02 Jan 2017

Social as people are, or as I’ve been lead to believe, we all need a place to ourselves every now and then. I have a perfectly good space of my own in my flat. But I’ve had too much of it over the Christmas break, and I’m looking for a new space for a little while. I needed to get out and look perfectly fine on my own – perhaps a little interesting – but very much alone. I don’t want to be bothered, I just want to feel presentable in the wild. I really am very lucky, even if I feel I’m not sometimes. I’m in town, and have changed my cafe options. The old place I used to visit will be seen by me again, but not for now. This is a small step in changing my habits.

When I arrived in town, I saw a man in a doorway chatting to a woman in her twenties. She pointed one way, and walked another. He left his bag and soon came back with a pizza box.  What if anything was in it is anyones guess. I passed him £1 as I passed him. This was something I was already prepared for, and it was something I decided I needed to start doing. He didn’t ask.

One pound seems trivial compared to the £5.95 I have just paid for a black coffee and caramel shortbread. I’m not so much paying for the coffee as for the rent of a comfy armchair in a warm place. The guy on the street can have neither. He knows he can’t come in here, and wasting so much money on a treat and a drink would be madness. This has made me feel less than good about myself too. The self-help books would lead us to believe that giving is good for us. I don’t feel that good, but at least I’m starting to feel something.

One of the recurring themes of politics is that we have a housing crisis, and we need to build more houses. It’s not entirely clear how this would help a man on the street who is happy to scavenge pizza from the street. At the very least, this man needs a safe space where he can sleep, wash, eat, and meet people. We all need that, and if the country wanted to solve the problem it could. But there is no will for this. People could take an easy ride through life without the daily worries of bills, wich washing up liquid to buy, you get the idea. And so, we aspire to our own little box to live in, and accept all the hassle involved in looking after it, and filling it with our own stuff. Whilst at the same time we watch our televisions to see how people in the world are suffering, safe from any real interaction with these wretched people. I don’t think we are very social at all.