Helping the homeless. Are we really going about it the right way?

It’s a time for giving, as we are constantly reminded by a wrinkly boy-man who may or may not be implicated in the Establishment paedophile scandal currently rocking the nation.

But I can’t help but think that the way we are asked to give might also be not quite what it appears to be. The Pope, head of an independent state of incalculable wealth, issuing sleeping bags stamped with its crest to the homeless today is a prime example of how charity in a world of riven social inequality simply doesn’t cut the mustard.

Two days ago, I received a Christmas email from the also scandal rocked Uber asked me to collect food for drivers to take to a Christmas Shelter, which left me feeling a bit cold. Nice PR idea, if homeless people really want school harvest-style dinted tins of butterbeans and just best-before cereal, but surely what would be more charitable would be for Uber simply to pay their drivers more?

The best way to stop people falling through social cracks is better social equality, I thought to myself as I walked past a Romanian woman selling the Big Issue outside my work’s local branch of Waitrose. I know she is Romanian because I stopped and spoke to her once and gave her a couple of quid for which she seemed overly grateful. But when I saw her on another occasion buying exceptionally unthrifty ready-sliced exotic fruit from the same Waitrose branch, I found my sympathy waning. Why? Because, as Baroness Jenkin said a couple of weeks back, we should “let the poor eat porridge.” It only costs 4p, apparently.

It’s ridiculous of course, and completely hypocritical, as I pop in every day to buy some ready cut coconut from my cosy and warm office job, where my own lunch is subsidised, to think such thoughts. Why on earth shouldn’t this perfectly nice and evidently hard working woman spend her earnings on ready sliced fruit if she wants to? Granted, I am not selling the Big Issue (actually, I advertise fags, right now, so that definitely puts me in the moral high ground) but yet I do know what it is to be a social benefit recipient and to be on a low wage.

As recently as last year I was earning less than the living wage if you divided the amount of time I worked by my wages: it amounted to less than a tenner an hour out of which I still had to pay my childminders. But my first class degree, cut glass accent and middle class heritage has seen to it that this is no longer the case; alongside an institutionalised working knowledge of how to play the system, a decently earning husband, social support networks, and all the other things that prevent me from falling through the social cracks.

I know what it is to eek out a week’s worth of lunches from a loaf of rye bread and a pot of peanut butter, but it speaks volumes about me that the rye loaf was organic and the peanut butter was raw. My background will pretty much always ensure that I can cope with whatever life tosses at me. Even my husband (a city banker) losing his job.

Walking past her again today, mildly hungover and wanting crisps, I felt a tinge of sympathy for the woman, who smiled at me as if as an old friend. The truth is, I’ve less than 20 quid in the coffers till payday, having paid for a taxi to the Christmas-do last night, overspent on pressies and gave the childminder and cleaner extra this month to keep them sweet for the forthcoming year. The kids were nagging me about their pocket money today and I had to tell them that it wouldn’t be forthcoming. But you get my gist.

I can coast along for the rest of the month until I start a new job, whereupon I’ll be on bigger bucks, and probably hubby dearest will get a bonus and we can all go skiing. If I sound like a wanker, it’s deliberate. I live in a modest home in East London, and I work hard, always have, playing by most of the social rules (except for the times when I too have binge drunk till I puked or taken illegal drugs to get over some heartbreak, or my parents getting divorced, or not getting into Oxford) and it’s only through a lot of luck and a bit of judgement that I’m able, now, this year, to live the way I am. It’s not extravagant, compared to my social circles, but for the woman on the street today, my life probably represents the lap of luxury, certainly one that is forever out of her reach.

And there we have it. Social inequality creates a gulf of hypocrisy that none of us can solve with a one off purchase of the Big Issue or paying two quid for sodding Christmas Jumper Day.

Even my resolve to buy the homeless chap who sits outside Bethnal Green tube a coffee and a croissant a day to salve my middle class guilt went by the wayside when he told me he’d already had a latte one morning and wouldn’t be needing another one. I donated to Shelter instead for the cost of a Christmas dinner and I hope he finds his way there it enjoy it. But none of this does anything to solve the root causes of poverty, which I have to say, the government seems to be doing its best to entrench as far as possible rather than solving with any conviction.

It was brought home to me quite how hideous it can all become when I sloped home from the Christmas Party early last night. Tom and Reprobate Kate were in the local pub doing the quiz, which felt like a better option than being sick on my bosses’ shoes again, but as I started to totter to the bus stop near Mile End in my party heels, a group of young men were standing around an old geezer passed out beneath it.

I stopped – several gins the worse for wear removing any social awkwardness from the situation – ostensibly to check an ambulance had been called, but as I bent down, the man’s hand were ice blocks, his eyes rolled back in his head, his vein-bloomed face testament to the empty bottle of White Lightening by his side. I realised on a colder night that he would be dead by morning.

I rubbed his icy hand and talked to him, trying to prevent him losing consciousness, as doctors once did to me when I broke my nose on the dry ski slopes at Hemel Hempstead. His eyes, pupils pinprinked flicked and at my touch he grasped my hands and I held them for a while and it felt like I was giving him, for that moment, a reason not to die.

Gibbering at first, but then, as I was kind, asking his name, and eventually what football team he supported, he came too, and we sat him up. I sent one of the boys for tea, (no hot drinks at the local FSC) but all he was able to come back with was warm water, which I dripped into his mouth like I was feeding a toddler. He objected at first – it wasn’t cider, but eventually he relented. A couple of passers by pointed him out as a local tramp, some even knew his name: Colin. I bet Colin never went even dry slope skiing in his life.

The ambulance, it seems had treated him earlier. They weren’t coming back. Eventually, with the men’s help, he got to his feet and he went on his way. I wanted to make sure he had somewhere to go, but I’m not sure even if he did he would have gone there. “I just don’t want you to hurt yourself”, I said, a little helpless as to what to do next.

He looked into my eyes – he had nice pale blue eyes – and said unthreateningly, “I only hurt other people.” And in that moment, his life flashed before my eyes: the devastation he must be trying to escape by drinking himself into oblivion. And so Colin lived to stagger another day.

I don’t want to romanticise the plight of the homeless, but one night’s compassion can’t undo a lifetime of sad circumstances. Whatever problems he has encountered, society has failed Colin. So society, then needs fixing because he is too broken to do much about anymore and that’s a tragedy.

And then I went home. I washed my hands really, really well and demanded Tom make me a flatbread pizza. Because, ya know, I’m only human. Perhaps I need to work on that being more charitable at home thing. But then life would have to be a bit kinder to me too and I’d be able to be a better person to my lovely husband, too.

Update: By chance in my bike basket tonight when I got home was a notice for Tower Hamlets Street Outreach Response Team, which had to number to call in case you are concerned about a person sleeping rough: 0300 500 0914 or www.streetlink.org.uk