I'm back. the police caught up with me in the end. I suppose, deep down, I always knew they would. It was on All Fools' Day, significantly enough, when the trap was finally sprung. I was at the wheel of an allegedly stolen Fiat, having just returned to London from a 4,000 mile motor tour of the British Isles. I was entering the City of London through the Square Mile's "Ring of Steel." Society-at-large will be comforted to know that this costly anti-terrorist defence system is indeed impenetrable. It certainly plucked me off the moor like a luckless pheasant. So sudden. So utterly irresistible. That awful frozen moment in time. That realisation of arrest.
In five frenetic weeks, with my companion George Alexander McAuley by my side, I traversed our newly cool Britannic kingdom in a state of Teresian ecstasy. I remember the three Raphaels and Canova's The Three Graces in the National Gallery of Scotland. I recall a nobly ruined Cistercian abbey and a game of snowdrop croquet in the Cotswolds. I look back at the crossing of the great suspension bridges over the Severn and Forth. I see again the inspirational Angel of the North at dawn, the luvvies in the Bluebird Caf?, the 14th century tower house "haunted" by the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the brazier warming what remains of the homeless under the bridge at Waterloo. I recollect buying my first mobile telephone, making a film about heroin for Channel Four, catching a glimpse of Salman Rushdie being spirited away by his minders into an upstairs room at the Coach and Horses in Soho, and overdrawing irresponsibly on my account at Barclays Bank, Regent Street.
And then there was the best day of all. George and I, high in the Lakeland Fells, a huge hemisphere sky of Eton blue, the snow-tinged Langdale Pikes laid out before us. Above the snowline we lunched in altitudinous splendour on roast beef, Scottish smoked salmon and fresh cream over strawberries. In the snow we chilled our beers and made Irish coffee. As we ate and drank, I gazed out in awe and wonder trying to memorise the panorama for my friends Punky and Braveboy (both still inside) as much as myself. We buried our rubbish and strode off along the ridge.
All our carefree yesterdays. Now, George and I are sharing our first cell together in a deep pink and carmine, offensively post-modern "privatised" prison, Blakenhurst, on the edge of the Black Country at newtown Redditch. A more unfashionable place would be hard to come by, although having said that, both the Princess Royal and Douglas Hurd visited (not me) last week. I have a new number; new charge sheets (in an orgy of drunken criminality we helped ourselves to ?40,000 worth of objets d'art from a honey-coloured Manor House we stayed at in Gloucestershire); a new solicitor whose diamond pav? ring and Manchester United tie seemed most inappropriate when we first appeared in court in Worcester; a whole new set of challenges ahead.
The first few nights we spent in police cells were the worst. In a gruesome lock-up in Peckham, George had been caught with our medicinal parcel of cannabis, which made matters even more unbearable. After successfully concealing it through three full strip searches (he's a bit of a prestidigitateur) he celebrated his luck by getting ridiculously stoned, rolling a joint and blowing the blueish smoke right into the desk sergeant's disbelieving face. Needless to say, the reefer was confiscated, George was strip searched a fourth time. The rock was found. He was cautioned and we underwent the ceaseless round of (usually) nocturnal interviews as straight and miserable as a pair of Quaker lay preachers.
Six days later, a triumvirate of justices (navy blazer and club tie; tin set and pearls; herring-bone sports jacket and Rotary club tie) glowered from the bench, pondering disapprovingly the question of bail and "gravity" of our offences before sending us back downstairs, tails between our legs, remanded in custody to chew on our criminal cuds.
Blakenhurst rings with the ugliest accents in Britain. To come back to this (after my pre-release induced euphoria during the early months of the year) might otherwise have been shattering, had it not been for naughty George and all the spirit-bolstering responsibility a 21-year-old co-defendant who has never been inside before entails. George is, without a doubt, "a right 'andful," and I'm simply too busy keeping him out of trouble (a supreme irony) to feel that sorry for myself.
Private prisons have their pros and cons. It only takes four days (as opposed to four weeks in a state-run prison) for a cheque to clear which, given the perilous state of my finances, bodes well for next week's canteen. But the food is dire. After the six and seven course gastronomic excesses of the last few weeks, this is the worst punishment of all. Work is coming in again, so I am beavering away at this and that, wondering how I am going to replace the typewriter I was forced to leave at a South Yorkshire petrol station in lieu of payment for fuel, and trying to forget the Day of Judgement which lies in the not too distant future. They say a change is as good as a rest. Well, I had a beano out there. Back in the sober atmosphere of close incarceration, it's somehow reassuring to be home from my hols.
