Homelessness
Cast your mind back to the turn of the year:
‘Merry Christmas’, ‘Season’s Greetings’, ‘Happy New Year’ …
And Ben and Bexie in the doorway at Peacock’s
In their sleeping bags with books and a chess set
In the incessant torrents of December;
It was Ben and Bexie who galvanised me
As I faced the welter of Christmas charity appeals;
I didn’t know where to contribute – so many!
And as someone brought up on the adage,
‘Parity not Charity’,
I’ve always felt ambivalent about charity:
Patching up the status quo and all that,
But as William Blake said,
You can see the world in a grain of sand,
So, you can be charitable at the micro level
While keeping your eye on the ball the rich are having …
But I was also brought up in a Christian manner,
So here comes Corinthians 13.13,
The Three Divine Virtues,
Faith, Hope and Charity:
‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity,
these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’
And so here I am and so here we are,
Hoping to offer practical and financial support
To the Blue Lantern Project:
Sustainable, temporary living accommodation
For the homeless …
But, for the moment, let’s go back to Ben and Bexie,
As the personification of homelessness,
With the image of a modern-day Scrooge
Before his agonised redemption,
Looking, perhaps, like Suella Braverman:
‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’
So, what did ‘Happy New Year’ and ‘Merry Christmas’
Mean to Ben and Bexie?
To answer this, let’s pursue a few synonyms
On our journey through the streets to redemption:
Homeless: unhoused – houseless – uncared for – displaced – dispossessed – outcast – unsettled – vagrant – vagabond – itinerant –
Notice how the last three shades of meaning
Morph not just into Victorian values of self-help
But, also, contemporary shades of meaning:
Remember that Tory cant about ‘crap parents’,
And as though homelessness were a lifestyle choice …
Vagrant – vagabond – itinerant –
So much of the reality of modernity
Is elided with those three words
As we shall see at the end of this presentation.
Now a few synonyms for wealth:
Riches – fortune – prosperity – affluence – property – substance – possessions
Now a few synonyms for inequality and injustice:
Disparity – unbalance – disproportion – unevenness – irregularity –
Wrong – unfair – disservice – offence – insult – injury – inequity – indignity – affront – unjust
Unhappy New Year!
Sadness – sorrow – grief – gloom – desperation – despondence – forlornness – misery – despair – distress – anguish – pain – mournfulness – dejection – depression – melancholy – hopelessness – pessimism – joylessness – wretchedness – dolefulness – weariness –
The man in the Black Dog film sleeping rough
In the tent beneath the railway bridge
In Gloucester before he was flooded out
Further broadened my horizons with this:
‘When you sleep in the streets, the streets become your home.’
Think of that when you next nestle down
At your real or metaphorical hearth –
Hearth – residence – dwelling – root – roof – shelter –
Security – protection – safeguarded –
Of course, you have none of those when you sleep rough.
Now the Church of England was once nicknamed
‘The Tory Party at prayer’.
And I suppose people with a belief
In self-help, competitive individualism,
A low-tax perception of the State as a Nanny,
And the perception of sleeping in a tent by a floodtide river
As a ‘lifestyle choice’
Might support the Office for National Statistics
In its proposal to drop the publication
Of the deaths of homeless persons
(741 in 2021)
With talk of – and I unironically quote here –
‘an improved and more efficient health and social care landscape’ –
What on earth does that mean, for God’s sake?
Meanwhile, in the real world away from that disingenuousness,
Nearly 75,000 single-parent households
Face the threat of eviction this winter,
According to Shelter’s statistical analysis,
What with falling behind with the rent and/or no-fault evictions:
The lack of ‘genuinely affordable’ social housing
Results in a supply-demand imbalance,
With competition for a roof driving up rents;
A few more stats:
1.5 million properties
Lie vacant at the moment
In England and Wales;
Nearly 275,000 people
Are recorded as homeless in England;
Think back to that long list of synonyms,
And now reflect on the fundamentals of that lexicon:
Wealth, poverty, inequality, injustice,
And reflect upon the hyper-normalisation of homelessness,
Of people sleeping in the streets and shop doorways,
Like some twenty-first century Gustav Dore engraving,
And now let’s try to translate our thoughts into action:
Together we can make a difference
As we see the world in a grain of sand,
Or in a shop doorway at Peacock’s in Stroud.
Thank-you.
With thanks to Bob Fry