My name was originally Alfonso Raymond Smith, but I changed it to Seamus Delaney when I was on the run from the police. I haven’t been Seamus since I became a muslim and started attending a mosque in Liverpool. As part of my conversion I changed my name to Abby Khan or Abigail Khan when I dress up as a girl. I’m not particularly religious, but I thought that being a muslim would help me cut down on my drinking.  I can’t say it made any difference, but I’ve stuck with the name.

I spend quite a bit of my time as Abigail. I’ve always liked to hang out with gay people because they’re more friendly and less judgmental and they accept me more readily in a dress. That was why I started cross-dressing but it’s become part of who I am, and now I like the feel of being in a dress so I often wear one at home.

My dad died of pleurisy and thrombosis when I was nine. He was a merchant seaman from Nigeria who jumped ship in Liverpool, where he met my mum. We lived in Toxteth but after my dad died I went into care. I remember that he left me a gold watch which my mum wanted to keep for me till I was older: she thought I was too young to have it, but I wanted it straight away. She lost her temper and smashed it on the ground.

I didn’t deal well with my dad’s death. He had been strict with me, and once he was gone I misbehaved. I was sent to an approved school in Widnes after I shot a shopkeeper with a pellet gun, and I wasn’t allowed home after that. I ran away all the time and made my way back to Toxteth. The police would come and pick me up and take me back, but after that had gone on for a while one of the policemen said he thought there was no point in carting me back to school if I was just going to leave again, so he gave me ten bob out of his own pocket and wished me luck. You remember people like that.

I started coming up to this part of the world to visit a friend of mine from Liverpool who was doing a life sentence for murdering a drinker. She was in Durham Prison but it wasn’t her I came to see but the friend she introduced me to. I visited the friend frequently and sometimes ended up sleeping at the station so that I could see her two days on the trot. It seemed easier in the end to get a place up here, but I hadn’t settled long before I got into trouble and I spent 14 months on remand in the South Bank bail hostel and when I came out I stayed here.

I started drinking and taking drugs - acid and amphetamine mainly -  after my dad died, but it’s the drink that’s got the better of me now. For a while it was the drugs that were the  problem. They made me paranoid and got me into trouble. For instance I went to prison for calling the police and saying there were bombs in public buildings in Liverpool. I was caught after I rang 999 and said there was a bomb in the Anglican Cathedral. Then I stayed in the same phone box and made some other calls, and they came and arrested me.

There was one period when I stayed out of prison, not because I behaved myself but because I didn’t get caught, and that was when I changed my name to Delaney and I squatted with a group of travellers who I met in a tip in the Wirral. They let me squat in one of the horseboxes with eight others. We wandered all over England stealing food and drink. Which reminds me of another policeman I liked: we stole a prize marrow from a farm and a copper came into our camp to retrieve it, but we’d eaten it and the copper laughed about it and let us be. In the summer we went from festival to festival. There were university dropouts, herbalists, solicitors who wanted a change - not so many of them but one or two - and a load of weekend hippies who joined up for a few days and then went back to their normal lives. We all got on surprisingly well.

After seven years of wandering I washed up in Stroud. I was suffering from paranoia from the drink and drugs and I harrassed the person who lived next door for no particular reason. I kept smashing his windows and one night the police lay in wait for me. They had a load of outstanding warrants and I ended up back in prison. That was my longest period outside. But to tell you the truth I’ve never thought there’s so much difference between being in and being out. In many ways it’s easier being inside, and when I’m out I can’t say I don’t miss prison sometimes.