
What Belmarsh taught me about lockdown - peter_d_sherman
https://unherd.com/2020/04/what-prison-taught-me-about-lockdown/
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peter_d_sherman
Excerpts:

"I assert this confidently because my training ground for today’s Covid-19
isolation was a single cell in HMP Belmarsh, 21 years ago. Those conditions
were tougher than they are now.

As I was confined in a far smaller space for 18 hours a day (23 hours a day at
weekends) with no modern distractions — no mobile phone, no internet or TV — I
had to be resourceful. Nevertheless, the basic ground rules for surviving
isolation are surprisingly similar then as now.

The preparations are all in the mind. Your world has been compulsorily
changed. If you resent or rail against the restrictions, your mental health
will suffer. The trick is to attempt, no matter how hard it seems, to train
your mind to accept confinement calmly, to ask the question: “How can I make
the best of it?”

[...]

"The first priority is to create a schedule and find the self-discipline to
stick to it. In prison, I pinned my hour-by-hour timetable on the bars of my
cell and rarely deviated. It was no draconian schoolmaster’s regime. My
schedule now, as then, was a patchwork quilt of colourful commitments and
curiosities.

I was, for example, receiving around 50 letters a day from well-wishers.
Remembering that Lord Curzon, while Viceroy of India had dispatched over a
hundred letters a day written in his own hand, I somehow tackled my
correspondence with punctual diligence and no laptop.

I would also spend two or three hours every day learning Greek. Oxford had
offered me a post-prison place to read a degree in Theology. But to pass my
prelims, I had to take a paper in Greek, the subject I had lazily skipped at
school. I knuckled down to learning it with a single text book, Wenham’s New
Testament Greek. To master the 900 word vocab, I would take out little
postcards with me on the wing whenever we were allowed out of our cells for
meals."

And from:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Aitken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Aitken)

"Jonathan William Patrick Aitken (born 30 August 1942) is an Irish-born
British former Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom
(1974–97), and a former Cabinet minister. He was convicted of perjury in 1999
and received an 18-month prison sentence, of which he served seven months.
Aitken was a member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. After becoming
a Christian, he later became the president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide
and was ordained in the Church of England."

