I remedy this deficiency by arriving at the jail on foot or by bicycle.When Noel was at HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire, I took the folding bike up to Peterborough on the train, and then cycled there 25 miles along the River Nene. He never knows exactly where he is and certainly not what the world without the walls looks like. Furthermore, I liked the idea of radically juxtaposing our views of the locales where he was imprisoned. Noel tends to arrive at his next high security billet in one of those Securicor vans that are known in prisoner parlance as “sweatboxes”.

He may’ve been up and down the country several times, and changed sweatboxes as well, before reaching a prison only tens of miles from the last one where he resided. He had plenty of time to spare, so I would factor some more of my own by association. But the visit was stressful, and by the time I got back to Croydon my wife had suffered the predictable Ikea depression, and longed only to spend the rest of her life alone on a remote Baltic island chainsawing sheep in half.I resolved that henceforth I would take my time visiting Noel. It’s difficult to whoosh past a 1930s redbrick villa, complete with mullions, loggias and all the accoutrements, without wishing to stop the car, walk up the front path, ring the doorbell, and force your way into another identity altogether At gunpoint if necessary. Outer south London suburbia is a psychogeographer’s paradise, where the outliers of the North Downs massif push their green fingers into the city’s grey flesh.

The motor-pootle through Carshalton, Sutton and Ewell did have its charm. Even at the time this shoe-horning of a prison visit into a shopping trip had all the hallmarks of a modern nightmare: one inhuman and fixed period of time further confined by another hardly more humane or flexible. The first time I visited Noel in prison he was temporarily residing at HMP Downview in Surrey, the reason being that all prisoners have to be allowed a month per year of their incarceration at an institution within 60 miles of their family.The visit had to be fitted into the normal weal of Sunday family life, so on consulting the map it was decided that my wife and the kids would do some shopping at Ikea in Croydon, while I skirted the southern periphery of London to meet with my prot?. 2004 will see the appearance of his autobiography A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, a book the birth of which owes something to my midwifery. But his victims doubtless take a diametrically opposed view, and I can see their point.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been helping Noel with advancing his career as a writer.