paper so Finn could call her himself alone.

I said I would return to the subject of situational homosexuality, and this seems as good a time as any. I did not encounter anyone who wanted to sodomise me. On the Sunflower Wing I tended to prefer the (usually disfavoured) top bunk, because the ceilings were high, and in view of this preference the (slightly nervous on the part of my cellmates, and cruel on the part of others) joke tended to be that I was ‘on top’, which amused me because it is not my nature and also hardly in my physical gift to insist on.

What I saw more was that the fear of perceived homosexuality led to an avoidance of physical intimacy and companionship that in previous generations would have been thought more naturally part of friendship. To wit, Finn seemed sweetly inclined to huddle up on my bed while teaching me blackjack, and on the beanbags in the common room while watching movies (yes, the Sunflower Wing was slightly ridiculous, at points more like a sixth form than a prison).

I say ‘sweetly’ though I had no particular desire to sodomise him or be sodomised by him, and it occurs to me that what we sunnily think of as the welcome development of companionate marriage could as easily be described as the annexation of companionship by marriage, or its iPod touch analogue ‘relationship’, which has expanded to fill everything while friendship has shrunk to mean apparently nothing besides periodically calling someone ‘darling’.

I suspect I got on better in prison for not being territorial. So much for Boundaries™, yet again.

No account of English prison life in the 21st century would be complete without an account of electrical engineering. This discipline was very advanced in prison, possibly more so than outside it. Prisoners rewired the televisions to run power to USB ports, so as to afford an extra point from which to charge their vape ‘batteries’ (the standard word for the actual unit, i.e. as distinct from the cartridge, or ‘cap’). They also rewired them so as to run their own antennae through the air vents in the windows and so receive more channels. The standard antennae were very strange and erratic, often glitching out when guards walked down the hallway.

The kettles too were disassembled and modified, e.g. to run continually when receiving power. This was done in order to use them for cooking, and, I think, for various drug related tasks. (Nicorette patches were given out – Aaron advised me to take advantage of this opportunity, which reportedly vanished if not taken during one’s first week of custody – which could then be used to manufacture ‘tobacco’ by heating them on a prison-issue plastic plate over the kettle, then mixing the resulting sludge with tea leaves emptied out of tea bags.)

Small phones the size of one’s thumb could be smuggled in from outside prison using drones, for a fee. These were designed so that they could be hidden in one’s rectum (apparently the standard place to hide things). I was also informed that iPhones could be smuggled in for £1000 (the RRP!), and I was pleased that nobody made the obvious joke about my being able to hide an iPhone Pro Max in my rectum.

Kong’s sister was involved in drone smuggling, and I am told that this involves piloting drones to cells with broken windows, with contraband suspended from cheese wire. The prison estate is surrounded with cameras, but at 3 a.m. it is obviously a tall order to notice a length of cheese wire moving across a CCTV screen; regardless, if one is awake at this witching hour, one can hear the sound of drones.

Kong even had a Lost Mary vape smuggled in by drone. I myself am partial to the Lost Mary BM6000, so it was nice to know that this was available in the English prison estate, as were heroin, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, tramadol, various benzodiazepines, and more besides.

And canteen. I must discuss the canteen. When one arrives in prison, one may choose between two options:

• one pack of vape caps (3x Moja pods, tobacco flavour only) plus a ‘starter kit’ featuring bread, biscuits, and other sundries
• two packs of vape caps

On my admission to Pentonville, I was a fool and chose the latter. On my admission to Wandsworth, I was interrogated by an olympically unpleasant black lady prison officer (who asked me whether I was white or black and, when I answered uncertainly as usual, shouted at me that I was white, how dare I say I was not white, I was obviously white, &c. &c., and didn’t take kindly to my tentative explanation that ‘black’ in British English was historically defined somewhat differently from the Americanised interpretation of that word, i.e. Afro-Caribbean … all of this leaving me to wonder why she bothered asking the question to begin with), and subsequently was slightly exhausted and forgot to ask for the first option instead of the second.

This left me under-fed for the first few days, though this was mitigated by the kindly canteen workers (prisoners), one of whom took such a liking to me that he chased after me to give me a bag with more food in it.

