Pebble: Homeless for the Holidays

(Featured in Pebble Zine: Issue three)

Homeless for the Holidays

words by joshua saunders • illustration by lauren kelsey

James Beavis spent over a week living on the streets of London this Christmas, witnessing life from a section of the community that society turns away from on a daily basis. He told Joshua Saunders about his filmed experiences of being homeless over the merriest season of the year; a time over spilling with tinsel, turkey and supposed generosity, during one of the coldest winters of the past 100-years. 

“I am truly out there, I am truly on my own with nothing,” said an understandably anxious 22-year-old student, he’d announced on his first of six video diaries that he would be spending Christmas homeless on the streets of London, to raise money for homeless charity Crisis. 

“I won’t have planned where I’m staying. I’m taking no money with me, no card, so I’ll have to beg for food and water. If I can get anything I’ll be giving any excess to Crisis... and if I can’t get enough, I’ll be going hungry and thirsty. I’m having no phone with me, no contact with my friends or family, I think I’m going to find the hardest thing this Christmas is not speaking to my dad, my gran, my mum and family.”

He’d be spending nine days and eight nights experiencing homelessness first hand on the streets of Lewisham, one of London’s most deprived areas. He would be appealing to anybody watching his videos to donate or to share his initial video across Facebook and other social networking sites, and unbeknownst to him 1,384 people across the UK did. By the end of his time stint on the streets James accumulated just under 35,000 views from the YouTube videos that recorded his arduous endeavour. Beavis also managed to raise over £26,000 to help the homeless community seek refuge in Crisis centres dotted throughout the UK.

“It costs £20.48 for a place at Crisis centre and they were 150 beds short. Charitable giving has gone down by a fifth, it’s not that people won’t give it’s about finding a way to make people give,” said a healthier looking James Beavis, only a few days after returning back home. 

James Beavis was on recorded his experiences on the streets through
video diaries, documenting the troubles of being homeless at Christmas

“I always thought I was quite a big, strong person” he said, “but it made me realise how weak I am, I’ve never done something so difficult in my life. I did it for 8 nights and there’s a guy I met who has done it every day for 12 years, he’s been set on fire, stabbed. I realised I couldn’t do it for that long, I think I’d have given on up life.”

Trying to find work is a problem riddled task for people on the streets, as without an address it’s not possible to apply for a National Insurance card meaning they are unable to get a legal job and therefore run the risk of having to do things illegally.

In December 2003 begging was made a recordable offense, it is an illegal activity but does not carry a jail sentence. James vehemently opposes this legislation, he questions “Why can’t you beg for yourself if you’re in need of charity? We’re cutting off the lifeline for these people. We are failing them because we can’t give them benefits either because they don’t have an address.”

 

During his time on the streets James struggled to raise just under five pounds a day even in some of London’s high-footfall locations, including outside Tottenham Court Road train station, having been removed from inside by security. “I went an hour and a half without talking to people, there must have been 300 people walking past you a minute.

“People don’t just turn their eyes away from you, they turn their whole head 90 degrees so as not to look at you. So if you’re not in their world, not in their vision, you’re not a problem for society, then they don’t need to tackle this issue; and we call ourselves a developed country...”

Instead of begging, James would often find himself looking through bins for any remnants of food, including Christmas day, a time when no shops are open.

“Begging is the most dehumanising thing ever,” James says, “I literally survived on as little as possible. You look down to the ground while saying it, it’s really the most humiliating thing and I think I’d find it even harder if I knew I wasn’t doing it for charity,” he recalls.
In the first of his video diaries from the streets, which he spent the last of his money and missed a meal to upload in a nearby internet cafe, an exhausted and feverish James told viewers, “Last night was the hardest night of my life, four hours of worrying about being beaten up, bottled or knifed. It’s Christmas now, it’s about 4am in the morning and I’ve been kicked out of two stops, I’ve had my cardboard taken.”

