The best place to be poor

I was born in north London, at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and at the age of 62, after many years of trouble and wandering, I have come to rest in the streets where I was born. And in my usual cunning way I have become one of the roughly 300 or 400 people living in inner London you perhaps think of as ‘homeless’, making the rounds from drop-in centres to churches, from morning till night, in the hunt for free food.

For this is what my life has come down to as I stand on the threshold of old age, the endless movement from one soup kitchen to the next, which at least gets me to the end of the day by a pleasant route. Or it might be not so pleasant, because of course a lot of conflict erupts at places where a large number of people benefit from organised kindness.

But social life I can find in plenty, to take the place of friends, who have become very distant. Those friends belong to another life. And I have a good substitute in the fellowship of the pop-ins.

Who are these people? Who are the people you see queueing outside the fashion-able north London churches? They are typically alone. If they ever had a partner, that person has died or has been divorced or otherwise disposed of. I can outline a standard life story for many of these individuals which roughly parallels mine. We are almost all of a certain age. We came to London in our youth, from college or university, and then perhaps we worked for a few years. But we soon tired of that and opted for a life on the dole, which was easy enough in the Thatcher and Major years.

At a certain point we made the transition from ordinary benefits to the sick.