It is Sunday night as I write this column. with a blunt, police-issue pencil. On a scrap of paper the prison warder kindly passed through the hatch of my cell door. I can't be precise about the time as my watch, along with my shoes and belt, have been taken. I am sitting in solitary confinement on a thin foam mattress on the floor of my cell. It is my third night in captivity and my sixth meal is about to arrive. There are no showers, towels, toothbrushes or razors, but you do get to splash cold water on your face at 5am, three hours before they serve breakfast.
I am 'inside' for being 'part' of an anti-Trident protest on the River Clyde. I was aboard Arctic Sunrise, which was once a seal hunters' ship but now belongs to Greenpeace. It had been hovering outside the Faslane submarine base making a nuisance of itself - and breaching a restricted area - in protest at the government's proposal to go ahead with a new nuclear deterrent. My role? I had been commissioned to cover the event for the Scottish Daily Mail. All 29 of us on board were taken into custody on Friday tea time, to various prisons around Glasgow.
I had watched much of the proceedings from the deck, including the arrival of a raiding party of 40 or so wet-suited military divers (members of the Military Police with a couple of men from the Special Boat Service thrown in) as they swarmed on board. They applied a jemmy to the triple-layered sea door - usually this protects the bridge from whatever the Atlantic can hurl at it, but soon the mighty portal buckled. Time to skedaddle, I thought, so I hurtled down the steps and onto the lower decks to hide in my cabin. They would surely never find me there. With shaky hands I poured myself a heroic measure of whisky, and contemplated the day's events, starting with the 6am réveille, the hearty breakfast and bracing sail up the Clyde and to Gare Loch where Britain's sea-borne nuclear arsenal is based.
The screw, whose tones were as clipped as his moustache, asked if I'd like to see the wine list
How wrong I was about not being discovered. Emboldened by whisky, I opened the cabin door. I thought that by now, everyone would have been taken into custody, leaving me free to stroll out and go home. A man in a red rubber suit pounced and I was frog-marched to the galley. 'You is nicked, son,' was the gist of it.
I told them that I thought reporters only got locked away by repressive regimes, by people like Mugabe.
Anyway, enough of politics.
I am going to write about the unmentionable: the grub in custody. I doubt many readers will have had the privilege.
I advise you to keep it that way.
Despite several reassurances that - as a bona fide member of the press - I would be freed, dinner in my cell at Clydebank police station has just arrived. For the third night in succession it is sausage encased in a hard, greasy roll and some small, solid, brown objects that were once baked beans. There are also boiled potatoes blackened at the top, on a bed of carbon.
Why a bed of carbon, I hear you ask? This is where the food had joined molecular forces with the cardboard container under the ferocity of Clydebank nick's industrial oven. The screw, an ex-army fellow whose tones were as clipped as his moustache, asked if I'd like to see the wine list. I very nearly laughed. He then rubbed it in. There were seconds. Would Sir care for some?
Lunch: the technique applied was similar to dinner, so it was probably the same chef. Beef stew, boiled carrots, boiled potatoes - again wearing a crunchy Homburg hat. A thinner lit de charbon this time. There had clearly once been a sauce. I could see that by the recriminating brown stain on the side of the cardboard, like the shadow left by matter after a nuclear explosion.
Breakfast was black pudding, sausage, potatoes. The liberal deployment of fat had partially protected the contents from the oven's ferocity but the carbon footprint remained. Instant tea, served with sugar as a matter of course, assisted in washing it down, as it did every meal. Such food requires rehydration.
I had had the pleasure of eating my first breakfast behind bars in the company of Captain Waldemar Wichman, the Argentinian skipper of the vessel, plus the ship's Chilean chief engineer. The three of us had spent the previous night side by side, like sardines in a concrete can.
Neither of the South Americans could eat the breakfast. Like fussy pooches, they sniffed, licked, nibbled and put dismissively aside.
"This is the worst food I have been offered in any jail in the world," said the Captain, a reformed Buenos Aires lawyer with much experience of prison. But after breakfast the engineer was sent back to the ship because one of the generators had started to belch smoke, so Captain Wichman was moved into a cell on his own. They do this in station cells to prevent men who are bunking together from fighting, snogging or worse. Apparently odd numbers don't misbehave.
There is little to do, now that I have read my newspaper, except fantasise about food.
That was yesterday morning, 39 hours ago. It is now 11ish on Sunday night and I have been in custody for 3,000 very long minutes. I have been told I'll be out by 1pm on Monday, once the procurator fiscal has considered our cases. Another 14 hours to go. There is no chair in the cell, just the plastic-coated foam mattress and a lidless loo in the corner. There are no windows, just a small ceiling grille that allows me (just) to discern the difference between night and day.
There is little to do, now that I have read my newspaper, except fantasise about food. I have never before thought of airline food as alluring, or imagined how nice it would be to eat a Big Mac. Or even one of my wife's watery quiches.
Then I remember I have to write a review for WFI of a restaurant in St Andrews, where I ate only four nights earlier, in another world.
Dare I think of those mouthwatering images now? Of the monkfish with pork belly, braised in soy sauce; or of the John Dory with shredded oxtail preceded by the Kilbrandon oysters in a Bloody Mary sauce? Of the Grüner Veltliner Terrassen from Austria, or the cheese plate followed by chocolate tart, washed down by a Fonseca Guimaraens? Yes I dare, until the images have faded like so many over-exposed photographs. Fourteen hours can be a long time.
This article is from Waitrose Food Illustrated: July 2007