I scream Kony

As someone who once did something, people occasionally come to me asking me to promote worthy things and, because I am a living saint, I generally do. Sometimes I spend literally seconds of my own time crafting a nifty tweet about someone who's being sponsored to race pigeons for their local library. No need to thank me. Generally I reckon this can't do any harm, and it might just dull the edge of my otherwise keen prickishness.

Today it was the turn of Invisible Children, a group whose moving video about the horrors of the child soldiers in Africa has recently gone viral. To make up for all the kittens I beat to death with a baseball bat this week, I sat and watched the whole video. It's good. You should watch it. I learned things. Not all of those things were true. So you should also read this.

The video is brilliantly made, at once moving and empowering. So I tweeted about it, because I'm a bad muthafucka, and no children are getting enslaved and forced to fight while I'm at my keyboard. More to the point, though the entire thing smacked of liberalism, and the video had made disquieting noises about "intervention", I felt it did it's job pretty well: I'd been forced to care about an important issue I was largely ignorant of before.

Yet while the video works well as a metaphorical call to arms, it also works worryingly well as a literal call to arms. Invisible Children want the U.S. to militarily intervene in Uganda. In this they've already had some success, despite the fact that Joseph Kony left Uganda several years ago. While the video is at pains to point out that killing Kony isn't in the U.S.'s financial or strategic interest, it's probably worth viewing any Ugandan military adventures in the context of the recently discovered oil fields near Lake Albert - along with deposits cobalt, diamonds and many other covetous things. Chinese and American colonial interests have been competing in Africa for some time now and, while I would hate to be cynical, I think Obama may have more than the kids in mind when he sent boots abroad.

Still, I don't want to get too bogged down in the rights and wrongs of military intervention in Uganda (spoiler: I think it's a bad idea) because, as disingenous as I find this campaign, it worked. Once I tweeted the rapturous half hour piece of propaganda I was inundated with people pointing me to the problems with the campaign, and wider reading on the issue. I got into a Twitter debate on the right way to deal with a problem which, an hour ago, I didn't know existed. My awareness: raised.

I don't think this lets the campaign off the hook - trying to start a war is a pretty reckless way of trying to start a debate, and it seems like some of the people in charge might be assholes - but it remains the case that the campaign succeeded where duller, more accurate sources failed. The credit for this desperately unimportant but oft reproduced victory belong to Invisible Children. It belongs to the vibrant exchange of social media itself #socmedfanboy.

I can't finish this blog with a firm conclusion. I think that Joseph Kony must be stopped, and raising awareness, or at least making him famous for being a dickhead, seems like a good idea. Yet the whole thing also smacks of white man's burden, it's also patronising and simplistic. I don't know how to stop Kony. But at least now I know who he is.

P.S. the best website on why Invisible Children might be bullshit is visiblechildren.tumblr.com/

Murder she rode

When it comes to distracting from inquiries, I'm a bit of an accidental expert. Which is why, when I encountered the spectacle of a horse galloping all over Leveson’s headlines, something smelled fishy. This fishy horse then began ringing alarm bells when I noticed that smarter people than me had spotted some utterly explosive revelations in that day’s evidence - revelations which one might have expected to be big news, had an equine usurper not taken the lead.

The testimony of Jacqueline Hames – available here – is as bizarre as it is damning. The whole thing is worth a read, but the relevant section runs from part 30 onwards. While reading the following story, you might like to imagine the various characters played by the cast of Channel 4’s Red Riding, if you watched it, which you probably didn’t, because it was shit.

In 1987 a private investigator called Daniel Morgan was murdered with an axe and later found dead in the back of a car. The investigation fell apart when it turned out that several cops on the murder squad had dealings with the private investigation firm (Southern Investigations) Morgan worked for, and that Morgan's business partner and chief suspect in the murder, Jonathan Rees, was good friends with investigating officer Sid Fillery. After the investigation collapsed, Fillery took early retirement and went into business with Rees.

I’ll give you all a moment to think libelous thoughts.

Done? Good. I think so too.

Morgan’s family understandably brought a complaint, and the case was reopened four separate times. In 2002 an appeal was made on the BBC’s vaguely fascist nightmare inhibitor Crimewatch offering big cash prizes to anyone who had any information. As a result, both Jacqueline Hames, then a Crimewatch presenter, and David Cook, who was the “public face” of the investigation were put under surveillance by Southern Investigations and, weirdly, the News of the World. Upon discovering this, both officers were placed under the witness protection programme. The police also decided to have a chat with Rebekah Brooks, NotW editor and future borrower of horses.

Ms Brooks claimed that the two had been put under surveillance as the NotW suspected them of having an affair. This was hardly groundbreaking journalism as, by the time the surveillance began, the couple had been together for 11 years, married for 4, were living with each other and had two kids.

In Ms Hames opinion, she and her husband were put under surveillance as part of an attempt to intimidate them out of further investigating the death of Daniel Morgan. I cannot begin to speculate on why the NotW would do this, mainly because I don’t want to end up in court again.

One person who can speculate is Tom Watson, who used his parliamentary privilege to suggest a strong connection between murder suspect Jonathan Rees and NotW journalist Andy Marunchak. According to Watson, Rees’ company paid Marunchak’s debts, and the two had businesses registered to the same address. Watson also alleges that, a week before he was found with an axe in his head, Daniel Morgan approached Andy Marunchak with a story about police corruption.

For what it’s worth (very little) Andy Marunchak vigorously denies these allegations. Yet for all his bluster, and all Brooks’ equine obfuscation, it’s clear that there may be a lethally cozy relationship between pigs, PIs and Fleet Street.

The Justice For Daniel campaign is online here and here.

In defence of Eric Pickles

Maggie Thatcher, comin' atcha!

On Friday night I joined several of my more virulently radical comrades at a showing of Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady. The film split opinions amongst my our little gang of leftists. Perhaps this is predictable - any film about the perennial hate pin-up and sometime Prime-Minister was always going to be controversial. Yet I ended the night wondering why so many of my friends so disliked what was, at worst, a fairly harmless film.

The occasionally unseemly battle for Thatcher’s legacy has been in full swing since she left office, but undoubtedly found new legs when Gordon Brown tried to forestall allegations of sense by suggesting the old brute be treated to a state funeral. Since then the tug of war over how Thatcher should be remembered has become rather ill mannered on both sides. This film, by contrast, seeks to explore Thatcher as though this fierce contest did not exist: portraying her primarily as a frail old woman, her mind leaving her, consumed by visions of the past. The response has been predictable. Miners wives have formed pickets outside cinemas showing the flick, while the Prime-Minister himself has said that he believes that “this film is wrong at a time when Thatcher is still going on” (or something like that).*

Shortly after seeing it, I described the Iron Lady as “Downfall without the happy ending”. I wasn’t just doing this to wave an anti-Thatcher flag (though my anti-Thatcher flag is lovely and ripples beautifully when unfurled in the current political winds). While Thatcher is a more controversial and divisive figure than Adolf Hitler, both films seek to paint their protagonists as human, contrary to the instincts of the audience. Whether she is lionized or demonized, Thatcher is almost never seen as just a person, making flawed choices at the centre of a corrupt and compromised system.

