It is an interesting thing to sit at my laptop on New Years Eve in 2021 and write, because 1) this is the first public blog I have written since coming home and 2) I'm very aware that the content of my blog is watched, read, re-read and even aired in court on occasion. So for those of you reading for the joy of reading and not some sense of barkerbaker voyeurism - welcome :)
We were all steam rolled into 2021 thinking 2020 was the worst of what the world had to offer, and for many, including myself, the tumultuous nature of 2020 was the gift that just kept on giving.
December 10th 2020 saw me in the back of a prison van, locked in a little cubicle, driving through the dark streets of Manchester to HMP Styal, Christmas lights dotting the road and turns I have learned to love and known all my life, now seen in a totally different light.
In the bleak, cold, stark journey from court to incarceration I had the joy of seeing my own fair abode from the blacked out van window and it occurred to me, how odd I always found it growing up, glancing up at the same windows on the winding motorways of the United Kingdom, wondering what demons lay within and what monsters were off to be put in their cages.
Me. I was the monster off to be caged. Caged, what a Manchester Evening News word, one that has continually filled me with fury in my many moments of anti-establishment, feminist, political cries for equality in a justice system - where women are painted as failed and flawed creatures, where crimes speak lounder than stories that came before, where words in court warp the true sense of truth, and completely undermine whatever we call justice, or whatever justice victims really seek.
So I sat in my cubicle, a bottle of water rolled under the locked compartment door - no handcuffs, just shaking hands and a one track mind - this can't be happening. How is this happening. It's all a big mistake. The continuation of my unrealistic inability to accept the severity of my actions and holding onto the words of a legal team who failed me more than I failed myself and awaiting a press parade of public humiliation that would mark me, marr me, and forget about those I left in my wake, my family, friends, employer, colleagues, students. So quick to print, so quick to run articles that once found fame and now projected shame. The irony. The press prints I've collected over the years, the awards, all locked in The Barker Baker suitcase in my apartment, so that one day they might find the light and I could remember what it felt like it was all for. But in the stark, dark, winding roads of Cheshire now, it was clear to all, even me. It was all for nothing.
A welcome of her majesty's prison during Covid-19, not lockdown at this stage in Greater Manchester and Cheshire in early December 2020, but in the prison system, a convenient and extensive choke hold on all who reside there, for the pandemic opened up a vulnerability - an easily exploited suffocation of the freedoms and dignities that can and should be found behind bars. Eradicated, decimated and masquerading as duty of care. There was none.
"Don't worry it's nothing like what you see on TV, it's not like Bad Girls," said the prison officer opening the third gate leading to the cell block, and my "wing" - perhaps she hadn't watched Bad Girls, because this was like for like, door after door, slots to speak through, noise like that of a zoo, screams like that of a mental institution or psychiatric ward, and smells like a kennel.
A plastic bowl, a toilet roll, a bar of soap, toothbrush, sachet of shampoo and laundry tablet were handed to me - I must have looked confused. The prison officer tapped the sign on my cell door - my name, prisoner number, prison photo and date of entry. "Shower is day 8 and exercise is day 5, press the bell only if an emergency, that will be all, IN,"
This plastic bowl was a thing of facination for me throughout the prison journey, never more so than when crouching over it to wash with little dignity in my cell, only thankful I wasn't padded up with another inmate and thankfully on my own. The same bowl now to wash what few clothes I had brought with me to prison, having not truly anticipated I might actually end up there. Washing knickers, lady parts, cups, plates, hair. So this is my Christmas. This is my New Year.
I watched the fireworks all through December, split sparks in the sky, blighted by bars. Beautiful in their freedom and mocking in their location. Across the cold starry skies on New Years Eve 2020, Wilmslow never looked so beautiful and so tragic all in one.
So what of 2021, truly.
What of New Years Resolutions in prison? I wrote on the back of my prisoner pin number sheet my new years resolution for 2021, anticipating my stay at HMP Styal would be as harrowing for the remainder as it was for the beginning, and in my sad handwriting, there is only one word, a piece of paper I brought home with me in September.
Survive
To be honest, on the eve of new year, here now as I sit, my new years resolution is not dissimilar.
It just requires a little tweak, 2021 saw me survive, 2022 will see me thrive. I have no doubt about that. What infuriates the few, inspires the many - and that has always been a modus operandi I can live with. For those who frown and fight to find flaw and undermine the positive and the progress, there are those who uplift, who stand by my side, who take steps with me, for me, in the right direction.
Since coming home, I have received, as I knew I would, a barrage of abuse, from strangers and just plain strange. Social media was once the forum of which I centred my universe, the projection, the protection, the falsehood that self-perpetuated the shallow nature of all that had come to pass.
Whilst I was away, I was severed from practically every kind of communication unless a good old fashion pen and paper, and in Styal you didn't receive your actual letters for fear of spice making it's way into the prison - a laughable notion when the level of drugs making their way into the prison system was neither a letter from a loved one to worry about or other!!! Bigger fish to fry HMPSS!
The detox was beautiful and I genuinely believed when I came home, I would be better, I would see it for what it was, a gentle poison that more often than not, smells like a perfume so you let it in.
I fell right back into my own trap, so overwhelmed by the negative press, the comments, the hurt, the hate, the words, the messages, it went on and on and on and my only weapon was to play "look, everythings ok now,"
Naive and delicately broken as always in it's essence.
For the record, on the eve of December 31st 2021, I'm neither ok, not am I concquering the world the way I would want you all to think I am, but what I am doing is putting one foot infront of the other with a kinder heart, and quite frankly, that's a Christmas miracle and a beautiful thing I can take into the new year, regardless of all the horror 2021 has brought, it has brought love, true, real, overwhelming, life changing love, friendship, honesty, reality, humanity and hope.
My new years resolutions are not to make promises for me, for those I love, they are to make moments and to take steps to bring about something that is more than me.
The political, anti-establishment, feminist, lgbt+, equal rights and justice warrior is well and truly in situ.
Campaigns and lobbying are afoot. Being TheBarkerBaker brought me into contact with the people who make the change, who change the narrative, en-mass, one by one. So the power of that can be it's true legacy. Not what the papers say. But what the change can be.
2022, for you, for me, for every woman still trapped in a cage, mental, physical, financial, emotional, abusive, drug ridden, addicted, who feel they have lost their power because our justice system took it. Power and freedom are concepts. It's voices that get people really scared.
So raise them with me.
Happy New Year Friends <35
