In prison, enthusiasm can make a morning fly by, especially when it involves animal impersonations
God knows what we looked like standing there in the middle of the Grosvenor Centre, shaking hands and patting each other on the back. I was in my middleclass trendy kit: nice cashmere overcoat, a gaudy, devil-may-care scarf. He was a bit grubby in a shiny, dirt-seamed anorak, manky jeans and fraying trainers. But we were so pleased to see each other. All the people staring at us could see that quite clearly.
"Alan, Alan." This big voice had boomed out across the shoppers, and I turned, a bit confused, and there was this old guy leaping down the up escalator two or three steps at a time. He got to the bottom a bit unsteady, a bit breathless. "Alan." Arms outstretched. He saw that I was a bit startled. "Prison," he shouted. "Yes of course," I shouted back, thinking who the hell are you? Then the penny dropped. "You're the guy who taught me how to rob the supermarket." He was delighted to be so remembered and we went over the clever, delightful, guaranteed successful bit of larcenous methodology that had stunned one of my classes into an awestruck silence during break one Thursday afternoon. "I don't do that any more," he said. "Course you don't." "I'm afraid I did do another sentence, though, after I left you." "Oh well." "It was just a misunderstanding with an undercover policeman. Three years I got."
Then, out of that bit of gloominess, his face lit up; "I remember that Aristotle." "Good bloke, Aristotle." "Yeah. He was taught by Plato and Plato was taught by Socrates. That's right isn't it?" "Absolutely." "They think I'm brilliant in my house. It was on the telly the other night about the Greeks and I just told them all about it. I used to like philosophy." We rambled on a bit about the other guys in the class, shook hands again and off he went back up the escalator.
There's nothing like enthusiasm; it always cheers me up and just when I'm thinking of finishing with prison, feeling sick of the whole damn business, some enthusiast comes along and sets me going again.
Casey drives me nuts. I really want to retire. It's time. Then he bursts in with something he's been reading about and the morning is gone in a flash and he's made me promise to do something new. (Trotsky, he wants to know about Trotsky. My own fault for showing off, and now I've got all that reading to do.) "There's a guy on the wing, he's doing a maths degree. He's not here, he's not in the prison. You talk to him and he's OK, he's a good guy but he's somewhere else." Someone had lent Casey a book about anatomy and he, of course, had got into it in that obsessive way that real enthusiasts do. It came with a CD and so we took a look. It was absolutely brilliant. We all thought so, caught up in that lovely time-collapsing fascination that concentrating on something brings. Some of it was quite difficult to watch. There was a dissection of a cadaver: bones, red meat, sinew. "Does this," I wondered, "affect our belief in God?" "Not a bit," said Ian, "Science is entirely neutral. Only the moral arguments count." There was some mention of evolution and Casey made a strange point about lemurs and the way they move and, as no one understood him, he jumped up and did a lemur imitation. We made him do it again, pretending not to get his point. "Very balletic that," I told him. "Just, run it past us again." And he did: doing the lemur. "It's a proper dance," said Ade, "go on, do it again."