A lot of us on the left would have enjoyed watching Thatcher portrayed as a bloody-fanged tyrant, warped with un-earned power. Such a portrayal would have reinforced our historic assumptions about her, but it would not have done much good beyond that. Thatcher the monster may be how we’d like her to be portrayed, but the sense of the superhuman that invokes serves our opponents, too. Great leaders (in either sense) must appear larger than their subjects. By robbing her of this quality, the film robs her of that which would excuse her more criminal behavior – from sinking the Belgrano, to letting Irish dissidents starve to death in her care.

In her life and career, Thatcher always sought to portray herself as above conventional criticism. This may be one of the factors that has allowed our rhetoric (in, for example, wishing death on an old woman) to surpass what is normally acceptable. If the person you are attacking is not truly human, what you say about them does not need to conform to human standards of decency. I have said abhorrent things about Thatcher (not more abhorrent than, say, threatening a nuclear strike on Argentina, but still) and felt entitled to do so, for this very reason. After watching this film, I wonder if that this natural approach is the right one.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should feel one iota of sympathy for the vile old bat. Indeed, seeing her losing her mind to one of the most unpleasant diseases imaginable only made me yearn even more for the moment she’ll be put out of her misery. Yet I’m reminded of the time, a little way into George Bush’s junior's second term, when a startling and terrifying revelation hit me. Of the two caricatures we had made of this reprehensible man – of a malevolent despot and a buffoon – only one was close to the truth. We truly had an idiot in charge of the free world. The moral judgment we were making of him were not relevant, as he did not have the capacity to be otherwise. Perhaps we should come to see Thatcher as the same – not evil, just catastrophically wrong – and save our energy for undoing the damage she’s done.

The XXX Factor

For everything that is undeniably shit about now, we still live in an incredible age. A hundred years ago, in polite company, it was considered lude for a woman to show her ankles. Fifty years ago, in the UK, two men could be prosecuted and imprisoned for having consensual sex. Less than ten years ago, three or more men still couldn’t fuck without risking jail time, which must have been terribly awkward when it came time to decide who got to go first and who had to wait their turn in the corridor. Today, we live in a world where thousands of sexual sub-cultures flourish. We’ve gone from the love that dare not speak its name to a Britain where, no matter how awesomely obscure your fetish is, you can share and celebrate your sex with likeminded people online. People don't need to be alone any more - even the most inventive pervert can find people to share support, advice and bodily fluids with. Which is why the trial R v Peacock was an obscene relic of a bygone age.

The act on trial wasn’t sex. It was the depiction of sex. Obscenity laws over half a century old were wielded against a man who had the temerity to sell DVDs of adults consensually doing things which were not, themselves, illegal. It would be wrong to say that nobody was getting hurt – in many cases the whole object was to inflict pain in a manner that, when coupled with a careful combination of theatre and trust, would transmute itself into ecstasy for all the parties involved. Or, to put it more bluntly, the men were shoving their hands up each others arses, pissing in each others mouths and using each others inflated balls as punching bags, and having a brilliant time doing it.

I’ll happily admit that the detailed descriptions of these acts, tweeted from the courtroom, made me feel squeamish on several occasions. But so what? Each time I so much as hear about X Factor I’m overcome with a deep, nauseous sense of despair, but for some reason I can’t fathom, nobody ever suggests banning it. Which is odd as, if you live in Britain with functioning eyes, you’re pretty much forced to know about X Factor, but anal fisting mostly keeps itself to itself. If men were having their urethras dilated on the cover of More magazine, or the screams of men having their bollocks electrocuted was Christmas number one, I might understand the prosecution. Instead, Simon Cowell’s abomination (the show’s pre-production title) assaults me at every turn, while my first knowledge of Michael Peacock’s sex life came from his trial.

That graphic depictions of extreme sex had to be shared in order to try a man for sharing graphic depictions of extreme sex is, to say the least, ironic. Perhaps, under the circumstances, everyone involved in the case, including Peacock himself, should be immediately arrested if a verdict of guilty is delivered. Of course, the graphic descriptions of graphic descriptions required to try this new batch of obscenators would themselves be obscene and the resulting cascade of larger and larger trials would grow like a judicial version of The Blob, till every man, woman and child in Britain is being tried for obscenity.

Thankfully, that now looks unlikely (even more so, I mean). In the last few minutes, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. This will be a blessed relief for all decent human beings, and a blood vessel bursting nightmare for Daily Mail readers. Win-win.

Still, despite his acquittal, Michael Peacock has been severely punished for not committing a crime. The vagaries of the process itself – the soul-churning moment of arrest, the months of worry that followed, the endless meetings with lawyers (though the firm that represented him, Hodge Jones and Allen, are as awesome a group of people as you could ever hope to meet, and have gotten me out of a tight spot on more than one occasion) are all deeply stressful and costly events. These are standard ways the process punishes people, but in Peacock’s case they were coupled with revelations about his private life which must have been excruciating. Even the most vanilla of you probably wouldn’t want your mum hearing every detail of what you do in bed, particularly not if you were telling her from the dock. This may be why Peacock was the first person to plead not guilty and opt for a trial by jury, an act of heroism for which he will be derided in the press as a pervert. Sensible folks (that’s us) should now turn the spotlight round and ask the perennial question: what the fuck were the police playing at?

I can understand why the obscenity law remains on the statute: when penned in 1959 it was actually a liberalizing bill, and reducing but not eliminating the scope for what could be considered obscene must have seemed like common sense in a UK that had yet to witness the 60s. It has not been politically expedient to repeal or reform the bill since because, while the bulk of politicians behavior is obscene, publically calling for more obscenity has rarely won anyone an election. However, lots of laws are rarely, if ever, enforced. Even if I walked into Scotland Yard and confessed that I’d never picked up a bow in my life, I’d be more likely to be charged with wasting police time than failing to keep up with my mandatory archery practice.

So why spend police resources on Michael Peacock? His prosecution was no accident, police did not discover the obscenity while investigating a more heinous crime. Instead, a squad that exists specifically to bother people about their private lives targeted him by sending an undercover cop to buy his DVDs. Yet the police’s story doesn’t quite add up – they claim they came across Peacock’s services via Craigslist and decided to look into them, but the prosecution, by way of suggesting he set out to corrupt people, described his ad as offering “innocent” porn. Where, then, did the police get the idea that they should be sending officers into the home of a young gay man and looking for reasons to arrest him?

