A Liverpool policeman said: "I come across lots of cases where people take things from supermarket shelves because they are psychologically disturbed. I have never once come across anyone who put things back."

If a psychiatrist could explain that to me, I would believe more in psychiatry. I learned a lot more about people in the past week. Like, it's the poor who help the poor most. And it's the very rich who are desperate to be richer. In the meantime, I am not sure whether this is the affluent society or the effluent society.

I had watched a TV programme called "Famous, Rich and Homeless," in which Names (both hands wave in the air to represent quotation marks) took to the streets and tried to live like the totally deprived on the loose change of the uncaring.

Among them was Rosie Boycott, a writer and former Daily Express editor. She has had her share of troubles, what with drink and a bad car crash, and as it turned out she was the one in the group who had the greater understanding of the streets because she identified most closely with the problems.

One critic did not identify with her or it. He used the word moronic to describe the two-parter. I don't know which way he was looking. Backwards perhaps. Down the nose, perhaps. But I - thankfully isolated in comfort from the problems - was well served.

It has never been my misfortune to stand in a street streaming with rain, without food, without money, without shelter, ignored by those walking by, with not a soul to turn to for help.

The nearest I came to it was the Army and it at least gave me rudimentary food and shelter. I was yanked out of a home environment by a Government envelope from London which left me standing on a railway station bound for a totally unknown place at the fag-end of a war: an Army camp in Hereford which was as far divorced from my needs of the time as John Prescott's broken lavatory seats are now.

Having reached it, I lay on boards in a barrack room staring through a window, watching a fly buzzing around there, and wishing to God I were that fly so that I could be free. Better the victim of a passing bird than one of those barking-mad, buffed up, re-constructed, blancoed, bellowing, strutting psychopaths my new masters called Sergeant Majors.

So there they were, the Names, doing something similar. The Marquess of Blandford was among them and he was near-enough wiped out from the start. Absent without leave, sir. Conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline in that his expression showed dissent, sir. Apprehended and cautioned, whereupon he walked away, sir. Well, well, what a pathetic exit. Left, right, left, right, left. I was glad to see his disappearing, disgruntled figure.

As for the rest, they made a good show of it. They learned rather more than they wanted to learn about themselves. They learned what it is to lose identity, as I did, the difference being that I got a number. They learned about real hunger. They slept in doorways. They had whatever inflated views they had of themselves and their prestige squeezed painfully from them.

They felt, however briefly, hopelessness: utter, cold, miserable, isolated hopelessness. Rosie Boycott started in her comfortable and spacious house and ended on the streets in her funny hat looking like Them - a troubled sorcerer without a convenient spell. I could identify with that right down, as it happens, to the funny hat. What in heaven's name do you do about lavatories? Don't tell me, John.

We are daily reminded that we are going through a period of financial chaos and in it people are losing homes and losing jobs and losing confidence. They are not on the streets living in doorways by night, but they feel the terror. It was not like that in the real depression, the 1930's. It was a time of total hopelessness.

I was a child (stop sobbing, you at the back) in Lancashire streets, where crowds jeered and booed workers going to the mill. They were going only because they were willing to put what little money they could spare into the business to keep it going. Shades of British Airways today! A Willie Walsher if ever I saw one.

My aunts were among them. They got shares for their money. Many years later, they were actually paid back. But in the meantime, they were spat at and jeered and police horses pushed back the mobs of the pavements, me among them. The ignorance of my years allowed me to enjoy it.

The great thing of those times is that people survived because they were strong in community spirit. The doors of terraced streets were always open to neighbours. People were cheek by jowl with the mills that sustained them.

Those who had little helped those who had less. Children of large families supported ageing parents and thought more of “duty” than today's children think of “rights”.

Folk singers with guitars now plonk away drawing attention to those times as if they were all gray. They were not. They were rich with colour. There was understanding, and laughter. My grandmother used to laugh so much when something amused her that her board table danced to the thump of her fist.

It had, after all, been much worse for her predecessors. She was part of the better times. When the American civil war caused a cotton famine in the 1800's hundreds of thousands were in need of food. Pawn shops were besieged. Shopkeepers in every town and village of Lancashire were ruined. There were soup kitchens everywhere; and riots over rates of relief.

"We're mixt wi't stondin paupers too,
Ut wilno work when works t'be 'ad" **

wrote a Poet (air-waving quotation marks again) of the time. Four years of America's war!

