Heaven

DAY 161 BOXING DAY

7.30 am

For those prisoners who do not return to work, Boxing Day is almost worse than Christmas Day. Very few inmates attend surgery this morning, and certainly none of them have any illness worth reporting.

8.13 am

Over breakfast, I learn another terrible consequence of the drug culture in prisons. Jim (antiques only), the gym orderly, tells me that some inmates who are addicted to heroin often die within a few months of leaving prison. The reason? The heroin they take in jail is always weaker because the dealers add other substances such as caster sugar, talc or flour. So when they are released, they are immediately exposed to a purer substance, which the body can no longer tolerate. Result? They end up dying of an overdose.

11.00 am

The governor drops in to see Linda, and gives me a Christmas present and a birthday present for Mary, neither of which he’s allowed to do, as it could compromise him should I ever come up in front of him on report. However, as it’s only a few days before he retires, I suppose he feels this is unlikely.

It turns out that the governor is a collector of farthings, and he gives Mary a farthing dated 1944 and I receive one dated 1940 – our respective years of birth. I am touched. He also brings in three volumes of The World’s Greatest Paintings: Selected Masterpieces, published in 1934 and edited by T. Leman Hare, for me to read over Christmas. He understands what turns me on.

The three volumes are fascinating at several levels, not least because of the one hundred pictures, almost all of them would be in an equivalent compilation circa 2002. The paintings include da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Bellini’s Portrait of the Doge Lorendano, Rembrandt’s Mother, Landseer’s Shoeing the Bay Mare (wonderful) and Yeames’ When Did You Last See Your Father? However, in this 1934 volume, there is no mention of the Impressionists; no examples of Monet, Manet, Van Gogh or even Cézanne. Velasquez is described as the greatest Spanish painter of all time, with Murillo in second place. I wonder if Professor Hare had even heard of Picasso in 1934, and where he would place him in the lexicon of Spanish artists in 2002.

There are only two artists I have never come across before: John MacWhiter and Millet – not Jean-Francois Millet, but an American, Francis David Millet. ‘On the out’ I visit Tate Britain regularly-I live opposite, on the other side of the river – but I don’t remember seeing either MacWhiter’s June in the Austrian Tyrol (magnificent), or Millet’s Between Two Fires. I hope Sir Nicholas Serota has them on display, because Tate Britain will be among the first places I visit once I’m released.

In his foreword, Professor Hare writes something that, in my opinion, is even more relevant today than it was in 1934:

There is so much nonsense spoken and written about art today that the average man is, naturally, inclined to be shy of the whole subject, and suspicious of those who practise the Arts. He thinks, if this mass of contradiction and confusing jargon is the result of the love of Art, he had better do without Art altogether. There is no mystery about Art, but there is mystification without end, evolved by certain critics who love to pose as superior persons. Such writers put forward the theory that the enjoyment of fine arts is reserved for a select and exclusive minority, meaning of course, themselves and their disciples. No greater error could be propounded than this, which is a comparatively modern fallacy and one which is so dangerous that if persisted, it must in time bring into contempt everything and everyone connected with Art.

1934.

2002. No comment.

1.00 pm

Linda shuts up shop for the day and goes home for a well-earned rest. She has been on duty for the past nineteen days without a break.

9.00 pm

I confess that, by prison standards, I am in heaven. But I feel I ought to let you know I’m still desperate to get back to earth.