The not guilty verdict will hopefully discourage the police and CPS from future shenanigans, but with a dedicated “extreme pornography” squad looking to justify their budget, and many previous defendants choosing to plead guilty rather than have their fetishes publicized in a court room, one has to suspect that the nonsense will continue. The verdict today suggests that many of those previously convicted were effectively blackmailed into a guilty plea. While we’ll never know exactly how the jury made their deliberations, the fact they took less than two hours to consider their verdict suggests they sat down, said “well, this is fucking silly” and sent for the clerk.

Unlike some people, I believe obscenity exists and I believe the crown’s definition of "that which corrupts and depraves” is actually a good one. Like anything pleasurable, pornography can be addictive, and addiction corrupts anyone afflicted by it. Depravity, to me, is treating people like objects, and pornography surely can do that too. Yet the law is obsessed with depravity only when it is also erotic, and seeks to protect only our sexual morals from corruption. When people bay for the blood of strangers, or debase themselves for a moment of fame, the state stays curiously silent.

In other words, if we're going to ban people from watching things that we think are weird and bad for them then, please, for the sake of my sanity, let's start with the fucking X Factor, and let people cum in peace.

Pride and Privilege

Yesterday I displayed my talent for sticking not only my foot but my entire shin and part of my upper thigh in my mouth by going on Twitter and implying that I thought having an abortion was a privilege. Give the last few words in that sentence a read back just so you can get a feel for how much of a preposterous bellend I must have seemed. Those weren’t the words I used but, in bursts of under 140 characters, I gave a lot of people the impression that’s what I thought. I’m not going to pick through every tweet that made up the back and forth (because it would be boring and petty and take forever, and I don’t think that the people I offended or who offended me necessarily want to be namechecked). Instead, here’s what I was trying to say.

First, having to decide what to do about an unwanted pregnancy is an experience that could range from inconvenient to soul-destroying, but it’s never going to be good. Even so, I think that having that choice is a privilege. It’s not a privilege like going to Eton or owning a fancy hat, both of which are reportedly fun. It’s the kind of privilege where you have something other people don’t and, if it doesn’t make your life better, it at least makes it less bad. I have lots of privileges - from my race, my gender, my class and the various intricacies of my circumstances. My situation is not one to complain about, and I’m not. That said, the fact remains that having that level of reproductive autonomy is a privilege I don’t have.

Usually my instinct when I think of the few ways that the hand I’ve been dealt doesn’t play well is to shut up about them. To do otherwise is like whining that your Ferrari doesn’t handle well once you get it over 90. This time I made an exception for a few reasons. For a start, we were discussing why men should take safe sex seriously, and so I pointed out (in words much less well chosen than the ones I’m about to use) that the moment of intercourse is the only time a man gets to exercise his reproductive autonomy. In some ways, I argued, it makes the pregnancy-related risks of unprotected sex greater for men than for women. Obviously, those ways don’t include the physical risks of bearing a child, and the psychological impact of a termination is never going to be as great for someone who doesn’t have to experience the procedure themselves. But for men, unsafe sex is an all-or-nothing gamble. Yes, your sexual partner might make the same choice you would have. Or they might not. Either way, it isn’t up to you, and you could become a parent (or be party to an abortion) against your will.

The idea that becoming a parent might be a big deal for men was a problematic one for some people. Men, I was told repeatedly, can just walk away. That women have the same option (after birth) but instead largely choose termination instead was a fact left absent from the debate. Some women will choose abortion because as well as not wanting a child, they don’t want a pregnancy either, particularly as pregnancy might create societal or psychological pressures that would make it harder to “walk away”, perhaps even too hard to manage. Surely another reason women choose termination is that they don’t want to create a person who they can’t look after. They don’t want to accidentally give someone a bad life, they don’t want the emotional trauma of never knowing what happened to the person they weren’t there for and they don’t want to always wonder if they’ll, somehow, walk back into their lives with all kinds of fair but impossible questions to ask. That men, as well as women, might not want these things was not a concept the debate entertained. In fact, the only reference that was made to men’s responsibilities as parents concerned child support – which men get away without paying. At one point, I was told, that if a man didn’t want a baby, then he shouldn’t have had unprotected sex – an ugly thing to say when then same argument was once used to deny women the right to an abortion. The implication as times was that, once a man had gotten unprotected sex (it’s always men who want unprotected sex, of course. Women couldn’t possibly enjoy it too) he’d had everything he wanted from her. To ask to take an interest in what happened to his sperm after that was, frankly, a little odd, even suspicious, yet another way men had discovered to hurt women, this time by impinging on their territory as mothers.

Reading the above list back, I don’t know how much of it was really being implied, and how much I was projecting the prejudices of a patriarchal society onto people. It was surely a little of both.

Good points were made: some thought I was suggesting women’s reproductive autonomy, as a privilege, should be stripped away or given to men. I wasn’t: women’s reproductive autonomy should be absolute, even at the expense of men’s. This trade off of rights is bad, but it’s the only system that makes any kind of sense. Until we become post-human, reproductive rights are not something both genders can have.

Others said that exercising bodily autonomy couldn’t be a privilege as it was actually a right. I think it’s both. As a white male I can walk down a street relatively unmolested by cops and totally unmolested by perverts, except for those occasions when cops are also perverts. These things are obviously rights; what sucks is that the rights of women and people of colour aren’t respected like mine are. Likewise, my ablist privilege allows me to walk and talk and do all manner of things with my hands. It’s my right to do these things, my bodily autonomy, my choice. The solution to these privileged rights isn’t to cut off my hands or break my legs (though I imagine if I chose to stop talking, there’d be plenty of support around). It’s to be as aware as I can of my advantages and how what I say and do might affect those who don’t have them.

When you tell people they have a privilege – particularly one which is inherent like those based on race or gender – people often react in the same way. They’ll deny that the privilege exists, or dismiss the examples cited as rare and unrepresentative, even if the person they’re talking to has experienced them personally, many times. They’ll also suggest that their privilege in this instance should be discounted, as there are many times when they are denied privilege due to membership of the group in question, or because other groups have privilege over them in different circumstances (why not use the comments section to accuse me of doing this? I literally don’t have a response! Also, check out these total asshats*). Finally, they might tell you that the privilege itself is somehow a burden, that being rich won’t make you happy for example, and so, really, you’re silly to want it too. I did all these things the first time I was told I had privilege, and like a karmic boomerang I met all these stances again yesterday. That people reacted like they had privilege doesn’t make my analysis right, but coming from people whose analysis of privilege, including their own, should have been sharp it was disappointing. When a woman told me that I should be glad I’d never have to choose whether or not to have an abortion, I lost my cool and told her she was being insensitive and that she should check her privilege. Which was the first time I’d actually used the word, and also the moment Twitter fucksploded in my face.