While his friends and family were overindulging on roast turkey dinners, James was getting progressively more sodden from the heavy rainfall sweeping England on Christmas day, in the evening he continued to say, “It’s really, really cold. I didn’t get enough money begging today so tomorrow morning I’m going to have to route through bins and I’m really hungry now.”
He reflected, “The rain was pouring on my face, all my heat was sapping into the ground and it was so windy that my sleeping bag was filling up like a wind tunnel.

“There’s cold, it’s not like a sharp shooting cold it’s a numb, bone aching cold, you don’t feel cold in your skin you
feel cold in your bones. It’s your bones that are making your skin cold.”

“I was actually starting to think like a homeless person, it’s ‘outstitutionalised’, you start to think us versus them,” James explained that the isolation of being homeless, estranged from the help of the public, left him feeling out of the institution - ‘outstitutionalised’.”

This split in society was further highlighted when he was filming outside of the prestigious Savoy hotel and a taxi driving passed nudged into him.

“There’s cold, it’s not like a sharp shooting cold, it’s a numb, bone aching driving cold, you don’t feel cold in your skin you feel cold in your bones.”

 “Someone threw a vodka bottle at me, [if it hit me] it would have screwed me up. It was a dead on shot but smashed before it reached me. You get upset from people treating you like crap.” Wanton actions like that leave the homeless community feeling further alienated from society, deprived of basic human kindness leaving a lot of people with an ‘us versus them’ mentality.

A common misconception that fuels this segregation is the presumption that a lot of homeless people are drug and alcohol addicts.
James has worked at one of Crisis’s homeless shelters for just over a year, he asked people stopping there about this widely presumed fact, “The people who I spoke to, who are homeless, don’t drink that’s for sure because it lowers your blood temperature, you get yourself food, hot drinks, also partly because of what people think of you.

If people see a tramp drinking, it’s just another alcoholic beggar who made the wrong decisions in life and that it’s their fault that they’re there. Taking drugs is too expensive for most of the homeless people. Who can spend £40
or £50 on Class As when your budget for a week is less than £40?”

Touchingly, when people from the homeless centre found out about James’s campaign many offered him money, “I think that just showed that we’ve got a community who are so willing to give so much back and then the way we treat them is not nice.”

“Taking drugs is too expensive for most of the homeless people.
Who can spend £40 or £50 on Class As when your budget for a week is less than £40?”

Changing people’s perceptions is at the mantra of James’s campaigning, his stint on the streets stemmed from wanting to raise enough money so that Crisis homeless shelter wouldn’t have to turn people away at Christmas due to a shortage of beds.
Feeling compelled to make a difference for “a community no one was sticking up for”, his videos hastily revealed the harsh reality facing anyone without shelter over the festive period, during one of the UK’s coldest winters in
100-years. 

Government statistics in 2011 estimated that homelessness had risen by 14%, translating to 48,510 people living rough on the streets. The figure, deduced from the amount of applications for council assistance from homeless individuals, is suspected to be a mere shadow of the real calculation of England’s homeless population that are dwelling in squats, on the streets, stopping in hostels and temporarily crashing with friends. Research from homeless charity Crisis estimates the number is closer to 380,000.

Contrary to the amount of people living in impoverished conditions on Britain’s streets, on Boxing Day Selfridges claimed to take £1.5million in the store’s opening hour, the company’s most successful hour of trade to date. It was also calculated that by the third week

of January the UK will have spent £22.8billion on the retail industry, a rise of £358million from last yearStereotyping has led to what James considers to be the ‘dehumanisation of the homeless’. 

His time recreating what Christmas for the homeless is like has developed into a public awareness campaign to show them that “Not all people on the streets are criminals, they’re not allalcoholics, they’re not all drugs addicts, but they have something powerful to give back. They’ve got something they can really give to society and their community, and society has really let them slip through the net.” 

From his experiences, James now intends to lobby government with his findings to campaign for more help and support for the homeless, a populace that is often neglected and cut off from the much needed aid society, and the state can give. “I can turn around to them and say, ‘I’m not in this situation but I put myself in a similar situation.’”

