Ending homelessness

There is a crepuscular light and a chilly autumn wind is sending leaves upwards into the evening sky.  Nonetheless, I maintain the ritual of stopping to watch the skateboarders at London’s South Bank.  They cavort and shimmy in the cavernous space under the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the harsh concrete backcloth these days covered with vivid graffiti.  So much life and energy where there was once misery and desperation. For this was the place where, thirty years ago, the greatest number of rough sleepers could be found.  By the late 1980s, following some misguided and deeply damaging welfare benefit changes introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government and an absence of an effective strategy to address an inexorable rise in rough sleeping, over 120 people were sleeping around the brutalist architecture of the South Bank.  In the evening, huddles of rough sleepers would gather at tables within the Royal Festival Hall and wait for the arrival of the first soup...

Naturally, I never allow my petty prejudices to taint my relationships with people - except for when I do. Take the other day. I’m walking along Peckham High Street and coming towards me with his familiar scuttling gait is Leonard Taylor. I’m eager to talk with Leonard as I know he has been re-housed locally after 17 years living rough. The last I’d heard he was struggling to settle, appearing in his old haunts, hanging around the soup runs, talking nostalgically about his former life of sleeping on cardboard in shop doorways and deploring the arid existence of the resettled homeless person: housed but friendless. Yet the usually remorselessly dour Leonard responds joyfully when I inquire about his situation.   He explains that he had a knock on the door from some Jehovah’s Witnesses and, after taking up their offer to attend a service, has joined the local congregation.   Immediately flashing up in my mind are the following highly pejorative verbs: brainwash, capture, ...