It probably didn’t help the level of shittyness in the ensuing shitstorm that I was a man telling (mostly) women they were wrong, a position traditionally held by dicks. As the debate got more heated and newcomers came, I did little to assuage anyone of the belief that I, too, was a dick. I’ve apologized to some people personally, and I didn’t fight a one-way battle, but to any and all I was rude to, I’m sorry. The reason, along perhaps with tiredness, is that the hypothetical experiences of the hypothetical men that were being belittled were actually my own. I didn’t tell people this during the conversation. I don’t why I didn’t and I don’t know if I should have. A decade ago I was the expectant father of a child about whom I didn’t get to choose. It was one of the most terrifying and lonely times in my life, particularly because I was still a teenager. I didn’t try to change my partner’s mind – it was her body and her choice. I didn’t walk away from the situation, either, as men apparently are expected to do. I stayed around and raised the child we had made. My life was very, very different as a result. It was a long time ago now, I don’t resent the person who made that choice about my life, and I love my son very much, but having that experience treated as trifling and irrelevant was deeply unpleasant. It triggered old feelings. I’m told this kind of thing happens to women and people of colour a lot when they try to explain lack of privilege to people like me.

I think we all have privileges, and privileges can and do come from membership of groups which, overall, are not privileged. Everyone being privileged does not change the fact that some people are much, much more privileged than others. What it does do is help us find our place in the world, and use the advantages we have to help make it a little more like we’d like it to be.

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Edit:


Since posting this last night several people have pointed out that reproductive autonomy isn't a privilege enjoyed by all women. Around the world women have this right taken away from them, frequently by men. Even in rich, liberal democracies the right to abortion is not assured. It can be taken away by Governments (for example in Ireland) religious movements (the U.S.) or coercion (violent or otherwise) by partners, family and so-called friends (anywhere).

As a result of these facts it has suggested that it is incorrect (and also unhelpfully divisive) to call reproductive autonomy female privilege. I don't think I used that term anywhere, but the gendered language I did use clearly implied it along the way. This is frustrating, as I was, in part, trying to demonstrate how privilege does not respect the lines we have drawn between ourselves, though it may favour one side of the line more than the other. In this context, to have implied reproductive autonomy equals female privilege is an epic fail.

It's fascinating that reproductive autonomy could be a function of almost any type of group privilege depending on the context: gender privilege (male or female), class privilege, racial privilege, cultural privilege, ablist privilege, hetero privilege, and sis privilege. In fact you need at least four of these, in some combination or another, to achieve reproductive autonomy, yet the only one that is absolutely necessary is (some form of) ablist privilege (assuming you want to have a baby with your own genetic material).

Though there's membership of no single group guarantees full reproductive autonomy, there are several whose membership all but guarantee you'll never lose it entirely. Here, unsurprisingly, the familiar hierarchies come back into play: while women can face rape or forced marriage, a man who chooses to wear a condom is very unlikely to completely lose his reproductive autonomy. This assumes he can afford condoms of course, and class is another privilege which pretty effectively safeguards against total reproductive disempowerment. Likewise, being a western Caucasian significantly reduce your chances. In the end, it's sobering to realise that, even with a privilege this nuanced and complex, rich white men are still the safest people on earth.

Whose farm? Their farm!

Do you like having somewhere to live? I know I do. In fact, I like living somewhere so much I think that everyone should do it. If you feel the same, you might like to come down to Dale Farm and help stop several hundred people from being kicked out of their homes. I did, and can tell you that as well as being the right thing to do, it’s also amazing, life-affirming and (I probably shouldn’t tell you this bit) fun.

My girlfriend and I arrived at Dale Farm late on Sunday night. As we walked down the road to the site we were flanked by friend and foe on either side. To our right, gypsies from the legally occupied part of Dale Farm greeted us warmly with smiles and thank yous. To our left, a mist was rising through the floodlit field occupied by the bailiffs who have, ironically, built themselves a shiny new compound without any planning permission.

Despite the friendly welcomes from residents I felt uncomfortable and awkward as I walked through the gate. I remembered that, despite proudly declaring my anti-racist sentiments at 16, I made an exception for gypsies, whose lifestyles I felt were selfish and destructive. In the last few weeks I’ve discovered one in three people still hold the same views as I did as a child, probably for the same reason I did – because they’ve never actually met any. I like to think I’m much less ignorant and intolerant now, but my trip into Dale Farm still represented a kind of first contact. As such, I was surprised by how normal it all was. Dale Farm is a community like any other – houses, streets, families. My discomfort at the implicit racism my own sense of surprise revealed was mixed with shock and rage at what was planned for the next day – a full on £18m assault on this place, paid for with taxpayers money.

Only a few things stand out as different about Dale Farm. The first is the shrines dotted here and there – most of the residents are devoutly Catholic, but despite my own agnostic fundamentalism debating the reality of transubstantiation felt like an argument for another day. The second is that Dale Farm is a real community – everyone knows everyone else, the kids run around freely, their parents safe in the knowledge that they will be looked after by their friends who are also their neighbours. In fact, seeing how the gypsies live made me a jealous - I live as part of a community, but I don’t live in a community. Once you see the difference it’s easy to understand why they resisted the council’s offer of limited, scattered council housing. If someone wanted to move you away from everyone and everything you knew and loved, you’d resist too.

Enough about cultural differences – what’s really exciting on Dale Farm is how thoroughly they’re overcome. The activists are spread throughout the campsite, but their main HQ, nicknamed camp constant, has a lovely kitchen and campfire around which activists and gypsies gather together to chat, eat and get a little tipsy in the evening. When we arrived there people were sorting themselves into groups and finding roles. My role was that of a medic. I was not entirely happy about this. I’ve done action medic training but, as a wimp, I’ve conspicuously avoided using it before. I got together with a few more experienced action medics and brushed up on the finer points of keeping people alive until I felt a bit more relaxed about the whole thing.

Many of the gypsies opened their homes to the activists but some of us slept in tents dotted round the site ready for the big day. We were expecting the eviction to begin as early as 8 AM so the morning was filled with activity – building barricades, scouting the perimeter, playing up to or avoiding cameras. I was surprised that, despite the fact they were under siege, I saw the gypsy children being sent off to school like it was any other day.

As I was helping construct one of the barricades one of the women came up to us asking us to help her clear some rubbish from her plot. It was a surreal experience – here she was with the hammer of eviction hanging over her head and she was busily making sure the place was clean and tidy. She was obviously distressed. As we piled the rubbish up she told us that she couldn’t read and write – her three children were the first in her family to be able to do so. Why had the council given them an education only to take it away again? I hadn’t got an answer. “People hate you” isn’t something you want to tell a woman on the verge of tears.

Just after lunchtime a shout went up that the bailiffs were coming. We rushed down to the front gate ready for the worst. Barricades, lock-ons and a massive concrete-filled car called “the beast” were in place ready to deter any potential onslaught. Things were tense but it was a good kind of tension, spirits were high and the scaffolding was filled with activists and gypsies singing, chanting slogans and ready to resist.