He would like to see the government opening late night centres for the homeless, where they can get cheap hot drinks, receive 24-hour advice on houses, jobs and other things. As well as providing somewhere to warm up at night, which can be one of the most dangerous times for someone living on the streets.

“If somebody’s going to come
up to me and set me on fire or stamp on me I’ve got nothing as I’m asleep on the floor” 

James remembers this vividly from his eight nights sleeping rough in abandoned corridors and construction sites. “The sirens, you hear them all night and police cars passing constantly, it reminds you how vulnerable you are, because you’re asleep too, you have no way of protecting yourself.

“I come from a boxing, martial arts background but if somebody’s going to come up to me and set me on fire or stamp on me I’ve got nothing as I’m asleep on the floor. I won’t know if they’re going to pull a knife on me and steal my stuff, it’s really worrying that society isn’t making a bigger deal of it.”

Over the next year he hopes to alter racist views targeted at asylum seekers and immigrants by uprooting to another country for a month and a half without money, knowing the language or having a place to stay. Showing how difficult it would be to start a new life in a foreign country through his first hand video diaries.

James hopes to open the eyes of the British public by allowing them to live through his filmed experiences and appreciate the tribulations facing any individual seeking a better life in a new country. Whilst in the process highlighting the unfair treatment and casual racism hurled at immigrants and asylum seekers in the UK on a frequent basis. He states passionately, “I’m not willing to live in a world where people treat other people like that. If it takes me doing something to get people talking then lets do it.”

You can watch James’s videos via:http://www.youtube.com/user/jamesbeavis1990

Pebble zine: Issue three

Skim the surface of alternative publishing with Pebble zine: Issue three

Open publication

Pebble: a buzz in the air, sniffer bees the revolution in drug detection

  (Featured in issue two of Pebble zine) 

Bees trained to sniff out drugs by latching onto their chemical scents could soon be swarming airports around the world. Joshua Saunders gains an insight into the future of a drug detection that’s set to sting criminals and those involved in narcotrafficking 

 

Honeybees are currently being trained to recognise scents such as heroin, cocaine and other drugs in an attempt to crack down on smuggling within airports. Their ability to smell pollen from over a mile away makes them ideal candidates for the new revolution in drug detection. 

 
One company, Hertfordshire based Inscentinel, are using Pavlovian conditioning - where a specimen is taught
to associate one thing with another unconditioned stimulus. This works for bees by conditioning them into associating the scent of a drug with sticking their tongue out for sugar.

The bees are introduced to the scent by pressing a button that releases the sample into their airstream. The scientist then touches the bee’s antennae, which is their way of detecting the scent; the bee puts out its tongue and is fed the sugar with water. The process is then repeated to analyse whether the bees stick out their tongues in anticipation of the scent and associate the scent, in this instance drugs, with being fed.
...
 

“You’d see that the cocaine bees are responding, not the heroin bees”

Stacey Kendall, a junior scientist who carries out this research at Inscentinel says, “if they do that, it’s a sign that they have learned to associate the smell with the sugar. If they don’t, half way through the six seconds, you’d touch their antennae again as a reminder and then feed them.” 

“One person can train 30 to 40 bees in a day, you start with bee number one and it will get exposed to the smell for the first time. You work all the way through to bee 35 and then go back to bee number one.” 

Inscentinel condition batches of 35 bees at a time, teaching them in five cycles to ensure the 80-90% of the bees are trained in one day. “They can do it in one cycle but not every bee will,” she added. 

From this, the company intends to provide cartridges of six bees in a vapour detector container, called a Vasor, to be dispatched to airports and other clients for use. 
 

The bees can be trained for over five different drugs and can be taught to recognise chemicals found in the explosive Trinitrotoluene, more commonly known as TNT. 

In developing countries, where it is more expensive to send a medically trained doctor to remote locations, the bees are being used to detect Tuberculosis. They do this by watching to see if they react to the scents given off by compounds found in TB patients’ breath, this has been noted by Dr Steve Chambers - one of New Zealand’s leading infectious disease specialists - as ‘the perfume of tuberculosis’. 

