Initially, with no other obvious options, I returned with trepidation to the trailer factory.

  “Back are yer,” Bert said. “Well, we ain’t got nothin’ for yer down here.”
   They put me in the office where, under the kindly supervision of Mrs Gizzard, I was given such tasks as putting letters in envelopes and stapling documents together and filing and sorting cards into numerical order.
On the second day I wore the suit and tie I usually only wore to weddings and suchlike—it did not fit me very well and didn’t help me fit in with the office staff either. I could tell there wasn’t anything for me to do there either. I only really went to work because I had nowhere else to go.

Robert Stroud murdered a barman in 1909 and was less than a model prisoner, spending most of his life in solitary confinement in Alcatraz. His only companions were occasional passing birds but he had so much time to spare that he became expert on their behaviour and wrote a seminal book on the subject.
   Burt Lancaster played Stroud in John Frankenheimer’s 1963 movie Birdman of Alcatraz, which was brilliant in parts but, in trying to cover all sixty years of Stroud’s imprisonment, made it seem even longer.