The bailiffs, flanked by cops (who are, of course, neutral and only there to keep the peace), arrived at the gate. Despite the council’s £18m budget they appeared to have bought themselves a megaphone from Toys R Us. They warbled something vague about health and safety then asked us if we’d like to fuck off quietly so that it didn’t cost them too much more money. We politely declined their offer.

To everyone’s surprise the bailiffs then wandered dejectedly back to their own compound. The firm, Constant & Co, has a reputation for nasty, violent evictions, and they specialize in providing solutions to what they terrifyingly refer to as “the gypsy problem”. Constant & Co even designed their website so it’s one of the first to come up when you type the word “pikey” into Google. They are, without doubt, an unalloyed armada of cunts.

Once the unstoppable force of bigotry having met with the immovable object of health and safety legislation, everything calmed down for an hour or two. Then a huge cheer went up. The fog of war being what it is I spent a good five minutes running around like a circus giraffe before I heard the good news – a last minute high court injunction had forestalled the eviction for at least a few more days. The mood was jubilant, the sound system was pumping and gypsy and activist alike were going cheerfully mental.

The next night there was a huge meeting between everyone on site. The solidarity between the gypsies and activists was incredible. The main debate was about whether to open the gate. Many activists thought it was a bad idea, but all agreed that the final decision belonged to the gypsies. “But we don’t want to be forcing you to do anything” opined one gypsy woman “the last thing we want is someone ringing up the Sun and saying we’re keeping you all here as slaves” she continued to the laughter of all. Our side was equally concerned that we might not be wanted there. “Don’t be silly” one of the gypsies responded “ye’re the best comrades we could ever have.”.

The main point I’m trying to make is this: come to Dale Farm. You’ll be doing something amazing and you’ll have an amazing time doing it. It’s about half an hour out of London on the train – Liverpool Street to Wickford. Call 07961 854023 or 07583621312 once you’re on your way to arrange a lift. Piece of piss. If you could bring some spare cups or cutlery that would be nice, but the most important thing to bring is yourself.

The eviction could begin again as early as Friday afternoon, but my educated guess is that it will begin either Saturday or Monday morning. But whenever you come, and however long you come for, it will be awesome. I hope I’ll see you there.

More info:

Dalefarm.wordpress.com

http://mattpearson.org/2011/09/19/what-does-dale-farm-teach-us-about-ourselves/ - brilliant blog dispelling many of the myths about Dale Farm.

Post-script:

Late Tuesday night an odd man turned up, on his own, and immediately made us all suspiscious. He spun an almost believable story about being a kayak instructor from Canada. I sat with him for an hour to suss him out and try to work out if we had a situation – these things are very delicate, as you don’t want to go accusing people who might be genuinely be well meaning outsiders of being undercover cunts. He told us he was staying for the next four days, but by morning we were pretty certain he was one of the baddies and we walked him off site. The clincher was when I asked to borrow his phone, with the intention of checking his messages, and he pretended not to have one. Naturally, you can never be sure, and we were all a little concerned we might have done the wrong thing.

Luckily, on this occasion, we can be sure as the twat in question went on to pen this barely readable puddle of bile in The Sun. Naturally, it’s filled with venom and bullshit and conveniently forgets how utterly fucking inept the "journalist" in question was at his job. If you can bare to feel your eyes boil at its acrid prose, you might like to have a read. Or, if you want a real treat, you might prefer to inject fermented rat shit straight into your retinas. It’s your call.

The main thrust of his verbal shit sculpture is that there is a gulf between the activists and the gypsies. This is true - we come from different communities, different backgrounds, different worlds. That is why it is amazing and inspirational to see the two groups working together in respect and solidarity. In the hour I spent talking to Nick I spoke a lot about how intertwined the two communities had become. Shame he did not deign to put that in his shit-rag of a newspaper.

Post-post script: After we rumbled him it was generally agreed he was probably an undercover bailiff as he seemed too thick to be a journalist. Now we know he works for the Sun, everything makes sense.

The prison blogs will return next week. Ta for your patience.

The kids are all riot

"Morning Splinter" I say as my giant of a cellmate rose from his bunk "there's been trouble in your manor." I've got the lingo down now, you see.

I flip the channel to show him what I mean. It seems you lot have been busy. Rioting across Britain. Police losing control of the streets. Violence, arson, anarchy. Thank Christ I'm safely locked up in here.

The rolling, if Breakfast, news coverage hits on the salient point and Splinter holds his head in his hands.

"They're Rioting in Brixton" he opines "and I'm fucking stuck in here!".

Less than an hour later Splinter gets told he's going to C wing and we say our brief goodbyes. It's odd seeing him go - while I think Splinter would agree we didn't quite qualify as friends, we'd bonded during our four days in a locked room. Worst of all, I never got round to asking him how to rob a bank, which would at least have given me something to fall back on if comedy doesn't work out.

With Splinter gone I use some of my direct action skills to occupy a space, in this case the bottom bunk, thus making me king of E 4-05. Before my new roomie arrives, however, I am spirited away for resettlement, an Orwellian sounding process which actually only involves asking me a few questions ostensibly to make sure I've got somewhere to stay when I leave and won't mug an old lady for her housekeys on my way out of the gate. Towards the end of my friendly interrogation, the screw filling out the form asks

"Is there anything we can do to help prevent you from re-offending?" I think about this for a moment before deciding to answer honestly.

"Imprison Rupert Murdoch." There isn't a tick box for this, so she diligently writes my answer down under "other". If I end up back in here, the state has only itself to blame.

As we were waiting to be taken back to our cells, something I've become quite adept at, talk to turns to violence inside and outside of jail.

"They use rubber bullets and bean bag guns" offers Mr. Ben, who has set himself up as an expert on riot control.

"Actually, on the mainland..." I interject.

"They do inside High Down." He informs me. I'm out of my depth.

Rugrat, a comrade from E wing, seems undeterred though. "There's a lot more of us than there are of them" he points out accurately "we should just bash out at S&Ds and do it."

"They'd lock us up 24/7" interrupts one lag.

"So?" responds Rugrat "We're locked up all day anyway." I laugh nervously. I'm pretty certain this is all just banter, but who knows? Maybe this is how prison riots start.

Before going back to the lodge I'm buttonholed by Bucky, a guy from C wing, who says he's

heard I'm writing about the prison. Clearly walking everywhere with a pen and paper in my hands is not a particularly subtle strategy. He tells me a story of the genuine violence which happens within these walls. A week ago Bucky had said the wrong thing to a couple of screws while he was collecting his dinner and they'd followed him back to his cell. When he realised what was happening he ran for the door and asked another jailer to lock him inside, but it didn't work. The two guards pinned him down in his dwelling and kicked the shit out of him- his face is still puffy and distorted from the beating. He looks at me like I'm crazy when I ask if he's thought of reporting it.