One possible way of utilizing this new method of drug detection in airports would be ‘looking at the cargo going onto a plane not the people,’ which Stacey believes is an area that can be overlooked.

This would work by sucking air from wrapped cargo and then concentrating that air into a filter, then by showing the filter to the bees, you’d see which ones reacted by sticking out their tongue. “You’d see that the cocaine bees are responding not the heroine bees,” and from that be able to deduce that traces of cocaine are inside the cargo.

The screening process is far from the initial fear-filled conjurations of how people believe bees are going to be used to detect drugs at airports. Stacey says, “it sounds like setting bees on people but they are contained in a handheld hoover type piece, so in theory you’d never know that there are bees in there.”

Another way would be to partner the trained bees with sniffer dogs while checking luggage. Stacey explains, “they don’t have to replace sniffer dogs they can work in conjunction. You have a sniffer dog, it’s indicated that there’s something in someone’s luggage [you could then] take them to one side and use the bees.”

To train a dog to become a sniffer dog it takes on average six-months, and a further month to train it to another scent. Up to 100 sniffer bees can be conditioned to associate a scent with sugar in a few hours making it a more financially worthwhile endeavour.
 
At the moment only 35 bees can be trained by hand, but 100 could be conditioned with an automated conditioning unit, where the scents could be released directly into the machine along with the sugar incentive. While this approach may not be as thorough as conditioning each bee by hand Stacey says, “when you put in hundreds of bees it doesn’t matter if a lower percentage are trained, you still get out more bees at the end.”

Inscentinel are using European honeybees, officially known as the ‘Apis mellifera’, because they are one of the most commonly found species of bee, allowing them to be trained worldwide. Stacey explains, “they are not really special, they’re not going to be any different from those used by bee keepers to pollinate an apple orchard.”

Inscentinel are currently working towards a field trial, this upcoming February, with a FTSE 250 company that wished to remain unnamed. 

So far, the company has faced little opposition from the outside world and animal rights activists. Stacey says, “we’ve had one or two angry emails or letters... but that’s probably to be expected.”

“It’s hard to know what’s going through the head of the bees, but they’re getting more sugar than they would be able to find naturally. If you put any stress on them there would be no point because they are not going to behave as they should, and may not learn or respond [to the conditioning]. Their life expectancy outside of the hive is just eight to six weeks so it doesn’t appear to, broadly speaking, affect them,” she adds.

After being used by airports the clients would then return the bees to Inscentinel. When the bees return from duty, the company intends to let them return to a normal life. Stacey says, “the idea when it was set up was that we’d get fresh bees, train them and hand them out to whoever is using them. Then when they return the used bees, we’d release them to a different hive, like a retirement hive.” 

Pictures courtesy of Inscentinel

Pebble: from end to end, John O'Groats to Land's End

  (Featured in issue two of Pebble zine)

Scott Westwood walked the length of the British Isles, without spending a penny by relying on the generosity of the public. Now the raconteur retells his tumultuous tale of six weeks and one day, journeying to the furthest corners of Great Britain

“When you think about it, the United Kingdom’s quite a small island compared to the rest of the world,” Scott Westwood tells me, only a month after completing a 43 day trek from pole to pole of our ‘small island’, raising money for the charity Parkinson’s UK. The imposing John O’Groats to Land’s end journey consists of over 1,200 miles alone. Without counting Scott’s additional ten and a half miles scaling Ben Nevis, the largest mountain in the British Isles, a few days into his walk. 

From the end of the pier at John O’Groats, Scott embarked upon the initial day of his solo, moneyless venture where he would depend upon the kindness of strangers to ensure he had food to eat and a place to sleep.

He spent the previous night on a train for 12-hours heading to the nearby town of Thurso, Scotland, over 550 miles away from his Birmingham home. On his last night at home before the challenge, he relaxed and avoided mulling over the quest before him.

The total distance actually equates to a few hundred miles more than The Proclaimers proclaimed they would walk or three quarters of Frodo and Sam’s journey to cast ‘the one ring’ into the fires of Mount Doom.