Despite this, one has not nearly enough food to begin with, and this was made worse by the fact that, having arrived on a Thursday (canteen, i.e. tuck, is processed on a Thursday, this being done by paper form at Pentonville and by digital kiosk at Wandsworth), I would not be able to submit my canteen order until the subsequent Thursday, to be delivered by the Thursday after that.

To compensate for this calendrical clusterfuck there exists a system of ‘emergency canteen’, whereby one can order specifically the vapes and the starter pack ‘out of hours’, but only once one has been there for a week (or perhaps not – more anon).

This Finn and I tried all week (Mon to Thu) to order, Finn handling this with diligence befitting a corporate PA, summoning several Africans (he was far better able to distinguish the Africans than I was) in the hope that at least one of them would submit the form. He then periodically summoned them to ask if they had submitted the form yet, and, when they said that they had not, he said “no worries, I’ll check again before you leave at [whenever their shift ended – he had kept track of this]”. He told me that this technique reliably got things done, but sometimes resulted in the relevant official telling him “oh, yes, we received five different emails from different people about your matter”. Finn related this with some pride.

Despite Finn’s diligence, though, there was some confusion about whether emergency canteen could be submitted only in one’s first week or only after one’s first week. Fortunately, since I had arrived on Thursday and Finn on Saturday, we had our bets hedged, at least between Thursday and Saturday. Or so we thought. In the end it took until Thursday for the CM (the seniormost gaoler charged with approving the form) to arrive on the wing, and he then said, for reasons I still cannot remember and did not comprehend, that he would not approve emergency canteen for either of us, i.e. the system managed to produce neither of the two possible results.

I should note here that I was lucky to have people on the outside sending money in. Those who didn’t, like Aaron, received a measly £5 per week from the state, of which 50p per day was subtracted for the non-optional cell television, leaving £1.50 per week in spending money unless they had a job, which was not always possible.

Fortunately, that same afternoon – Thursday, September 10th – my release came through from the Crown Court in absentia, my lawyer and family having appealed the magistrates’ incorrect decision.

The bail sheet was served on me, and I signed the conditions: to reside at Osterode (my grandma’s house), wear a GPS tag, report three times a week to the local police station with my phones unlocked, abstain from visiting Upper Mall in Hammersmith (the Chernys’ road), and maintain total non-contact with Oliver Babington-Wilson (mangled as usual into BABBINGTON, another preferred mangling being BARBINGTON which I note is not even a homophone), Heather Agatha (mangled as before into HEATHER AGETHER, our dear old police not being proficient in Greek), and Sam Cherny (mangled anew as SANCHEZ, having not appeared in previous conditions – God save our mangling police!).

Poor Mr Hussain will on 24 September face another fresh-faced prosecutor who materialised five minutes ago in Westminster Magistrates’ Court to perform the “I am newborn baby, what is missing disclosure?” routine. The magistrates will find the baby adorable, offer it biscuits, and roll over, perhaps to January or the heat death of the universe.

I was also amused at how many times different prison officers asked me to confirm my name, date of birth, cell number, prisoner number, etc before releasing me, after several well-known recent incidents involving their fucking up and releasing the wrong people.

I must tell you that shortly before I was released, my good friend Stephen was kicked off the Sunflower Wing for shouting at Captain Underpants, who had responded rudely to Stephen’s request for help unpacking some newly-arrived supplies into the storage cupboard. It wasn’t immediately obvious how Stephen was in the wrong, but Captain Underpants had broken down in tears, which of course had been the Neurodivergent™ thing to do. Qui lacrimat vincit, I said jokingly to Stephen – who cries wins. (To wit: Oli has previously shown off footage of my arrest, as if running crying to the police represented some sort of Iliadic eukhos.)

I don’t mean to make prison sound all bad, for it was not. I will fondly remember looking out of our newly-cleaned cell window, with cool night air drifting through its newly-cleaned vents, our blanket-lamp casting its warm, dappled, orange light over the cell, and asking Finn (me, not the lamp) “really, is it not quite cosy here in prison? nothing can get to us!”.

I was sorry to say goodbye to Finn. But as our lovely gaoler Mr Singh arrived to take me off, another gaoler arrived to tell him he too had been given bail out of nowhere. He came with me and left at the same moment. So that was nice.

— Sam Robinson-Adams