Back in my own stone box, my new cell mate, Rocksteady, has arrived. He's asked me not to write about his circumstances, so I won't. Luckily he didn't say anything about hacking his voicemail, so I still have options if he tells me anything really juicy.

We spend a lot of the evening chatting about riots and getting to know one another. Annoyingly for you, his story is fascinating. It's annoying for me, too, but at least I got to hear it. I mean, seriously. Wow. Prison has its perks.

I spend some time working out what to do if there's a prison riot, interspersing calm strategising with the occasional mindblowing glimpse of vertigo when I realize that, yes, I'm considering this as a real possibility. With a little luck you won't get to read about my plans in the papers before you read this blog. They mostly involve hiding.

There's one other unsettling note to my evening. According to Rocksteady, screws don't take too kindly to people writing about what's going on inside. Considering Bucky's story, I can see why.

So, if you're reading this, ends day 7.

Day 6 - Prisonomics

Here, as far as I can gather, is how the prison economy works.

Every Sunday (today) our captors furnish us with a “canteen sheet”. This is a double sided A4 list of purchasable sundries, ranging from chocolate to tweezers, playing cards to bibles, super noodles to shaving foam. The most important items are phone credit (40p a minute) and tobacco (“burn” in prison parlance), both of which make appearances at the top of the canteen sheet.

Convicted enemies of the state, such as myself, get a maximum canteen spend of £17 a week (to come out of any money we’ve brought in with us or earned inside) whilst prisoners on remand, like Splinter, can spend as much as they like. I invest in some chocolate, paper, stamps and tangfastics then sink the rest of my liquidity into the blue chips: coffee and burn.

Tobacco is the currency of choice here in jail for one simple reason: most people smoke. Even if you don’t, there will always a market for the lethal stuff, so it makes an excellent, if short term, store of value. So far I’ve traded burn for paper, pens, stamps, sexual favours, semtex and coffee.

Coffee acts as the prison’s second currency of note, the Euro to burn’s Dollar, though there is less demand for it and most inmates are looking to trade coffee for burn rather than the other way round. Of course, in our barter based system anything can have value to the right customer, and I’ve made a range of happy trades swapping jam, salt and porridge (yes, I know) for stuff that I actually want.

Another item in seemingly high demand is tin foil and its substitutes – yoghurt lids, polo wrappers etc. I’ve yet to actually be offered drugs here but the shadows of the black economy fall long away from the searching eyes of the screws. I couldn’t tell you exactly how drug deals work inside but I’m guessing that, as the price of skag comes in a fair bit dearer than £17 a week, most money changes hands on the outside – just get your people to talk to theirs. A lot of stuff can be bought this way, though the import tariffs here are steep – a bog standard mobile phone is £250-£300 (still cost effective compared to the payphones) and a gram of skunk will set you back £50, around five times street value.

However, there is one drug that the prison’s awash with, and it’s absolutely free. Methadone maintenance programs are Wandsworth’s quick fix for dealing with junkies: heroin users who don’t opt for detox are shuffled onto D wing, where their “treatment” awaits, along with a whole cornucopia of commercially available chemical delights. Absurdly, the methadone maintenance program stops abruptly when users leave jail: shivering junkies are turfed out onto the street , told sternly not to reoffend and given £47 to start a new life with. NHS waiting lists for methadone can be weeks long – many will be back inside before the wait is up.

Methadone is unpopular even amongst those who take it. Many of my new junky pals describe it as harder to quit than smack and resent the prison for providing them with this chemical cosh. If you’ve been using on the outside you’re often entered onto a programme without consultation, a cruel temptation for those I’ve met who see their periodic visits to jail as rare opportunities to give their bodies a break.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. With the death of EMA, jail is now the only place in Britain that still values education, and you can earn as much as 90 pence per three hour session learning a variety of trades. Inmates can train in anything from plastery to radio production (at our in-house station “radio wanno”). Private companies have seen a chance to make a buck too, and Timpsons (the key/shoe making people) provide a range of courses which then offer you the chance to do some unpaid work for them on the outside, followed by the somewhat dubious promise of a full time position.

There are inside jobs, too, paying similarly princely sums for your time. You can work as a cleaner, cook, orderly, wing rep, or anything else the screws are too lazy, apathetic or incompetent to do themselves. I shouldn’t badmouth these posts too much – they represent one of the few useful ways to spend your time inside, and speaking to an orderly is generally far more pleasant and productive than trying to convince the guards to do their jobs. Yet however helpful they may be, some lags see prisoners who take these positions as no better than collaborators, an image which isn’t helped by the fact that they come with an impressive range of perks, from a break room with a plasma TV in it to all the sly burn you can… er… burn.

The prison economy usually functions fairly well but ran into trouble recently after a group of rogue orderlies began lending large quantities of tobacco to inmates with the promise they’d hit them back a few snouts once they got their canteen through. Demand for these credit-fag swaps was high, so high that orderlies were soon raiding the store cupboard to feed Wandsworth’s appetite for cheap burn. By the time the scale of the problem became clear, it was already too late. The two bed properties many lags had put down as collateral turned out to be worthless as they already belonged to the prison. The Governor has already authorized several costly bailouts in an effort to put an end to the crisis, but the prisoners smoked those too. As I write this, A and C wing teeter on the brink of default and, for the first time, E wing risks losing its coveted triple “Aaargh!” status. In just a few short hours, canteen forms are due back at the landing office and the tension on the wings is palpable.

So ends day 6.

Day 5 - Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Wandsworth

I’m worried I’m going to end up writing 14 stories where nothing happens. It’s sobering to think that The Shawshank Redemption chronicled 20 years in sing-sing and still only found a few hours of narrative - and Stephen King was allowed to make stuff up.

I’ve rather lost the Shawshank spirit myself over the last 24 hours. Fighting with heart and mind against an unjust system feels a bit silly when you’ve only got 8 days of oppression left. My initial attempt at a blog for today – a withering polemic on the purpose of prison itself – was brusquely abandoned mid-flow when Deal or No Deal came on. It was, in any case, an effort to use the abstract of my situation to conceal the embarrassingly mundane reality of life in here. We’ve spent most of the day waiting for Harry Potter.

Films are a big deal in prison. With next-to-nothing to look forward to, most of the chatter on the wings naturally gravitates to TV, particularly films, and for the last few days all of the talk has been of Harry Potter. This is particularly weird when you realise that Watchmen is on tonight, and the other night we were treated to Blade, which has a vampire in it and lots of massive guns.

Harry Potter is a kids' film. About a wizard.

I woke at 6 again this morning to another imperial pronouncement from Hubba-Hubba, God-emperor of the Hoobs and the future overlord of all mankind. Something about the Hoobs' incessant cheerfulness and utter contempt for humanity unfailingly seems to penetrate my slumber. You see, the TV is always on; Splinter can’t sleep without it, so every day I wake up to its sickly glow. My first few nights inside I didn’t mind, I was exhausted anyway, but there is so little to do in here my body has now caught up on its sleep debt and considers the most minor stimulation to be a clarion call to get up and DO SOMETHING, no matter that, of course, there is fuck all to do. As a result I have developed my first bit of jailtech, using rolled up Rizla as rudimentary earplugs.

