I am a Prisoner in the Bangkok Hilton

I thought, four years ago when I decided to write to a prisoner in Bang Kwang prison that it would be a once a month or so exchange of letters, keeping his spirits up and some general chit chat. I chose Gary so that just was never going to happen :-) My husband and I have got to know Gary so well over the past four years all via the written word. We sent parcels over to help him and his fellow prisoners, passed on messages and generally did what we could to help “the old man”. Gary in now in his 60’s and has been in prison for over 9 years. Nine very hard years in “the Bangkok Hilton”. Not many farangs (foreign prisoners) manage to survive for so long especially at his age. Gary really is an exceptional man. So he is home and in Wandsworth Prison in London. He is hoping to be moved to a more suitable prison in the next few months. He is a category B prisoner “Those who do not require maximum security, but for whom escape needs to be made very difficult”. Hopefully in time this will ...

So We went to see Gary We have written to Gary for many years and in the last 6 months we have been fortunate enough to talk to him on the phone since he was repatriated. But last week, after a couple of false starts we managed to actually go and visit him. We were always a little jealous of random emails we would receive from some great people about how they had been to see him in Thailand. This is somewhere where we could never go and so our letters had to suffice. Once Gary was back in the UK we were determined to go see him and set the wheels in motion. Its a bit of a process but I think we have it sussed. Firstly Gary had to get what is known as a Visitors Order. This is a request to the Prison to allow a visit and is at the discretion of the prisoner, its not the Prison who has the final say on whether or not you can go visit. What we didn’t realise, all three of us, is that once Gary has the Visitor Order number he has to send it to the visitor so that they can organise the visi...

Warning This blog contains adult sex innuendo Gary sent this through in one of his letters to us and I couldnt resist repeating it here. Sorry Gary :-) and if by repeating this I upset you dear reader, I again apologise. "Bora Da Guys Nookey on the National Health? Its a mans life in Britains Model Prisons. Sex Surrogates supplied weekly. Had I known that this was an integral part of the Gaols sentence planning procedure, I would have stolen that Mars Bar from the schooltuck shop. However, call me old fashioned if you will, but these new sexual positions that are all the rage in the 21st Century do little to satisfy my carnal desires. Me, I am a missionary man with a few mild variations. This recent one of bend down and touch your toes leaves me unfulfilled and besides gives me a pain in the bum for hours after! Shall we have this as a blog Alan ROFL, LMAO (sic) Bridget"

(Note: There has been a gap in Gary's blogs to us as we have had difficulty getting letters and parcels to him in Bang Kwang and he getting letters to us unless they went via a 3rd party) Sadly my initial hopes regarding my book have been scuppered. The original intention was to have it published before being repatriated. This didn’t work out and as I have now fully experienced the physical repatriation experience it behoves me to document it. As far as I can tell only 2 other Britons have written accounts of the process from attending the handover ceremony to the Wandsworth Marshals, to being delivered into the FNIC(First Night in Custody) cell on E Wing. Whereas Lester and Scotty, the two who have documented the process, knew their actual date of repatriation for weeks beforehand, my day was mired in confusion, due in part because of the floods affecting Bangkok. Originally I was scheduled for the end of November – later leaked to me by the screws as being 30/11/11. As the Bangko...

Since Nov. 2010 I think I have detected the merest zephyr of change that has wafted across the Thai desk at the London Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Certainly not enough of a breeze to ruffle the feathers of a certain ' Shelia ' in the British Embassy in Bangkok. Nevertheless, when she visited me yesterday (Feb 3 rd 2011) to; amongst others, deliver a bollocking for continuing to exercise my right to blog; a new word has entered her lexicon: Transparency. Seemingly there's a plan afoot that embassy staff have to be a shade clearer in their attempts at cover ups. As laudable as the Foreign Secretary's directive is, by the time it has been “filtered” past the Mandarins such as Haigh – the head of the Thai Desk it has been watered down. Onto Dufall. The distortion has resumed its usual opaqueness in order to protect the guilty. Transparency has arse. How about a little more on the whys and wherefores of Quinten Quayle deserting the stinking shit, oops the s...

One has to hand it to the British Embassy’s leading misanthrope Kate “Kuntz” Dufall. She never misses a chance to ream us poor inmates in her charge a new 'Ronson' (rectum). A recent victim of Kuntz is my countryman Neil “Joey” Clayton. Soon after our arrests the Royal (that’s fratricide to us commoners) Thai filth handed over our passports to the Embassy in Bangkok. Currently, by her own admission, Kuntz is holding over 70 passports, each one worth a good $US500 on the illegal passport market. A nice little earner for someone who can trace her Aussie roots back to the Botany Bay; 70 x 500=$35,000. There’s a problem though for her to realise this windfall. Those passports are needed for when we finally repatriate, that is unless she can get us to apply for new ones. Enter Joey. Kuntz has hit upon the scam of telling us, individually that our passports have been mislaid – not lost, mislaid. As if there’s a difference! – consequently we must apply for replacement travel warrants ...

Call me a cynic if you will. At least it is better than the appellation of Dr. Hannibal (as in Lecter) that Dufall of British Embassy infamy insists on using to discourage potential correspondents and visitors. Furthermore , a cognomen of cynic is accurate whereas Hannibal..... This month’s Citylife (Jan2011) community service section – check it out on the Web – resulted in howls of derisive laughter to emanate from D3 in the Hilton. No fault of editor Pim’s but the entry was deliberately sparse on necessary detail thereby permitting certain – no names, no pack drill – British Embassy employers to instigate yet another dirty deed done dirt cheap and bolster her pension funds at the expense of the pockets of both British ex pats and us residents in Bang Kwang. As of (presumably)1/1/11 all non- Europeans requiring a visa to travel to the UK must pass an exam that tests their fluency with the English language. A favoured phrase of both my prep. School Latin master and my mother comes rea...