Do you remember British detained?

Kudos to you mate.!!!

Looking forward to reading about the experience.

My daughters birthday today so won't get a chance to write much today guys.

Double well done, as it seems this is the only photographic evidence of Kevin in jail.

There are certainly other photos Dom but I guess none of the others are explicitly in a jail setting.

The jail is right next to the fire station and we missed it first time past , I have a couple of equally bad snaps of the outside but I took them from the car as we were leaving as I did not want to draw attention to us in case they thought we were doing a reccy torganise a jailbreak Kevin did ask if I could take him back with me in my suitcase

Still knackered been a long day again today and I think I will just have a beer or two and then get to bed, we are just back from the swimming pool, swimming in a tropical storm had the place to ourselves, luckily the water was warm

Ok a bit more detail.

I had planned to go up to visit Kevin more or less from the day I decided to buy the tickets to be here for Janna's birthday after all it is only a few hours and it can make a difference to a poor guy who has been stuck on remand for nearly 3 years.

We got Ana's neice's asawa, Dhren, to take us up to San Mateo, none of us new the exact way but I had the GPS and a Map of Metro Manila that cut off at exactly the edge of Marikina where San Mateo starts

Dhren recently bought a car after he and Carlotta had spent some time in Europe with Carlotta's mum (she's an OFW working in Europe). He is running the car as a contract hire taxi so I made sure he got paid for his time.

In the end we set out just after 1pm and it took 3 hours to get up to San Mateo, traffic in Manila is getting even worse than normal.

The jail is down a back street, you have to find San Mateo Municipal hall first which is on the right as you arrive at the end of a long long road, Gen somthing Luna, this road is the San Mateo end of Dr J P Rizal street that runs north through Marikina.

Luckily Ana knew Marikina quite well as she lived there with her best friend and her best friends mum back in the late 1980's, so a couple of possible bad turns got stopped.

Anyway when you find the Municipal hall you take a left at the end of the road and head down a narrow alley to the end of the alley from there you take a right and head steeply down another typical alley, the road is quite steep and you are going downhill, at the bottom there is a right hand bend and just round the corner is the fire station, the jail has a tiny entrance to the left of the fire station.

As I mentioned before we did not know that Monday was not a visiting day but Ana spoke to the guard and asked explained how long we had travelled, she's good at being persuasive anyway they let us pass in the food I had brought from the UK and they brought Kevin out to the gate which is basically a set of open metal bars.

Kevin had been sleeping and he must have spoken to his dad as he knew who I was in advance, when he got up to the gate the first thing he said was that he had been sleeping and was a bit feverish as he had picked something up recently and that he did not want to pass it on but what the hell everyone gets ill in this country so I shook his hand anyway

We talked a bit about the history of it all and his history in the Phils and before in England, he really misses home, as he said it takes something like this to realise what you are missing at home in the UK, I guess that is fairly obvious but it takes each of us to realise it personally.

He really misses his kids, there was a danger at one time of them being handed to a very distant member of Charlene's family he went into some detail but it is not the kind of stuff that should be repeated publicly, not that it's a great secret or anything just that it is private stuff that I would not repeat about my own family.

There were a few conversations like that which is not the kind of stuff I would repeat in a public forum which in essence leaves me a bit short of new news as such.

He's an easy guy to talk to, had a similar life to many of us worked hard when he could, got his fingers burned once before in a different business he tried to start in the Phils up north and then moved south (I think some of this has been reported before). After moving to Manila he tried to start a small restaurant but the numbers didn't stack up as the location just did not work, and somehow they got into the idea of using the location for the business that ended up in him and Charlene now being in jail.

He said he gets on fairly well with the other inmates but he has his tantrums now and again (who wouldn't) and sometimes he gets a bit loud with the other inmates, I suspect he is just doing his best to survive in a very difficult situation, he's punched the wall more than once, hurting himself in the process. They swap foods inside so as to get a bit more varied diet he gets some meat now and again this way instead of the fish which is not his favourite.

I took him a few foods from Britain some HP Sauce (in a plastic bottle fortunately) he smiled at that I took some simple reheat meals as well, Steak in Guinness, meatballs, meat soup and so on, all British stuff, I have a big baggage allowance unfortunately I wasn't thinking too clearly as I was a bit rushed at the last minute before my flight and included tinned items which are not allowed because of the metal, I hope he manages to get the contents off the guards as he licked his lips when he saw the tins of Princes corned beef

I took a couple of shirts, my size is too large but I won a Carling T-shirt in my local which I thought might fit him.

To be honest he has too much stuff already they are only allowed 2 bags but he has 12 that he has to cart around with him.

He has passed on his books to the reasonably good English speakers and told them to pass them on to others once he is hopefully out of there.

He is largely focusing his waking hours on the cases in one form or another either reviewing the court papers or writing letters to the court and so on, he does spend a lot of time sleeping which is basically to black out the realities of the situation, I would do the same to be honest.

Physically one cannot help but notice that he has to view things from 4 inches away in order to read anything but he did say he didn't have his contact lenses in so I guess maybe not so bad when he has them.

While he is coherent he was drifting a bit back and forth and he did mention depression which he is trying to seek some help with later this week I believe, he looked at times like he was hollow, I mean just empty there were moments when I felt I was looking at a very very lonely depressed sad man, but he fought it back and could return to being focused again. At the same time you have to remember he was feeling feverish so I may have misread his state of mind.

He has another case today so fingers crossed that this gets dismissed as well, after that the courts over here apparently shut down for a month for some kind of inventory taking, so the next hearing and I think final hearing is a month from now in August sometime.

Ana stayed with me for a while during our conversation but she gets shy sometimes and was a bit quiet, I had to stand in a puddle for the whole hour in my sandals, so my feet ended up soaked I let Ana go back to car after about 20 minutes as I could see she was struggling a bit to keep up with our conversation and she was standing in a puddle as well though not as bad as mine

So we talked about a lot of stuff came to about 5pm and the guards said time up, I asked them if I could take a picture but they told Kevin to go ask the warden I think, the warden came out and took my camera but very unprofessionally I still had it set for the night before so the shot got taken with far too high an ISO setting which made for a very poor noisy photo, at least they gave me my camera back

During the whole time a lot of folk were coming up to the gate to hand in stuff for the inmates a few times the gate was opened while Kevin and I were standing there, must have been hard on him, I think it would have been for me.

At the end Kevin thanked me for visiting and as he said it was amusing given the history of the Scots, the English and the French that his visitors had been two Scots and a Frenchman I think the Aussie must have been an ex pat Scot.

Anyway he was really grateful for the visit, I wished him well and all the best of luck with the next couple of hearings shook his hand and said I hoped one day we could sit down and enjoy a beer or two, Kevin said oh yes please a really cold beer and at that I shook his hand and said goodbye.

I will post pretty much this post on the yahoo forum as well, hope I've not got too many typo's I'm still a bit too tired to go back over it all again

Cheers for just now guys.

Jim

Hopefully they will both be free soon.

Thanks Jim.