Jailtech is amazing. Jailtech (I’m the only one who calls it that) is simply the art of being creative with what you’ve got. Prison toothpaste becomes glue for photos from home, old magazines become lampshades, orange peel becomes air freshener, forks and bowls and towels, somehow, become a curtain to shield you from the afternoon sun. One inmate, left without a working kettle, pulls the broken apart and carefully lowers the wires into a bucket to boil water. Human beings are capable of incredible things, if only you try to stop them.

I spent the morning glazing at the telly, writing up yesterday’s court adventure, and waiting for the exercise yard. At around the time I should have gotten to stretch my legs, a guard came round and informed me I had a surprise visit. It was a surprise because I’d been told I wouldn’t get visitors until I’d filled in the right forms, which I couldn’t fill in until I got my visitors’ addresses, which I couldn’t get until I made a phone call, which I couldn’t make because this prison is run by incompetent twats. So, a very nice surprise indeed.

The visit was glorious, an hour with three of the people I love most on this earth. In truth it’s a little overwhelming. I’m not allowed to take notes – or, indeed, anything – with me, so a list of questions lies unasked on the desk in my cell as I make my first contact with the outside world. With so little time it feels like we should spend all of it talking incessantly at high speed, like coked up chipmunks, but instead odd silences gape awkwardly between bursts of news. It’s all over far too quickly and I’m taken back to my cell, a bittersweet taste in my mouth, wondering if a little of something can be worse than nothing at all.

I spend much of the day considering this, how the poverty of our condition here seems to help us to cope, makes us take an almost spiteful pleasure at times in the little we do have. Every ad break my giant gangster of a cell mate and I sing along to the snatches of music in the adverts. We particularly look forward to one trailing the forthcoming “Street” season of programs on channel 4, which has some nice grime beats we can’t get our hands on anywhere else. I have a feeling we wouldn’t appreciate these as much if we, you know, had something good to listen to.

The same goes for friendship. Splinter and I would be unlikely to mix in the same social circles outside of prison, but in here necessity means that we get along (though, if I’m honest, I think Splinter’s embarrassed to be locked up with such a shit criminal). Likewise, Wandsworth’s walls can even make friends of potential enemies. Take gadget, who I met today in the exercise yard. He’s just started a 5 month stretch for GBH and, as we lapped the little square of dirt which is our outside, we traded life stories. His world is as different from mine as Splinter’s is, though all three of us have kids. His 9 to 5, a concept I find alien, is spent at the MoD. We joke that, if we met on the outside it would probably be across a police line. Still, gadget and I get on, and even discuss politics. He points out one of the nice things about this place is that, under the glare of the guards, we’re all equals. While I think the gang that I hear runs A wing might disagree on that point, I can see what he’s getting at – there’s a certain camaraderie to being a lag, a sense that we’re all in this together as David Cameron would put it if sweet, sweet justice ever landed him behind bars.

Later as I sit in my cell I consider the horrible irony of this. As an anarchist I dream loftily of a world where people are all equals, none above another. Now I discover that the best way to achieve that might be to lock everyone up. Who knows; maybe prison really does work.

At time of signing off, E wing has gone eerily quiet. It's time for Harry Potter.

So ends day 5.

Day 4 - Don't Fear The Jailer

Every day feels like a week in prison, but today was the first where seven days actually got knocked off my sentence. It nearly didn’t happen.

I was woken at 6 by a screw informing me that I had a surprise court appearance. A surprise for me, I mean – the prison must have known for at least a couple of days, but decided to keep it to themselves, presumably because they know how much I ruddy love surprises.

I made myself a rolly and a bowl of coco pops and plonked myself down in front of the Hoobs. The Hoobs, for the uninitiated, are a gang of brightly coloured extra-terrestrial fuckwits whose pre-invasion intelligence gathering operation consists of asking children what a farm is or how to make a kite. I ruminated darkly on how futile my appeal seemed in the face of this inevitable alien onslaught.

I also wondered if it might not be futile in the face of a legal system that seemed determined to fuck me in any available orifice. The past few weeks showed an unmistakable pattern – every time I made a concession, it seemed to make things worse. I was sick of the ragged nuggets of hope held out to me by the state only to be cruelly snatched back at the last second. I wouldn’t take the bait this time, I decided. Why waste a day of my sentence languishing in a custody cell (worse, by far, than prison) just so an old man in a wig could restate how bad I’d been, when I could stay in Wandsworth and write, smoke and listen to Splinter’s stories to my heart’s content?

Then I thought of MiniMarbles and the summer I was missing with him. Despite my noble, pigheaded instincts, if there was just a 1% chance of me going home that day I had to take it. I let the screw stroll me to the van.

No more compromises, though, I thought. I’d not spend the day throwing myself on the court’s mercy. The prison offered to let me change into my own clothes. I declined. That’ll show ‘em, I thought, my sleep-deprived brain quickly rationalising my spiteful nose-chopping. I would not dignify a process that did not dignify me. Or something. So they took me to court in my prison sweats.

As I was handed over to SERCO, my reign of half-arsed defiance continued.

“Take your shoes off.” Barked the guard in a needlessly confrontational manner. After all, we’d only just met.

“Take your shoes off… please.” I suggested. The guard looked understandably confused.

“I don’t have to say please to you.” He stated accurately.

“But you can.” I replied, matching his accuracy. “There’s no reason we can’t be civil.”

“Take your shoes off.” He growled again, getting all up, as they say, in my grill.

“No.” I replied, because I am four years old.

A torturous and surprisingly lengthy exchange then followed wherein we argued the comparative merits of my captors either asking me politely to take off my shoes, or doing the job themselves. They eventually plumped for the latter option.

“Chuck him in solitary.” Spat my former debating partner as he dropped the shoes back at my feet. I secretly beamed. Solitary meant I’d actually get a chance to write and think and maybe even grab a little sleep. Sleep, I dimly realised, was something I probably needed, as I appeared to be starting pointless arguments with petty dictators over the square root of fuck all.

I sat in solitary and thought about my predicament. I realised that, along with my appeal would come a lawyer, with whom would come news of the outside and through whom I could talk to the people I loved. I spent the next hour hastily scribbling messages to my family, my friends and my girlfriend, trying to cram four days of homesickness into a few paragraphs of prose. By the time my barrister arrived I’d almost forgotten there was going to be an appeal.

As usual when interacting with lawyers I tried to give as much thought and gravitas as possible to decisions which, most of the time, might as well be fucking guesswork. As wonderful as my particular briefs are, they are legally bound not to tell me what to do. At times it’s rather like having a surgeon ask you where to make the incision, and can lead to me saying some fucking stupid things. Like “guilty”.

