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.