The imposing challenge would test his determination, sanity and the ability to carry on walking despite having swollen and severely blistered feet. “It didn’t hit me that it was all real until three days time when I was in pain,” he said.

Equipped with nothing other than the clothes on his back and a rucksack containing a stash of energy bars, as well as a tent and water bottle, the weight of the bag soon took its toll.

To keep on schedule he needed to maintain an average of 21 miles a day; with a couple of one-day marathons to make up extra miles, which took Scott 14 hours to walk due to his heavy bag. “If I worried too much it would have held me back,” Scott said. 

Five days in and arriving at Inverness, it was already a tough battle to accept the lengthy challenge ahead. But with recurring bouts of determination he fought off his body’s calling to give in; “what else am I going to do? I’m going to carry on walking because that’s the only thing I can do,” he thought. “Your life is waking up, walking 22 miles and going to sleep... This is what you do now,” his mind kept telling him. The regular campsite consisted of fields, parks and woods but also...

“I carried a pebble from the most northern point of Scotland and brought it to Land’s End, now I’m done”

...strangers would offer him a place to stop. “I’d get talking to people in the street and they’d say ‘Where are you staying tonight?’ and I’d reply, ‘wherever I can find.’” Throughout the journey Scott stopped on people’s sofas, in their spare rooms, in B&Bs, hostels, and some five star hotels. “I was very lucky with all that,” he added. 

On Scott’s third day of walking, there was one man in particular whose help left a lasting impression on the walker. Keith had seen Scott on the road and offered to send the trolley of belongings that he had acquired ahead to Glasgow to collect there, “It was kind because I wouldn’t be going to [Glasgow] for another week and a half”. Keith also put him up forthe night, fed him, bought him a new water bottle and created a ‘John O’Groats to Land’s End – Parkinson’s UK’ laminated sign for his backpack. “Keith O’Rourke, this bloke was an absolute godsend,” he said. 

A few days later and Scott was already adopting the look of a traveller, having collected two walking sticks to use en route. One of which lasted for the rest of journey. It was white driftwood with a hand groove, “It started at my shoulder and ended just above my waist. I’ve never felt more affinity with a piece of wood. It was my companion and protection if someone tried to attack me, and it was something to lean on.” 

On the 26th day of the trek, Scott scheduled his only day of rest, back within his home in West Bromwich, Birmingham. Scott said: “It was horrible fate, the amount of train stations I walked past saying trains direct to Birmingham. I was just outside Wigan when I walked past my first sign for Birmingham- that was amazing. I was counting down the days to get home and it was nice not having to beg for food [for the night], stopping in my house, in my bed,” he reflected. But the break was short-lived as the following morning he was back on the road. 

“Leaving home was heartbreaking having to leave my door to walk for another 15 days was just horrific.” But with the last stretch of the journey ahead of him the food he had stocked up on slowly diminished, “there was a point where I walked 12 miles on just a banana.” Ten days away from the finishing line, and Scott realised he would have to go hungry for the day to ensure that his supplies would last to Taunton, where he was set to meet some friends. He headed towards Weston Supermare the day he acknowledged he must go hungry. 

But an hour into the day and his journey took him past a health shop, “the man comes out, stops me and says, ‘have you really walked this for five weeks, with no money’ and he said, ‘come in, take as much as you want.’” His luck continued
to turn around, as he was offered a free Carvery from a barmaid he was speaking to, and later was invited for some food by a kind lady and her son.

“Later, I’m on the pier, the sun’s setting in front of me, a bloke comes up, starts chatting to me and I end up getting bought fish and chips. All on the day I said I was going to be hungry. “I thought if that’s what the universe is doing. If I say I’m hungry today and it provides me with all this, I should have done it earlier.”

At St Ives the walk was drawing to an end, Scott felt emotional as he walked through the memory filled streets that he spent many childhood years in, “the blazing sunshine came out and I knew it was going to be a good day because I’d walked the route a hundred times over.” 

