The hit happened in the gymnasium of the high security Gartree Prison, while Nick was on shift as the P.E instructor.

Having read that opening passage, you’re probably not too hard pushed to imagine why Nick decided to leave the prison service. But it’s one thing leaving one career to pursue a different line of work. It’s another thing entirely to abandon everyday work at the age of 37, and the security and paychecks that comes with it, to live in a van and climb for the rest of your life.

“I’d paid my mortgage off so that was amazing,” Nick says. “A lot of people in life work all their lives to pay a mortgage off and a lot of people can’t even afford a house nowadays.

“I was really unfit and I was basically getting close to alcoholism and smoking loads so it took me a long time to train to do the P.E course at the prison. You take a year out and it costs about £28,000 to train a P.E instructor, so it was a big commitment for the prison and the prison service to do that. I was about 26 or 27 years old when I got in the course, and it was during those three weeks in North Wales where I discovered climbing.

“It was when I qualified as a P.E instructor in 1992 that I knew I just wanted to go climbing and that I wanted to be a climber.”

“Some murderers did less time in the prison than I did in there”

I ask what impact working in a high security prison for such a long period of time has on a person.

“It had a lot of impact on me,” Nick admits. “Especially when I was a prison guard before qualifying [as a P.E instructor], it had a massive impact, because I worked down the punishment block for 18 months at Gartree, and it was horrific. I was probably about 24 then and we were fighting most days. It was a horrible time. I used to go to work in the morning and I would sit there in the car park and almost drive away. I found it so stressful.

“A P.E instructor is the best job in the prison service really, but it’s still stressful, because when you’re interacting with people in a jail everyday, you’re always going to get something happening at some point of varying degrees.

“I became quite insular and separated when I was working loads. I would just go home at night and lock myself away really. I didn’t really see much of anybody else.”

The solitary nature of the job is made imminently clear in Bullock’s writing, particularly in Echoes.

For Nick, the cathartic nature of writing is one of the main reasons his books exist at all, something that comes across clearly in the honest, at times blunt writing style in both Echoes and his second book, Tides, which was just released in November.

“I love writing,” he says. “I find it very cathartic. Writing, I couldn’t believe how cathartic it was and how much you had to start looking into yourself. If you’re writing honestly you really have to look at yourself and look at why you do things and that was very cathartic.”

“A big bag of Super Skunk”

In Tides, as in Echoes, this catharsis manifests itself within the first page. The prologue of Tides focuses on a question Bullock once heard his father ask: “do we live too long?”

I ask Nick, why open with that line?

“It’s a damn good question, and it gets people thinking,” he says. “At what stage in life have you lived too long, and have you lived the quality of life that you wanted? If you’ve been fortunate enough to have a good quality of life, or made one, then is there ever a point where you’ve lived too long? There possibly isn’t. But if you’re not happy, then maybe there is.

“The second book is about life and choices and giving people hope. The first book was criticised a little by some people, and rightly so, because there’s a thread: I couldn’t understand why other people who had that opportunity to go and make these choices in life didn’t. But there are so many things going on and you can’t judge people’s lives.

“There are always special moments that make life worthwhile”

“I was being quite critical. And people did pick up on that and they were right in saying “well I’ve got children and I’m happy”. The second book addresses that and I hope it gives hope to everybody, however their lives are lived. There are always special moments that make life worthwhile. There will always be people whose life is a hell of a struggle.

“Not everyone can do what I’ve done and not everyone will have the opportunity.”

Tides certainly captures just how much Bullock’s life has changed since the prison days. One particularly memorable story centres on a moment Nick and two others were stopped by a police roadblock on their way to a climbing session at the Great Orme in Wales.

With one of the climbers announcing to the others that they had brought “a big bag of Super Skunk” and “put it under the seat”, the trio were understandably anxious about the blockade. Try as they might to persuade themselves that the police wouldn’t bother to search their car for drugs, the story leads to one of the laugh out loud passages of the book:

“A police van had pulled up and a dog jumped from the back wearing a yellow coat, and on the dog’s coat in big black lettering was a word, and unless the dog’s name was SNIFFER, I had the feeling we were fucked.”

It’s one of many fantastic, fascinating stories in the book, and leads naturally onto a question about how Nick looks at the extreme contrast between his current day to day and his past life.

“For me personally, climbing is open spaces, it’s freedom”

“I had made a security for myself, owning the house and not having any debts, which gave me the freedom to then go and pursue a life that I wanted to explore.

“[Working as a prison guard] made stressful, risky situations on the rock and in the mountains actually not feel as bad as they were too, because what I was facing at work a lot of the time, for me, was more stressful. I got to a certain level of coping with stress and every time I went out on rock and in the mountains it just felt like a relief and enjoyable really.

“For me personally, climbing is open spaces, it’s freedom, it’s the ability to get up in the morning and go out and do something where I don’t quite know how the day is going to end.”

For Bullock, the retired prison guard, it often comes back to freedom, and the unpredictability of a life spent not just outside of a prison, but outside the realms of all security, whether that be in a van, on a rock face in Wales, or halfway up a little known mountain wall in China.

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