One of life's survivors

After the fiftieth repetition, she suddenly springs up, back onto her trainer-clad feet, and tells me it is nowhere near as difficult as it looks. Goaded on by me, she feels my arm for muscle and tells me, with a cheeky smirk, that I really must cut down on chocolate and bulk up on tuna if I want to feel firmer.

She promises to draw me up a fitness plan for the next time I'm in. And for someone who trains for up to four hours a day and knows her glutes from her pecs, I'm not about to argue.

Rigorous exercise is what keeps Mel feeling 'up' while she's inside. It's the first thing she thinks about when she opens her eyes in the morning and the last thing she does before she goes to bed. The fact that she has to do her nightly sit-ups and press-ups in a seven-foot cell doesn't seem to bother her in the least.

The gym is 90 per cent psychological and ten per cent physical, she tells me. It keeps her sane and strong and helps her focus her energies, both good and bad.

Standing at 5ft 9ins and weighing 11-stone of solid muscle, Mel looks strong and statuesque. There isn't an ounce of fat to be seen. She may have a bar of chocolate once a month but she tries to deny herself even that, she tells me.

But Mel's physicality is not what hits you straight off. Her presence is felt though her large, infectious personality. She is definitely one of life's 'characters'. London-born and bred, she is a 'ducker and diver', a 'mover and shaker'. She makes it her business to know what's going on, to involve herself, to throw herself into things with the zeal of an excited kid.

Amid a collection of shy and retreating glances from the mass of prisoners on my first visit inside the wing, Mel beams a smile at me straight off. Hers is the one handshake that greets me when I enter. She talks with the casual familiarity that comes of being brought up in a large city, where strangers perhaps become firm friends faster than in towns.

It is not just her North London lilt that separates her out from the crowd when she speaks. What stands out most is her brightness. She seems in control of her sentence and she's decided she won't let it dampen her spirits, oozing an avid interest in life that has not been jaded by her seven years inside.

"You can sit around and feel really sad when it comes to Christmas or birthdays or you can try and be happy. I always try to lift people's spirits and get people going. I have to remember there are people much worse off than me, who don't have food to eat or a bed to sleep on," says the 26-year-old.

Mel is in Durham Prison serving a life sentence, for an argument with a cab driver in London which escalated and ended with his death and her conviction, but she isn't going to defeated by doing her time and seems almost impervious to the black hole of negativity that can take grip of some women behind bars.

But then, she's had a lot of time to get used to it, to find her own oasis of happiness in incarceration. Jail is perhaps more natural to her than it is for a woman who enters the former H-wing as a 35-year-old. She was found guilty of murder at the age of 19 and in some ways, she has done her growing-up inside, finding an identity for herself like every other teenager in any situation. Maybe this is why you get the feeling that Mel's transcended the confines of her bars. She surrounds herself by everything positive and avoids self-pity. Her face is open and her manner is that of a show-woman. She is the one who starts the party off, who gets people up and dancing at a prison shindig.

"Prison has not stopped me from living my life and I don't think I'm institutionalised," says Mel. "I don't have my liberty and I'm locked-up for a certain time every day but I can always escape for a while with my memories which are still there. I can transport myself back to hanging around Camden Lock with my friends.

"And while I'm inside, I'm learning, educating myself and staying focused on what I want from life. In one way, prison life helps you sort out what's important to you because you have time to think things through," adds Mel, who hopes to complete an NVQ training in fitness by the time her parole date in 2005 comes around.

"People in their 20s are always rushing around outside, living life at a really fast pace. Here it's different. The pace is much slower."

She had barely launched into her catering career when she was imprisoned. She misses the exotic assortment of food she made on the outside, and the Caribbean fried chicken and rice her mum loved to make. She's focusing on making the gym a second career when she gets out and hopes to combine it with motivating youngsters who are on the margins of society.

The most important thing prison has taught her is not to judge. She says she was quick to condemn the people whose so-called 'atrocities' led them to be locked-up. Now she likes to reserve judgement, to give human nature the benefit of the doubt in its capacity to reform and develop.