He reached the finishing line at Land’s End, Cornwall, by 6pm on his 43rd day. The journey that had taken him through more than 134 of Great Britain’s villages, towns and cities, was now over. “I’d planned in my head how I’d feel crossing the line since Glasgow, and it wasn’t what I felt. I finished and I just felt like I had to carry on. I was like, ok now what do I do tomorrow? I got so used to walking that I couldn’t stand still.” 

He rejoiced with a lovely reception of family members and tourists, brandishing an appreciative banner from Parkinson’s UK. Stained from 43-days worth of walking and the non-alcoholic champagne his stepdad sprayed over him, he made his final thank yous, with passing tourists honking their horns in the background. “But it was a lie, I’m not done yet,” he thought, noticing the sheer-drop into the sea only 100 meters away. Scott, his mother and stepdad took the final few strides to the cliff face and the furthest corner of the United Kingdom. 

“I had a pebble, no bigger than my index finger, with me that I’d carried all the way from John O’Groats - the entire journey,” he slung the smooth black pebble into the sea, heralding the end of his voyage. Moments later at the cliff edge elation swept as Scott accepted that it was all over, “I carried a pebble from the most northern point of Scotland and brought it to Land’s End, now I’m done.”

During the six week and one day walk, he was solely dependent upon the public and their kindness, “literally if people weren’t generous then I would have starved.” Scott has raised over £2,500, half of which was donated to him on the trek down. “People were giving me twenty pound notes, fivers, cheques, change, bar staff gave me their tips, and little children gave me their chocolate money, it was truly unbelievable.” 

“Don’t put this in the article, but I walked the same [amount of days] as Jesus you know, we both walked for forty days,” jokes Scott, who now is back for a second year of intensive training at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

“I haven’t done any exercise since coming back. On the walk, I lost a stone and a half so had to put that back on,” he now waits for his certificate from the official John O’Groats to Land’s End association to commemorate his journey. As well as verification for a potential added accolade, “I believe I may be the only person who’s walked solo from end to end.” Scott finally reflected, “it was a great achievement that I walked the country, but it’s the people I met and the thousands and thousands of stories that I have, which I wouldn’t change for the world.” 

Find out more about Scott’s journey at www.justgiving.com/ScottWestwood2012

Pebble zine: Issue two

Take a look at December/January's edition of Pebble for an assorted array of features, lifestyle, fashion, beauty, music and culture.

Here's what new from the features section:

• Scott Westwood, travelled across the UK to its furthest apart corners solely reliant upon the public's kindness
• Sniffer bees could be swarming into airports around the world as the revolution
  in anti-drug smuggling measures
• Two sisters, splitting lives and growing up in different countries
• El Mar, Mi Alma - the sea, my soul: Chilean surf film
• Breaking into the industry: the Christmas industry
• How spiritually intelligent are you?
• Sibling rivalries: what you and your brothers and sisters argued about
• 'Honey Curls', a sweet poem to my sister
  
  


Open publication - Free publishing - More alt j
Special thanks to Scott Westwood, Stacey Kendall, all our contributors and the design team.

Go, read it now.



For more from Pebble zine check out the website: www.pebblezine.com

Pebble: prison pen pals

  (Featured in issue one of Pebble zine)

It’s an unusual friendship: a law student from Birmingham and a convict in California. “It’s strange how things are so simple in my life and yet everything’s so chaotic in his,” Kristy, 21, reflects. It’s less than three years ago since she first began writing to Miguel, held at Corcoran prison, San Francisco. 

 

Miguel often sketches pieces for Kristy and has even
designed her a tattoo

Curiosity struck, after she read an article about a woman who fell in love through a prison pen pal service. After he was released, the couple married and moved in together, but the romance was cut short after he refused to give up his other pen pal mistresses and she left him. “I wondered how anybody could be so attached to someone who had committed such a bad crime,” Kristy thought.

Eager to learn about life across the pond, she perused the endless list of inmates hoping for a friend
to write to. “I said I’d never write to anybody like a paedophile or a rapist. But I was really interested in writing to somebody from the mafia, having always been interested in them.” After sending out several letters Miguel replied with a brief handwritten note explaining the crimes he had committed, the structure to his day and his passion for art and tattooing. 

