I received a text last week from my ex-boss and good friend from the prison, asking if I could lend a hand to help clear out the junk from the workshop building that sits opposite the prison 'proper'. You may have read my blog on this particular box of delights, called A Rabbit Warren of Treasures? Anyway, it transpired that there was a minimal team (three people) who had been brought in to help fill multiple skips with detritus from all four floors of the building. Naturally, I leapt at the chance and volunteered the muscles of my Jack too. The chance to spend time in this vast dark and cavernous body? Oh yes...
Apparently there'd been some fallout between the group hiring the workshop building to host their own zombie escape game things (not my cup of tea in the least, but there you go) over the past few years. Upper floors secreted wooden boxes with lids (basically coffins) into which customers were placed and then attacked and chased by actors dressed as infected zombies, around the various other rooms containing stretchers, gurneys, test tubes and all sorts of rubbish stamped with hazardous waste symbols. And lots of fake blood, a gallon of the stuff. Add bountiful extras such as buildings and flooring made up from many tonnes of chunky wood and pallets, plus genuine prison leftovers when the workshop was just that, and what you had was a HECK of a lot of physical labour, involving shunting, pushing, carrying and destroying everything to be lugged out to the skips. The way in which the place had been left by this group was utterly disgusting, bins with months old fermenting food, and just copious amounts of rubbish that they were too lazy to move out themselves - even basics like takeaway boxes and old tissues. Leaving us lot to clear up after them obviously gave them some sort of sick dominance, but I did it for the prison. I did it for the ghosts.
The reason for all of this activity had been undisclosed to me at the time; but on discovering that the workshop was being divided forever from the prison for the first time since the 1970's, and being turned into a nursing home (that's as it currently stands) by City and Country, I was saddened and shocked. So... did that mean that the prison too would be sold off and destroyed, had everything we'd been working for been for nothing?!
No! In a nutshell, C&C agreed to let The Cove Group, formerly Jailhouse Tours and my ex employer, buy the prison and they would take the ugly workshop building and do something with it. So yes, it's sad to lose such a sprawling nod to modern prison life, but if it means keeping HMP Shepton Mallet as a heritage site, a museum, for good - bring it on! WE DID IT!
Public uprising made it clear to all involved that discarding The Mallet for use as town houses and flats was just not on. That's putting it mildly. All of our ranting and screaming, petitions and raised voices worked. I can't remember if I said previously, but I spent a good deal of time making a 42 minute film about just why the prison being developed was so darn wrong, and the aim was to send it to BBC Points West and ITV West Country, if and when it all went down the pan. Thankfully it seems that nobody will have to see my lame plea to find a buyer after all! Here's hoping that the CEO manages his new venture wisely. Change will be harder to stop from the inside...
Once my 2 days inside the workshop with the skeleton crew began, I took every opportunity to record when I was alone and in silence. At the end of shift 2, I was quite literally solo inside when everyone else was gobbling pizza in the chapel - and so I said my final farewells and did a lengthy walkabout. As night fell, I shouted my customary, "G'dnight all. Thanks for everything. Over and out."
My previous recording bouts within have always been a positive experience, and this time was no different. The recordings are none too clear for the most part, certainly not a patch on those of summer 2020, but they were there in number. 38 in a smidge over an hour. I'm still working on cleaning them a bit further, but for now, here they are.
PS: The only negative regarding the experience is that I crocked up my sacrum pretty badly - the next day I bent to move our lightweight BBQ in the garden, and with an agonising surge of fire in my back, I toppled like a felled tree! I'd re-opened an injury from 2019 that I sustained carrying one case too many of wine for our wedding. That pain was off the scale and never really healed - to be honest it still ached on the day I rejuvenated it 5 years on! Oh well, it was all good fun (errr...?) honest grafting has its bonuses for sure; and I found some gems of things due to be dunged out into the skips. But as ever, for me the prison comes first, and if that means lugging hundreds of pallet flooring down 4 floors, so be it. We all sweated, and I was proud to have done so. And to be perfectly honest, I'm quite enjoying the codeine!
Over and out. For now. x
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