Is it possible to do your food shopping without passing someone who has made their home on the pavement and not had a proper meal for weeks? Certainly not if you live in Kentish Town.
And what are we turning into that we can pass these people with our bulging shopping baskets and not turn a hair or, as in my case, try to salve my conscience by selecting just one supplicant for a hand-out each time I go out?
The most recent recipient of my bounty was lying under a filthy load of bedding reading a book. Always curious about what anyone is reading, I asked what it was. It was a Dave Eggers novel I have been meaning to read myself. When I get round to it, I will be sitting in a comfortable chair, under a reading lamp, in a warm room.
Fitting, somehow, that a rough sleeper, as we have now come to call them, should be reading Eggers for he, like his friend, the writer, William Vollmann, really cares about these people. Bill, who always takes things to extremes (to know what it is like to be a woman, he becomes one*) has both lived among them and given them a home on the car park that came with the defunct Mexican restaurant which he bought to use as his work room and studio. He takes in his stride both the smell of urine and shit as he comes out of his front door (he is not allowed to erect any kind of structure on the site) and harassment from the authorities**.
Where, after all, are these people meant to go? Eggers, more circumspect, also does a lot to help, but in more socially acceptable ways.
I understand Bill. Desperate situations call for desperate remedies, and yet I haven’t invited any tramps, as we used to call them, to set up a tent in our garden though, almost exactly a year ago, a builder did exactly that – set up a tent in the garden – to serve as his work-room while he built us a cedar-wood cabin for our books.
If I really cared that much, wouldn’t I be letting someone curl up on its warm wooden floor (books must be kept warm to remain free of damp) instead of sitting here filling out Camden’s ‘rough sleeping strategy survey’ which will yield its finding in five years’ time, and while my friend, Nicky, puts in another eight-hour stint at the local CRISIS centre: temporarily housed in a nearby school to cope with the referrals from the many hostels which have shut down for Christmas?
And what stopped me from crossing the road and mixing in when I saw a firm of private law enforcers using dogs to evict the squatters who were making good use of an empty building in the high street?
The times make cowards of us all.
* See The Book of Dolores by William T. Vollmann powerHouse Books NY
** See Harper’s Magazine