Thirty-Seventh Day

An extraordinary thing happened today. I met a person from outside. I know, the guards I see every day, and my interrogators, all have lives beyond these walls. When here, though, they are parts of the machinery of this institution and of its fabric. The girl I met today was luminous by comparison.

I was led from my room through our bleak corridors in the usual way, my squat guard silent but for echoing footfalls. He stayed with us in the interrogation room.

I'm not sure quite who the girl was. She could have been an official, but could just as easily have been an undergraduate on some quixotic project, who in her naivity had got access to me - something I cannot imagine any more hardened researcher attempting. The girl was preposterously young. I imagined some sleepy bureaucrat signing her off, his mind preoccupied with the recent discovery of his teenager's dope habit, or maybe with a particularly ripe cleavage he'd been staring at on the tube that morning. She asked me about my sleeping patterns, my general health, and made me perform some tasks, some word games, some mental arithmetic. This was evidently some form of psychological assessment, but it didn't feel all that rigorous.

Frankly, I wasn't interested in what this girl - I cannot think of her as a woman - was asking me. I was taken aback by her presence, and how it made me feel. She had luxuriant, tousled hair. Her face was plain but confident and happy and made up with skill. She was tanned. Her handbag was obviously costly, and a pair of sunglasses lay beside it on the table between us. Here was a wealthy woman, but in no sense a glamorous one. She was too young and too English and the illusion she gave of carelessness and a lack of preening was far too successful for that. In a word, the girl I met today was a picture of privilege.

I was prompted to an absurd feeling. I resented this girl's privilege and that of her class, and I felt a desperate pang of envy. I didn't just want the trappings this creature enjoyed, or even her freedom to come and go from my prison, I wanted to be as much like her as I could be. I wanted to be young and beautiful and born to a life of the best of everything.

My parents should not have pursued their worthy but ordinary lives, I thought. Neither should I now be satisfied with what I now accept as my fate. I should be striving to bring my children or theirs to this girl's heights. Somehow, though, I have accepted the life that has been thrust upon me as my own and as right for me. I know or think I know that this girl will not grow up to be happier or healthier than I, or to have a better understanding of the world. Almost everyone in the world has someone to envy, and they console themselves with thoughts such as these.

There is a connection between privilege and freedom, of course - freedom to choose what to do with one's life, and more importantly with each hour of the day - the ability to buy time for study or travel or for blow-drying one's hair is what sets apart the rich from the poor. Historically this divide was all the wider, I suppose, if that's not so vague as to be meaningless. Writing about class, and now history, I cannot help but think of class struggle, which means Marx, which means revolution. This Sloaney girl made me think of the Manifesto. 'Workers of the world...' and the rest. Where shall we place my detention in the history of the modern age? What does it say about these times? I don't know the answer. I know I don't have the perspective to give an answer. But it feels like the end of history. If those with power in the UK believe themselves threatened by me, and this is all the response they can muster, this is an effete age indeed. It is as though history has been replaced by politics.

I will stop here, though this isn't all I have to say.