In this case the rub of the matter was that the presiding judge could allow our appeal, refuse it, or, in fact, lengthen my sentence. This obviously raised the stakes somewhat, but I was told such an outcome was “very unlikely”. I recalled the same two words being used about prison, but I took the gamble anyway.

I’ll say this for our legal system: it’s more entertaining than daytime TV. Watching the judge squirm through my appeal was enormous fun, and I even got to steal a glimpse or three of my gorgeous girlfriend through the Perspex of the perp box. To be fair to his honour, he was caught between a rock and a hard place: no honest reading of the sentencing guidelines could place me in prison, but he’d be persona non grata on the dinner party circuit if he just let me go. It was quite a bind the poor sod was in.

In justifying the injustice of my continued incarceration, the bewigged one made some rather eyebrow raising pronouncements. First of all, his honour suggested my crime had overtones of contempt of court. It wasn’t a court, he hastily added, but it, sort of was, as well, a bit. Though also, it wasn’t, obviously.

Of course, if it had been a court Murdoch and Son had been sat in, I wouldn’t have made such a tit of myself at all. Indeed, had the bastardly duo been addressing any body with real power, then I’d never have undertaken my slapstick crusade. For me, the fact a pie in the face could deliver more justice than the select committee was the biggest joke of all.

Finally, the judge said, I must remain in prison as “a deterrent”. Perhaps this was to prevent a wave of copycat pieings of octogenarian billionaires at parliamentary show-trials, or perhaps to teach the public that, no matter what the letter of the law says, if you humiliate powerful people then you will be punished. The words of my cell mate, Splinter, occurred to me again: “If someone comes at you, you gotta come back at them hard, to show you ain’t no dickhead.” Splinter would have made a fine judge.

Though the crown was, on this occasion, no dickhead, his honour did make a nod to the evident ludicrousness of my incarceration. While, naturally, he was unmoved by the arguments of the defence, the magistrate in my case should have taken into account my guilt plea (she had done) and so my robed benefactor would be taking a week off my sentence. Abracadabra – nobody did anything wrong, but somehow mistakes were made. The legal system saves face whilst pulling a slightly less silly one and I’m left with just ten days of free room and board. I make no effort to hide my new grin and practically skip back to custody.

I’m led back into the van, a week lighter and feeling pretty great. I steal a newspaper from my custody cell and smuggle it into the van with me. Perhaps it’s sleep deprivation or conjugal withdrawal, or perhaps it’s just elation, but as we roll through London I start to feel feral, already free, untamable. My name comes over the Kiss FM news and the other isolated cons and I trade wolf howls from our tiny cells.

Back at Wandsworth the SERCO screws wander off, leaving us alone in the sweltering van for almost an hour. We can’t see each other but the shouts of growing anger are audible throughout the van. Before long one of my fellow captives has had enough and begins hurling himself against the door of his cell. The van rocks gently. I begin to do it too, timing my jolts to coincide with his, bouncing back and forth off the walls of my cell as the momentum grew. One after another the whole pack joined in, unseen but united, the van tilting precariously, decentralised networking at its finest. After that, the screws let us out pretty quickly.

“Aren’t you that bloke who threw the pie?” asks a sharply dressed cockney I make a pitiful attempt at a rolly. I nod.

“What’re you up on?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

“Multi-kilo cocaine conspiracy.” He replies. “Got a spare snout?”

I’ve been warned against the cardinal sin of generosity inside, but I’m in an obnoxiously good mood so I oblige anyway.

“Don’t make a habbit of it, though.” I warn “Cos I’m the hardest cunt in here and I’ll fucking have you.” My new friend grins as he sparks up.

Strolling back to my cell I’m informed from various quarters that I’ve been on telly again. Some of the lags come up and pat me on the back or call me a variety of lucky expletives, but back at my cell there is someone less keen to congratulate me.

“Allright Splinter? How are you?” I ask jovially through the door.

“How the fuck am I? You’re going home next week!” A traitor part of me wants to point out the fact that I didn’t rob a bank, but that’s hardly the point. This place isn’t good for anybody and Splinter has as much right to feel pissed off about staying here as I do to feel good about leaving seven days sooner.

So ends day 4.

47 hours in a locked room

I'm tired and I need a pillow.

Yesterday my captors moved me upstairs to a cell with a spotlessly pillow-free bunk for me to sleep on. Despite Splinter's spirited efforts to get the boys with the keys to rectify this, along with my own, meeker entreaties, I'm still without a cushion for my head. This is not the only reason that I'm tired.

As anyone whose ever really tried it knows, doing nothing is exhausting. The mind and metabolism grind to a halt and even staring into space feels like an effort. We're supposed to be let out of this little room for about half the waking day - 6 hours worth if the posters dotted on the landings are to be believed - but in practice what we get is about an hour, split into two chunks. Today we didn't even get that.

Our first daily dose of diet freedom, the exercise yard, was rained off. There was no big announcement, no wet play, it just didn't happen. Then the clock rolled round to rec time, (or "S&Ds" as it's apparently called) and it kept on rolling. After a while the reason became clear - the weekly canteen delivery (the snout, supernoodles and sundries prisoners buy with their own money) was making the rounds, and it got scheduled for the same time as S&Ds. So S&Ds got cancelled.

It's hard to know whether such a mistake comes from callousness or incompetence. Both events are regular, predictable, part of the vital clockwork of the prison. Both are important. But somehow the institution couldn't schedule them for slightly different times. Even moving things round by half an hour would have made all the difference, to us anyway. I guess it doesn't seem quite so important from the other side of the door.

One of the first things I realised in here was that when you've got next to nothing, what you still have means the world. The bright side of this is that a friendly conversation or an unexpected cup of tea brings more joy than I ever remember getting from the games and gadgets that occupy me on the outside. The dark side is that, when even the little you've been told to hope for is taken away, it's devastating.

Part of me feels ridiculous, whining about being locked away in here. This is, after all, a prison, and missing out on 30 minutes respite sounds like small beans, but when you're in here, it means a lot. Not being let out means we can't shower, we can't call home, we can't apply for visits or doctors appointments or jobs. It means we can't talk to each other or take a walk or just get a little space. It means we'll spend nearly two full days in a locked room, smoking and sweating and bickering with each other, staring at the walls or, worse, the TV, wondering if the next break will come round or if some further fuck-up will cancel that, too. Most of all, it means the glum exhaustion of doing nothing.

It's 10 PM now and a guard came round to check we hadn't somehow escaped through the 40 foot tunnel I've been secretly building. I managed to get his attention before he breezed past.

"Can I get a pillow please, guv?" I shouted at him through the slit.

"Office is closed." he barked back dismissively. "You should 'ave asked during S&Ds".

So ends day 3.