The Great Brain Robbery

Aylesbury isn't known for much, but had a few minutes of fame in April 1964 when the great train robbers were tried at Aylesbury Crown Court. It was the largest value robbery ever in the UK, and was so because it was just after a bank holiday weekend in Scotland - meaning the second carriage of the train, the 'high value package' sorting office, en route between Glasgow and London Euston, contained £2.6m in used £1, £5 and £10 notes (and after a normal weekend this would only have been £0.3m). The robbers stopped the train at 3am by covering the green signal and making the red one light up with a 6v battery they brought along with them. The judge described the robbery as "a crime of sordid violence inspired by vast greed" and passed sentences of 30 years imprisonment on Ronnie Biggs and several others. Ronnie Biggs escaped after 15 months and spent most of the rest of his life in Brazil, though he returned to the UK in 2001 for healthcare and a pint of bitter - and was re-imprisoned though later released on compassionate grounds. 


This resonates (slightly) with our travels to Aylesbury today, as it is the most inconvenient town to travel to from near and far. For one of us, it was a disproportionately long train journey from London (presumably with better signals now); a gruesomely early start for another's car journey, and a triangular-shaped car journey from not very far away for the last (but one which passed very close to the robbers' hideout, not that that is much compensation).


First we had the security system to get in - presumably to reassure us that we were in an environment where nobody was allowed in or out without all the necessary permissions and contestable authorisations to be allowed to talk to each other. Then there was the decor: going beyond the phase of battleship grey or suburban magnolia that graces many NHS mental health facilities, the inhabitants of this meagre corridor had clearly had some control over the colour of at least one wall in each room. We were invited to set up our base camp on turquoise NHS-standard issue soft chairs in a room with a green carpet and a solitary purple wall. Student accommodation? First Great Western rolling stock? A night out clubbing? Never mind, we thought - at least it didn't feel like a hospital.


The central hub of Buckinghamshire's complex needs services has lived in this single short corridor since it started in 2005 - and there has been one triumph of architectural planning and one disaster since then, we were told. The disaster is that the planners of the new soon-to-be-commissioned mental health facilities building did not really understand the specific requirements of an intensive psychosocial treatment programme, and has only one room allocated for the purpose, which is therefore useless. So the service is likely to remain in its minimalistic faceless corridor for the foreseeable future. But the good news, the triumph of the corporate mentality, is that a single loo has been converted into a double loo. It is noteworthy how many staff proudly told us this - I even lost track of whether they were being ironic. 


Even odder perhaps was the sign on the outside of one of the two loos: "The Gordon Gunnarsen Centre for Expressive Dance". This conjured up fantasies of balletic movements around the pan, strange Reichian bodywork therapy in confined spaces, and no doubt other less seemly activities better kept confined to the private spaces of our imaginations. But, whatever, else we have resolved to never use the rather coarse 'going to the John' euphemism again, but replace it with the much more gracious 'need to see Gordon'...


Shortly before leaving, we were much intrigued by an aphorism related to us by a senior staff member, which seemed to say something important about the day:

"I think of my mind like a bad neighbourhood. I would never go into it alone"

The photo question was answered almost as soon as we mentioned it: the 'Faith Lunch' table (the magnificent spread which all members of the group had brought in to celebrate a staff member's last day), the plaque in the large group room, the mesmerising carpet in the centre of the circle of chairs, and a 'split personality' painting which one of the members (not attributable) had done some time ago. 
We understand, from various conversations apart from today's, that the patterns of the carpet can be a very useful diversion during the parts of the group therapy when exploring them can be more immediately satisfying than joining the group discussions...
So here they are:

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