Well that’s two months since I arrived here. It seems like quite a landmark – a quarter of the way through my sentence. I have mixed feelings about that…one one hand I feel so pleased that I’m still enjoying every day. I have discovered the joys of “garden design”. I’m happy to have found something that keeps me enthralled for hours on end, and that will help me to earn a living when I’m released from prison. For the last week I have spent eight hours a day setting myself different design challenges and using the Plant Encyclopaedia that my dad sent me to be horticulturally creative. In light of this, the rest of the sentence doesn’t seem particularly daunting. On the other hand, there is a significant part of me that, bizarrely, doesn’t want it to end. Being locked up for 23 and a quarter hours a day (yes, he Coronavirus restrictions have ramped up a couple of times since I last wrote!) gives me an odd sense of “enforced freedom…freedom to choose what to study, and to take as much time as I like to study it. There are no deadlines, no distractions. I even have all my meals provided and all my clothes washing done for me. I have all the time in the world. Surely these are the conditions hat could either make or break a person and I know which of these two outcomes I’d prefer.

I imagine two forces acting on me – one from my right and one from my left: From my right, I feel the love and laughter of friends and family, expressed in the letters and emails that I received daily. (I have even received kind letters from people I barely know, including the priest of the church where I used to attend a youth club as a teenager, and several people from my parents church.). This force is warm and gentle. If I were to give it a colour, it would be yellow…orange…sometimes brilliant white. It glows inside me and fills my body to the tips of my fingers. It makes me smile. It allows me to stand upright and to see the horizon.

From the left, I feel something very different – it sucks the air away from me, and draws the colour out of me. It is in the voices of other inmates as they shout and taunt and belittle and threaten one another. But above all, it is in the cold, black words of the prison officer who insults me (and others) at every opportunity.

In my case, the comments are about the letters that I receive, the study that I do, and my attempts to advocate for more vulnerable prisoners. Yesterday, as he opened my mail in front of me, I received a barrage of disparaging remarks, delivered with his characteristic mocking tone:

HIM: “See these?” (He holds up my letters, shaking his head.) “Some guys don’t seem to realise where they are. This is a fucking jail you’re in.” (He opens one, which contains a printed lesson in ‘How to Draw’.)

ME: “I’m just trying to learn as much as I can while I’m in here.”

HIM: “What, like how a prison works?? You should have learned how not to get in here, that’s what you should have learned.”

ME: “I’m learning things that will help me get on in life once I’m out of here – to help with a profession.”

(He opens two more letters and speaks to another prisoner, who is standing nearby.)

HIM: “You’d think they didn’t even know they were in a prison. Maybe this coronavirus will reduce their numbers a bit.”

It’s sad to me that much of the humour that the prison officers use is based around subjugating and belittling prisoners. It’s hard to know whether they are genuinely cruel and uncaring, or whether it’s simply that they don’t know any other way to ‘banter’ with the prisoners.