"Before I came to prison, I was the type of person who said that some people should be locked up and the key thrown away because they were 'evil', whereas now I tend to reserve judgement and I realise people do have the capacity to change and turn themselves around. That's what rehabilitation is all about and that's what the parole board is trained to assess before letting someone out.

"But it's only being inside that's made me see that and I try not to make narrow-minded judgements that people make on the outside - that I myself made at one time," she says.

As far as her sentence is concerned, she has not forgotten why she was convicted but neither is she nurturing the memory of that unfortunate taxi ride.

"I can't turn back the clock and if I hold-on to that one memory, I won't ever move on and I'll be warped up by it. I've accepted responsibility for it and I'm moving on, giving myself goals and hopefully becoming a better person."

But for all her positivity, there are some cold and unbendable certainties to being in Durham that make her life hard. Being shipped to the high-security wing that is so far from her hometown is hard to cope with and she sometimes feels the geographical distance cuts her off from everyone she loves. She buys phone cards from her weekly £9 wages but that doesn't go a long way when you're phoning London regularly.

"I've learnt to cope with prison down South because I know my family's just round the corner and all I have to do is pick up the phone and get a visiting order. It's not the same here. I'm miles away from everything I've grown up with and from my family, the thing I miss most," says Mel.

She doesn't want her parents to undergo the more formal security checks of Durham Prison so she has not asked her parents - builder dad Anthony, 52, and factory supervisor mum Pam, 45 - to visit her here. She hasn't seen them since 1999,

Instead, she saves up her visiting hours to be housed in North London's Holloway Prison for a few weeks in bulk so she can catch up on old friends, sisters Marlene, 21, Maxine, 16, and little brother Nicky, 14, nearer home. She says these meetings are filled with anything but tears. Just as being happy depends on a state of mind, not an external situation, so she believes she can get the most from friendships inside.

But it hurts when she misses out on watching the younger members of her family change, grow-up, go through seminal changes in their lives. She feels aggrieved that she's missing out. She will avidly watch children's TV solely so she can keep up to date when she chats with her two-year-old nephew, Tyrese McKale, who she last saw when he was six months old. East-London soap is also essential watching material because she can relate to the cockneys on screen.

"I like to know what my little nephew is into and the latest cartoon he's talking about. I don't want prison to alienate me from him so I educate myself. I'm in prison for a reason but I'm not going to detach myself from the outside. I'm still a part of the world. I've got over 1,000 cards up on my cell wall. I keep every one I get. It's my link to the outside," says Mel.

Being in Durham is hard also because it is predominantly white while her Wembley hometown is fully multicultural.

"Race was not an issue where I grew up. No one thought about colour or mentioned colour. But coming to prison, I find I am the first black person some women have ever come across. So suddenly I'm a black person instead of just Mel."

While she keeps close tabs on the world at large - she is religious about watching the evening news many times over - she can discern a difference in attitude in the women inside and those on the out.

"In here, you say 'hello' to everyone, but you don't greet everyone you meet on the streets, you don't say hello to Joe Bloggs. When I went out for a hospital visit, I was saying 'hello' to every single person I met. They must have thought I was a nutter," she laughs. "And in here, I do get sick of the all-female company sometimes. I'd love to occasionally chat to an ordinary man who's not a prison officer," she adds.

She also refused to submit to the repetitious tedium that can sometimes become prison life. Jail, by its very definition, is made up of routine, the same routine, day in, day out. She avoids giving in to the rigours of 'sameness' by staying up late, watching TV until midnight, just for the sake of it. It is her protest, however small, against the heartless emotional punishment that incarceration inflicts on inmates through the tyranny of routine.

A few more words on life and Mel's off, bounding up the stairs two-by-two, mentally onto her next task already.

And as she climbs up with a bounce, she takes her joi-de-vivre with her and I'm left thinking a lot of us, bogged-down by life on the outside, could learn a few tricks on how to be happy from Mel.