Visiting Time

Collection of stories, poems, essays and other writing by the prisoners at HMP Shotts in Scotland.

From the inmates of Shotts prison, an accretion of voices not unlike the sounds erupting from the fiddles, flutes and guitarsof musicians you might find playing in a Glasgow bar, only these disparate voices are not musical. Instead, a finely tuned arrayof words expressing thoughts and emotions procured from their writers’ time in prison: “Porridge, a breakfast people make in pots./ But I’m doing porridge here in SHOTTS.” In one of the prose pieces, a grandfather pretends to his visiting grandson that he’s a secret agent on his final mission signalling to the reader his retirement from crime; in another, there is the ongoing concern for an elderly father at home with senile dementia: “... he’s ducking behind the curtain ... I don’t know if I can cope with this today.” Haiku and longer poetic forms capture the interminable frustration of being inside and the effect this has on the human psyche: “Go off the rails/End up in the cells/Apply for bail/Application fail// Back to jail/howl and wail.” One reflection on the emotional difficulty of being transgender in a system that does little to offer support adds poignancy to an anthology that is already thrumming with humour and attitude.