Meeting special people in Juggling with Hedgehogs

I met 3 special people this morning. First of all Sandra Gregory whose book helped me get through the early stages of my son's incarceration. It's a harrowing book, but I'm one of these people who, when things are hard, tend to immerse myself in reading about other people's experiences of the same thing. More often than not, as bad as it is for me, I can always find someone worse off. That someone was Sandra Gregory.

This morning, she was on This Morning (daytime TV for those outside the UK) talking about her experiences, explaining that basically, like many people, she was duped into smuggling drugs, that the people who end up in prisons usually ARE, and that it's an easy mistake for young people to make. I loved her on the spot. I ran down to the studios when the interview was finished, to give her a hug, tell her how much her book had helped me, and to thank her. She was delightful.

I also met the CEO of Prisoners Abroad, the charity that helped me keep going while Ryan was away. She was lovely. And I also met a lady whose partner is in a jail in Peru. He is likely to be there for at least another 3 years, and I could see just from looking at her how much of a toll this has taken on her. It was kind of wonderful to be able to talk to 3 people about an experience we all shared, one way or another, and I realised just how lonely my son's 9 months in prison in Greece had made me. How shut off from people I had become. Even though I talked about it to some people, no-one could actually understand it fully unless they had experienced it - and in all honesty how many people know someone who has a relative in prison overseas? It's just not something people really talk about openly.

I talked to Sandra about the shame of it, about how difficult it is to talk about - she said that gets easier. She just has a 'fuck it' attitude to the whole thing now, and she doesn't care what anyone thinks. I just took to her straight away. She was bolshy and smart and VERY intelligent. Not to mention incredibly resilient.

It gave me a new perspective and a new incentive to try to find a job that does what I set out to do all along. Help people. Directly, actively and properly. I'm sending the vibes out into the Universe again. The job I do now doesn't remotely relate to what I used to do 5 years ago. It's time for a change.