Sometimes a blog of mine will write itself.
My fingers will hit the keyboard, moments pass, and I've pressed publish.
I'll spend the next few minutes reading back the blur and correcting the typo's and bad grammar for fear of my lovely Erwin rising from his rest to critique my writing.
This one however, has taken some time.
Like a therapy session on paper, it's been ruminating. Being cultivated. So much to say, but how?
It starts with a cardigan.
A cardigan bought in peak pandemic, 2020, online from our little lockdown home. I had swerved the mass redundancies at work and duly been given a promotion, to celebrate this unknowing short lived success, I bought myself something I had been hankering after..... a Taylor Swift Folklore cardigan. And lo' a splurge, which came with all sorts of conflicted emotions. I bought this cardigan whilst facing down a court case that was due to upend my life and the lives of those around me. So many years after the fact, after the crime. No-one could have prepared me for what 2020 would look like. From Covid, to cell block. The cardigan by and large seems rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things and yet, for me. It was an anchor. A focus.
I probably wore that cardigan all of 5 times before I was ripped from life and banged up in HMP Styal. A short lived joy and something I obsessed about whilst incarcerated.
It was my little symbol of hope, of change, of growth, of success over failure, of change. It was my tie to Sarah. Our covid love story, our first wedding anniversary together in lockdown, not what we had imagined for our marriage, but it was a strange and wondrous joy to spend so much time together. Days, weeks, months together. We listened to Folklore together, the beauty of it achieved something wonderful - Sarah became a Swiftie. Her indignant and defiant indie coolness, eroded a little in the love of the co-creation of this incredible album, she justified her new found love in it's links to Frightened Rabbit, to acoustic talent, authenticity of art, of Taylor Swift's vulnerability. It was hard not to love.
And so, the cardigan became so much more to both of us.
So much so, the day Sarah came to pick me up from prison to come home, she brought said cardigan in the car, all the way to York. My best friend in the backseat, clutching my favourite possession and the Fran essentials that marked true freedom : wife, bestie, cardigan, an ice-cold can of Diet Coke and a little box of Tim Hortons Timbits (an ode to my favourite Canadian friend)
By the time I got to the prison gate, holding my black prison holdalls in each hand, my life for 10 months packed into two tiny black bags, I felt pain. Pain at leaving the prison estate and not knowing what I was coming home to. Not knowing who I was anymore.
All the things you think make you who you are, are bit by bit taken from you in prison. Fragments of identity are stripped through the isolation, humiliation and degradation of what prison is. Brutal, futile and without purpose, fuelled by violence, sadness, frustration, bad behaviour and loss.
The gates opened, as they did for my every day coming and going to work from the jail and back.
They opened for the final time, and I was embraced by the loves of my lives, but I know they felt it just as much as I did.... it wasn't the same. It wasn't the hype. It wasn't the hope. The moment of relief we had all been waiting for.
It was like holding someone who looks and feels familiar but isn't. Like a dream.
And as they blasted a "Fran playlist," all the way back to Manchester, and I wrapped myself in my Taylor Swift cardigan which smelled like home, drank my Diet Coke, I was still in prison. I didn't come home.
It's taken a long time for that version, that person, to fade away. It came with waves of anger, sadness and loss from all involved. Heartbreak and angst at the loss of life inside to bring it into our home all the same. This echo of the person I was before.
Piece by piece, I came back.
It was like waking up from a pro-longed nightmare, that somehow felt like a dream, there were so many mixed emotions about my time away.
We're a month away from my 3 years being home.
Only 3 years.
It's been the longest and shortest period of time in my life all at once.
At face value, it's nothing short of miraculous, the recovery, the return, the reset and reunification of past and present.
I sometimes look at our life now and have to hold back a cry, a burst of emotion at the gratitude of how far we've come, together.
From wearing a cardigan in an apartment building in lockdown, prancing around to Taylor Swift, to wearing it in the car coming home from prison.... to....
Sarah wearing it in London as we went to see Taylor Swift.
To see the actual bloody cardigan and the V & A museum.
Now; seeing Taylor Swift in concert is an impressive feat in 2024 regardless of our whirlwind lived experience - the most sought after tickets ever (until tomorrow when Oasis go on sale obviously!!!!)
It's the context that gives it power.
My little Canadian bestie (Timbits) after many many many attempts at getting tickets, achieved the impossible and got us some epic tickets for Wembley, we booked our accommodation, travel and off we toddled to London Town.
Now, two things here - I met Timbits in 2019 when I had gone through a huge period of recovery, to become the person I am now. So she had the joy of meeting Fran 2.0, and we became fast friends. It turns out if you're a good person, you attract good people, and she's the best of the best.
Just one year into our friendship, I disappeared off to prison and the press had a field day at my expense plastering my so-called criminality in every local and national rag even making the New York Post, who knew people were so interested in a failed fraudster baker from Manchester?
I digress. My lovely, normal, functional friend, had to read these things without any real context from me. I had shared with my friends the ins and outs of the court case and what I was looking at - not the sentence I got that's for sure, but off to jail I went.
That could have been the end of this new found friendship. I asked Sarah to check in on her and if she still wanted to know me after my very public downfall. Naive, childish and the mind of a lonely woman on 24 hour bang up.
Fast forward, summer 2024. Singing our hearts out, handmade swiftie bracelets a-plenty, curated era's tour outfits, co-ordinated geekery, and for 3 hours we screamed and sang and danced and loved along with 92,000 people in Wembley stadium.
In my freezing cold jail cell in December 2020 with snow coming through the broken window, wearing every item of clothing I had come in with to keep warm, writing letters home with shaking hands, did I think I could get to a place like that with the people I love and have them still love me?
No.
But we did it.
And we took the damn cardigan with us.
There were hundreds of women and girls in London with the Folklore cardigan and it made me wonder what the stories behind their cardigans were? Or were they just nice knitted items bought online to celebrate a songstress that's taken over the world?
Sarah and I got Taylor Swift tattoos on New Years Eve 2023.
Mine says "This Is Me Trying,"
Someone asked me recently, what did that mean to me?
I said it reminds me that trying is enough, that I try to be good, kind, honest, healthy and happy.
It's quite the Wishlist, but I'm living up to my own expectations in achieving those ideals.
I've joke a few times with Sarah now that when I make the documentary of my crazy life, I want this to be the soundtrack song, because if you start life and love with Taylor Swift, you end it the same way.
