A Night In The Cells

[rhythmaning]

I recently spent an evening in prison.

OK, it wasn’t a functioning prison; it was a hotel. I was in the restaurant.

This was in Oxford; I spent a long weekend there in March, visiting my mother and catching up with friends. (Including white_hart, who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time.) One of these friends is now a professor in the department where I was a student. That is a very strange idea – that my contemporaries are now the professors. [Sound cue: The lunatics are taking over the asylum….]

I first met A. in the garden of Somerville College; it was the summer of erm 1980. We were working on a play together – a production of Pier Gynt. I was doing sound and lights (ha!) and A. was playing a variety of characters.

Most of the cast of this play went on to share a house the next year just off the Cowley Road; by the end of the year, most of us weren’t talking to each other, though A. and I have remained close – as close as one can from a distance of four hundred miles – most of the time.

We hadn’t met up for a couple of years; I hadn’t been in Oxford for that long. I spent Sunday evening with A., D. and their kids (where I learnt that their son is named, in part, after me!) and A., keen to make the most of her academicstatus, invited me to dinner a couple of days later at her college.

Unfortunately she forgot to tell her college this, so instead of being entertained on high table – which I’ll admit I was slightly dubious about – she took me to prison.

Oxford prison ceased to be a prison per se in the 1990s. The building was sold off, and has become a hotel. (I couldn’t help but feel that this is significant. Perhaps this is why prisons have become so crowded – because they have all been turned into four star hotels?) All around the prison is now the restaurant equivalent of a retail park – a forest of restaurants and bars. The precinct featured in the recent Morse spin-off on ITV, Lewis – the one where an ex-con gets shot.

The hotel itself still looks like a prison. The restaurant – in the basement – has lots of small windows, each window representing a cell, a former cell; they were tiny. Even knocked through and opened up, there was still a feeling of claustrophobia: lots of doors and doorways.

We sat and chatted – both gossip and rather more esoteric topics. A. does a fair bit of work for the government, and we talked about various government crises. We talked about risk, and how many people don’t understand it. We talked about genetics, genetic modification and the precautionary principle. (I was in favour of the precautionary principle, A. less so. For me, the idea of mixing up genes from different species, letting them crossover – because that is what sex does, it is all about mixing up genetic material – and then seeing what all these genes do when they get back together is a step too far. I’d rather be cautious now than regret it in twenty years time, when we find out what actually happened. I feel the same about mobile phones: maybe all this radiation all around us is harmless; but I’d rather take care than find out in many years time that in fact we’d got it wrong.)

We also gossiped about old friends. We swapped stories and caught up on our personal lives. Who’s seeing whom (one college friends is apparently dating one of Robert Maxwell’s sons; a very strange idea indeed); who’s relationships are on the ropes; who’s kids are grown up now (an even stranger idea).

It was an excellent evening. Friends – old friends – are a great thing. It felt so easy.

Comments

[topicaltim.livejournal.com]

One of these friends is now a professor in the department where I was a student. That is a very strange idea – that my contemporaries are now the professors. [Sound cue: The lunatics are taking over the asylum….]

This is always odd, a sort of Impostor Syndrome by proxy. One of the friends I shared a house with in my final year at Oxford is now a teacher, nay, a Head of Department at my own old school. This causes me all sorts of conflicts when I have to decide how I imagine a typical member of staff there...