In this age, Rosie Boycott, in the midst of her torments on the streets, was given £20 by a stranger and she immediately gave it to someone more worthy. There's an echo from the past. It was a huge sacrifice. I missed the second part of the programme but I asked my wife about it. "She," I was told, "got the most out of the experience. It looked like a life-changer."

People learn more from enemies than friends and poverty is a terrible enemy. In an odd way, war changed values for the better and the improvement has dribbled away with time.

One book was written by a man who spent a long time in a German prison under sentence of death. I forget his name and that of the book. I do not forget the message. Each and every morning might be his last. Each morning he survived one more time. And each morning, he garnered what little comfort he could from the starkness around him. The closeness of death is what taught him about life. Just as streets of shambling no-hopers taught Rosie Boycott and friends about life.

Little pieces of coloured thread, for instance, hidden away in gray blankets. And shreds of tobacco, carefully gathered, not easily found. The threads he turned into a tiny emblem which he wore on his shirt. Shreds of tobacco became a cigarette. And when he had his cigarette a new prisoner arrived and because the author was a courteous man above all, he offered the cigarette to the stranger, not believing for a moment that it would be accepted. To have such a treasured object accepted was unthinkable. The stranger accepted it with enthusiasm and smoked it.

And the author was left to sort out what it was in his own character that had caused him so much torment - this smoking of his cigarette. He concluded that he was in the wrong. If he had not expected the cigarette to be smoked, he should not have offered it. Lesson learned.

So what are we to make of this age, this age of gangs and knives and drugs and teenage pregnancies and muggings and empty churches and benefits and selfishness? In the midst of financial crisis we have Rich Lists, MP's raiding expenses, bosses taking large bonuses for failing, and banks that caused the problems in the first place grabbing back as much as they can to balance their books.

Not a pleasant change in human behaviour over 80 years or so, is it?

And our politicians: Many, it seems, are desperate to acquire more when they already have much. One charged for sweets, crisps, cakes, ice creams and doughnuts.

"Nowt so queer as folk," my grandmother would have said, using the word 'queer' in its original sense. A cup of coffee now is the equivalent of five weeks' pension to her.

Nowt so queer indeed.

At last, the police chief with his little homily about supermarkets is proved wrong: MP's, in their shame, are queueing to put things back on the shelves. Fancy that.

*Taking part: Rosie Boycott, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Bruce Jones (Les Battersby from Coronation Street), Annabel Croft and the aristocrat Jamie Blandford

• **Translation: We are mixed with the standing paupers too, Who will not work when work is to be had.

Retrospective

Accrington Stanley, Alan Bennett, Eddie Braben, My cruel sea, Derek Jamieson, Roy Farran, Charles Lamb, Sam's chophouse gang, Lake district: Water's little dance, Martyrs of Clay Cross, Edmund Spenser, Nowells of Read hall, Cecil the Mink, Oh, to be a countryman, Technology rampant, Rosie Boot, Cooks and all that, Les at 100, The Paslew Saga, Wellington's England remembered; Pendle witches; Greenhouse weeds: a mortifying tale; Mottled legs; Dentistry; On growing old; Edmund the money man; the new editor; barristers and journalists; Memory and Last of the Summer Wine; the Yates's experience; Rose: the ghost and the ring; The gravy train; Lillian Ross of the New Yorker and John Huston

Main contents list

Lancashire affairs:

http://www.llsociety.org/

Media

www.gentlemenranters.com

http://booksaboutjournalism.com/

skidmoresisland.blogspot.com

Written by journalists for journalists, but you can peep

Hawthorn blossom: Derek Jebson

Cricket

Spring, and scent of hawthorn
sweetens the long meadow air;
cricket bats fresh with oil
click against fast leather,
and in the pads cupboard.
smelling of must and seasons past,
startled spiders leave in dissaray.

Old Tom the groundsman likes his drink.
One too many is one too few for him; he
spends his time dreaming of pale ale
as he trundles his mower back and forth.

Old men gather as they always did
on the bench they claim as theirs,
hard by the pavilion. Sharp-eyed, all five,
as Tom chugs along their way.
"Missed some daises," says one.
"He always does,."

Young players now take the field
Kitted in white, aglow with hope.
Come tomorrow they will feel old
as stretched sinews howl their woes.
Three days before that pain ends
and muscles find their spring at last.
First, then, victory over self,
Before victory in the middle.

Geoffrey Mather (c) 2009

Friday, July 3, 2009