Contemplative

It has been such an exciting day.

If you are in any doubt about this I invite you to make the simple comparison between yesterday’s photograph and today’s.

The big city is an amazing place.

It is full of tattoo studios and shops that sell pretend smoking equipment. There are buses everywhere and I couldn’t help but notice lots of gentlemen whose religion seems to insist that they wear a tall black hat and an overcoat.

I don’t know if this is a compulsory part of their faith or simply a shared sartorial preference, but I thought it was very striking, and if anybody knows why I would be pleased to be enlightened. I can understand a faith insisting on beards and hat wearing, but they all seemed to be wearing identical hats and coats. If it were me I would be choosing different colours and hat styles or the addition of feathers or ribbons, but nobody did, and I was terribly curious.

I am home now.

Home in an on the taxi rank sort of way, that is.

As you know, I have spent the day in prison.

Today was my Prison Officer Assertiveness Course, where I learned how not to be intimidated by troubling people who might wish to shout at me.

Despite twenty years of not being intimidated by tiresome drunk nuisances in my taxi, I still don’t think I have passed.

This might seem surprising to anybody who has ever met me. On the whole I would have considered that I have never had the least trouble asserting myself in any department whatsoever. When I told my father that I was not assertive enough for the Prison Service he was astonished. “How bossy do they want?” he said disbelievingly.

All the same, I do not think that I have passed.

We had got to be in Manchester by nine o’ clock this morning, and so I stayed in an hotel last night. This meant a wonderfully peaceful start to the day, without enthusiastic dogs licking the soles of my feet to indicate that they wished to be released into the garden, and without anybody who needed feeding except myself. Even this was taken care of on my behalf. I would not be offering the hotel a Mitchelin star for its breakfast facilities, but it was still a jolly sight better than anything I might have bothered to do myself at home.

Suitably replete with sausages and coffee, I made my way to the dismal edifices of the Prison Service’s training facility, which was presumably designed by somebody whose chief purpose was to accustom its students to hopeless incarcerated gloom. I trudged up the endless stairs and joined the wilting plants and the horrible television and about a dozen other students in the reception area.

Some of the students were already prison officers, identifiable by their confidently assertive manner and their uniform. They all buzzed off into a separate training room a few minutes after we arrived, presumably to be reminded of new and effective techniques for ordering people about efficiently, in order to achieve maximum compliance with the expenditure of minimum possible shouting.

The remainder of us trooped obediently into a classroom, where a very charming and kindly lady asked us our names. This turned out to be the interactive part of the morning, as detailed on the letter. After that she simply explained to us, sensibly and helpfully, what we had got to do to pass the test.

The test, we learned, was simply about producing the correct response at the appropriate moment. We would be faced with somebody pretending to be a cross prisoner, and he would tell us some things. We had got to answer with the appropriate response from the prison rule book.

We were reminded, in detail, about the prison rule book, and told that passing the test was dependent on our qualities of assertiveness. We had to assert the rules whenever called for.

The difficult part was the complete suspension of disbelief. Faced with a sweary young man, busily grassing himself up for every imaginable infraction of the prison rule book, it was hard to come up with anything to say except ‘for goodness’ sake, shut up, you’re going to finish up spending the rest of your life in solitary confinement.’

During my visit to his cell he confessed to an illegal mobile phone and a planned assault on a prison officer. He used all sorts of surprising language. I have been busily trying to teach myself to notice this since my last visit, and remembered to say: ‘please do not swear at me as I find it offensive.’ This was not true but I think I managed to sound convincing.

He tried to persuade me to change his cell, to let him use the prison phone and told me that I was as rubbish as all of the other prison officers. I may have failed on this last part of the exchange, because I absent-mindedly agreed with this, rather than asking him which other prison officers he meant in order that I could tell him not to insult them because of it being against the prison rules.

After that it was suddenly over, and I was ejected into the city without having the first idea if I had passed or failed, and it occurred to me for the first time that actually I would really rather like to pass.

I have been a parent for over thirty years now, which is a bit limiting when it comes to career ambitions, not that I ever had any anyway. I have managed to fund it all by driving a taxi, but suddenly the idea of being in a job where it was possible to succeed and have ambitions started to appeal to me very much. Imagine having colleagues and income tax and exams that you could pass and career development and holiday pay.

It is all a strange and unfamiliar world, and it is just on the other side of a very tall fence that I might or might not be able to jump over.

I am sitting in my taxi feeling a very peculiar mix of anxiety and interest and not wishing to hope for anything.

I will know next week.

I think I might need to cross my fingers.