Miguel is locked 5,250 miles away in what the Los Angeles Times once described as ‘the most troubled
of the 32 state prisons’. Their most infamous resident, Charles Manson, now 77, still receives regular fan mail.
In the room that he shares with another ‘celly’ - as he refers to them - Miguel keeps photographs and letters sent by Kristy on a small bedside table. With minimal luxuries, his life sharply contrasts with the liberated existence of people on the outside.


Miguel - Spanish for Michael - is of Mexican descent, but was born in California. He is muscular in build, has short black hair, a moustache and dark eyes. His arms to his hands are laced with tattoos. 

"They knew he had a bad temper, and he’d react in a bad way"

“Certain tattoos he was given because of the certain crimes he committed, as that’s what they do in the mafia,” says Kristy. 

“I think he likes writing to me, because I don’t really know about his world, whereas the majority of his family have either been in prison, been part of gangs or in trouble with the law. 

“I’m not from the world he’s from; his area’s predominantly wrapped around crime and you have to be part of these gangs to survive.”

More recently, Miguel designed a tattoo for Kristy, having formerly owned a tattoo parlour before being imprisoned. “I told him that I was thinking about getting a tattoo, but I’d want a unique design, because I’d never get anything just for the sake of it, and he designed me a piece.” 

Kristy regularly receives sketches from her prison pen pal, who has a resonating passion for fine art. And in return, she sends him a letter at least once a month, giving him the companionship he’s deprived of.

As well as helping her to understand the American legal system for her dissertation, Miguel is currently studying law in prison with ambitions of getting into the profession once he’s granted his freedom.

After a while, you kind of forget about how you met, tells Kristy, “People always say, ‘Aren’t you worried because they’ve got your address?’ but then you think he’s got X amount of years in prison and I don’t see him as dangerous. You have this type of bond; a friendship.

“If I ever wanted to stop writing to him, I could tell him and he’d just stop, but I don’t think it would ever come to that.”

Kristy receives more correspondence from Miguel than his family. “I suppose I’m the impartial person in all of this; he can tell me something and I won’t pass judgement.”

Relationships give prison life normality, and sometimes instead of ink, love can flow from the tip of a pen. But being behind bars can constrain a pen pal relationship from forming into little more than a friendship. Miguel found out first- hand from briefly dating a woman on the outside. “She wanted him to have a phone-sex conversation while he was on a prison pay-phone, could you imagine it, with all the other prisoners there listening!” 

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Kristy’s been dating long-term partner Luke and has no intention of anything more than a platonic friendship. She says: “He sees me as being younger, and I see him as being older.
“He can kind of think of me as a young mind who he can talk to – he can watch me change and I watch him getting wiser and reforming.” 

Far from the sombre side of prison life, on the outside, Miguel was known to have a short fuse, often acting irrationally out of impulse and emotion. It was his tempestuous nature that led to him being arrested in 2006; Miguel kidnapped a man who had been stalking his sister.

He then stole a car with the driver still inside and drove to the desert. Once he’d got there, he gave the keys back to the owner, who drove off. He then threatened the stalker before leaving and was later caught by the police. “His family never told him [about the stalker] because they knew what he was like. They knew that he had a bad temper, and that he’d react in a bad way.” Miguel was only told about his sister’s obsessive ex after he showed up at her apartment.

Since returning to jail for the second time, Miguel’s trying to keep his head down and is mentoring younger prisoners. He has even transferred from a previous Californian jail to avoid the risk of tarnishing his record, which could push his release date further out of reach.

Under America’s Three Strikes Law, if Miguel is prosecuted again, he will be forced to serve a mandatory 25 years sentence, plus time for the crime he committed, meaning reformation and rehabilitation back into society are his only choices.

But with a further ten years to serve until he’s up for parole, regrets plague his mind: “He feels guilty about not being there for his daughter while she goes through school and his son who’s just about to go into prison.”

