What stood in one corner of the cell was disgusting: two empty disinfectant canisters and one well used and well stained piss pot, the sort of chamber pot that people would train their babies to be potty trained on before they would learn to use the toilet.

I’ll tell you, the screws’ faces painted an even greater picture than my words can describe. We kept emptying our pots in the hall for two weeks before the screws started emptying our piss pots for us, but this didn’t last too long after we started calling them bellhops.

I believe the most degrading thing in the world is to be treated worse than a starving dog by five growling, muscle-bound thugs, better known as screws!

I was seeing more stars than Patrick Moore; he didn’t half give me a sore fucking whack on the nut.

My motto is: hit first, ask questions later....

The boy who initiated me into smack, who I will call Tim, was at that time eighteen years old, and came from Castlemilk. His life was a helter-skelter ride of drug-fuelled binges.

I started to develop a penchant for the odd hot foil of smack. After all those years of calling junkies ‘the scum of the earth’, I had now fallen by the wayside and had become a junkie myself!

Over the next sixteen years, I would grow close to the ringleaders of the infamous Peterhead Prison Riot and hostage-taking incidents would loom large in my life.

In Polmont, everyone was acting the hard man and giving it the large. I had to fight or cosh or do something to be accepted. I can tell you, it was better to be in a gang than being on your own, and I’d do anything in Polmont, no questions asked!

After a couple of weeks in Polmont, I started to become more assertive and began arguing with older, bigger boys. I loved it. This is where my ugly side would make some scary and unpredictable appearances. Even to this day, I can go from a happy-go-lucky cunt to the devil on acid.