VEGAN PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE LETTERS
Latest Letter from Jonny Ablewhite

My Dear Vegan Friends,

Winter brings the cruelest months – but I made it! Enduring Christmas and New Year was like holding my breath underwater but now, gasping, I have finally surfaced. Praise to all the vegan Gods in the pantheon! I’ve recycled this just for them! A special ‘ThankYou’ for all the cards too, including the birthday ones. Probably a day my poor mum would prefer to forget! Birthdays are of course an unnecessary self-indulgence (I’m kidding!) but I’ve realised I’m now so old I may die in here, or at least get old in here!

Now that the anti-climatic festivities are gladly over, I can direct my life’s focus away from that consumerist cacophony of nonsensical celebration back onto what matters, the source of all my joy: tofu, tomato and mushroom pie!! I love this creation; I especially worship the mushroom! She is the blessed cousin of the very bacterial cells the burst and billowed all creation into being all those millions and millions of years ago! While our species homo sapiens may soon be left as an indistinct scar on the weather-worn face of history, from the ashes the mushroom shall rise again; a fungal Phoenix – behold and fear this beautiful and gallant organism!!

This slight sojourn into my labyrinthine internal dialogue doesn’t disguise the wonderful fact that however tedious prison can get – and it can get tedious – you can always rely on good ol’ fashioned vegan cooking to lift you from the doldrums, skywards again. However disillusioned I become about the uselessness of my time here, and the inordinate expense and effort this sacrilegious State is prepared to expend in keeping me here; however melancholic I become when contemplating the irreparable wounds 6 billion of us are leaving on this miraculous planet, I always seek solace in the comfort of taste, the blissful squish of mushrooms in fine sauce exploding on the palate – a wholesome, nutritionally packed, but morally imperious feast!! As AR vegans we may be fewer than the few, and we may never witness the utopias we crave but, dagnabbit, we tried – and we ate well along the way!!

Yet lately this monotonous regime has often left me on the painful wrack of boredom. I’m stuck between Open University modules, and despite the Spanish and German lessons, I crave more learning. I shall begin the preparatory reading for my next module 3 months early! The Philosophy group does bring some succour. We’re currently ploughing through Existentialism, leaving Nietzsche and Sartre bewildered in our opinionated, postmodern wake! We’ll be moving through Charles Fourier and Emma Goldman soon so I’ll keep you informed if any anarcho-vegan prison phalanxes are about to erupt! Sadly, the boredom did get so desperate at Christmas that I sacrificed my ascetical principles and forked out for a rug, courtesy of that “laminated book of dreams” we all love: the Argos catalogue! However, I have discovered there is more to the prison rug than you may first assume; you don’t just buy them, you adopt them! In here grown men nurture their ‘rug’ babies. Like orphans discovered on our doorsteps we cradle and preen them like surrogate mothers – and clearly the perpetual vacuuming is a sublimated form of breast-feeding!

Once I had gained the courage to leave my rug-child, I began venturing back to the beckoning arms of the prison band. The exploits of this ‘musical’ troupe evolve onwards and upwards. We whittled our talents down to a duo which, since the guitarist is called Cane, I’m aptly named “Cane and Able”! I’m yet to be slain by him but he may garrotte me with his G-string (ooer) if I write yet another lyric about the slaughter in Iraq, the farms or the labs! Cheery ditties penned from prison are a rarity – and they should remain so!

Finally my fondest salutations to you all – for the letters and cards and visits: for everything. Our vegan communities are a wonder to behold and I live in perpetual, concrete hope that our message will be universalized: all hail the vegan dawn on that fine, dazzling day! Nevertheless, I know this weary world can often seem impossible to live on. With hopes for significant moral progress being increasingly dashed on the rocks of bureaucracy, ignorance and intransigence, it is easy to become disheartened. Yet I believe that social evolution is possible through consistent planning at a local, regional and international level – this includes organizing all means available to the activist: from lobbying MP’s, ethical consuming, noncooperation, action and protest: the whole panoply. It is especially important we maintain the freedom and responsibility to organise our ethics in empowered public places, critical public spheres. These are charged hotbeds of countervailing influence and flourish in citizen media: electronic and physical, in public meetings, giving school talks, camps, podcasts, blogs and websites that function at the heart of an empowered vegan consciousness. Here we can share our capacity for ‘reflection, rage and rebellion.’ Here we can open a dialogue with our local communities, with others opposed to State hegemony and then question and challenge the structure of centralized power. Here we can engage in indispensable questions on about how to conceive of ourselves, how to create and act, how to produce and thus construct our own affirmed and sustainable realities and futures that are bereft of commercial, hierarchical and patriarchal conditioning. Indeed, “these are not marginal experiments – they are the mainstay of large numbers of communities across the world. That is where the future lies.” (Vandana Shiva)

I await that future with confidence and belief!

Brightest Vegan Blessings to You All,

Jonny.