 "She wanted him to have a phone-sex conversation while he was on a prison pay-phone, could you imagine it"

Seeing past a person’s crime is essential while writing to someone in jail, having the empathy to understand that a criminal is not necessarily a bad person but someone who’s made a bad decision or action.

“It’s kind of like when you get a big crowd of people, they lose their individual identity. You just see them all as prisoners. But then, when you write to certain people, you get the idea that they’re not a bad person. [Take Miguel], he’s done this specific crime for certain motives. And you start to see them for who they are rather than the crimes they’ve committed. So the more you write to them and the more you hear about their life and family, you start to sympathise.” 

In the past few weeks, Kristy filled out a visiting form, so that one day she can meet face-to-face with her friend from afar. 

“He’s said our friendship has made him think about things in different ways, to make a change and want better things out of life.” 

Featured in Pebble zine

Pebble: breaking into the comedy industry

  (Featured in issue one of Pebble zine)

Arron Ferguson, from the rising comedy couplet NOT The Adventures of Moleman, jests about performing alongside a man too tall for buses, 2am satire fried chicken and generally talking funny...(tumbleweed), perhaps we’ll leave the puns to him

NOT the adventures of Moleman
Illustration by Guy Larsen

 


The act
I just do what makes me laugh. Mainly, I work as part of a double act for sketches, but away from the sketches is kind of like one-man variety show kind of thing crammed into five minutes, if that makes any sense. When writing, we tend to start with everyday stuff, then take the bits that are odd and keep adding to that until eventually it ends up funny.

The secret to being funny
I don’t know why you’re asking me that; ask someone successful! I think, ultimately, it’s just, a) making sure you do what makes you laugh and don’t worry about other people, not even the audience, because ultimately, the thing people respond to the most is seeing someone having a good time. And, b) the key - making sure you have your own style that no one else is doing, which is impossible to master unless you keep gigging. So many great acts on the circuit, but all of them, including myself, start off being too much like their favourite comedian.

The chalk and cheese comedy duo
Arguably, the best person to pick to be in a double act is someone you get along with, but at the same time is someone who pisses you off a bit. Then you’re providing different stuff. I can happily say Richard, who I’m in a double act with, is definitely a better actor then me, but then he’s not so good at things like handling hecklers, improvising around stuff that may go wrong, and that’s what I add. I can be the one who knows what to say when a prop breaks in the middle of a show.

How to get paid
You have to hunt online to find pubs that do open mic nights, and then you hope that eventually one of the people running them will like you and start helping you out with it a bit. That’s what we were doing, really. Going on Twitter, and people come back and say they’ve done a good

gig here, it’s nice. Also, there are lots of good Facebook groups, one called the Comedy Collective, where people will post: ‘I run a club, come every Wednesday and get a slot’.

Tips to newcomers
This is massively a product of the era that we live in, but try and provide content in a million different mediums. I think comedians starting out now, for a chance to make a living out of it, need to perform live, they also need to be actively hilarious on twitter, they need to be making YouTube videos, they need to be making podcasts. I think that’s the best way to succeed, hit every single market you can.

The Edinburgh Free Fringe
Doing theatres in London, people are paying six pounds to come in,
it massively changes someone’s mindset. They put six pound over a desk when they walk in, then they’re prepared to enjoy themselves and they go for it. Whereas if someone just wanders in for free, then there’s a ‘f***ing entertain me’ attitude, ‘I can leave, I didn’t pay for this.’ We were lucky and ended up getting invited to start five-ten minute slots at variety nights. One of them was on a bus, which was pretty awesome. The other half of my sketch act is very tall, he’s six foot three and he couldn’t sit on the bus!

Taking his audience to KFC
No one can prepare you for what the Edinburgh can do to you. It does change you. I mean, despite being quite a sensible, grown-up young man, the second I had three weeks built up of festival atmosphere, I just kind of snapped and improvised. And said, “Who in the audience wants to go to KFC?” and they all came. We were just there at two in the morning, drinking champagne and eating chicken from a bucket. It got really weird, but that’s what happens. It’s incredibly strange but you should just trust it.

Featured in Pebble zine