Of A Street Poet And A Prejudiced Music Fan

 We interrupt the catch-up to bring you this rant.

It's actually something I think I may have mentioned previously, but this recent experience upset me enough that I am still mulling it over several days later.

There is at least one band I have followed for the past fifty years or more. This is one of that rare breed of bands that are still working and putting out new music. I was in the queue to see them a few days ago. Although I am older than many of the fans, this band still attracts its fair share of grey haired people ... unlike the band itself who have never been seen without hair dye or (possibly?) a hair piece. The queue had been growing for several hours and I was sitting on the steps of the venue talking to people who, quite by chance, had turned out to have come from towns near me.

I became aware of a twenty or thirty-something woman making her way along the queue, stopping to talk to people. I saw several refusing to engage with her or shaking their heads and she walked on, getting closer to where I was sitting. I suspected I was about to be asked for money, sadly not unusual in London or any other town these days. I hadn't seen any buskers or people begging in two days and I still had some money I keep for such emergencies. The woman approached and explained that she was a poet and that she was homeless. She was trying to raise £16 to pay for a hostel bed for a week. This is the modest sum I've heard mentioned several times by many people in North London in recent years and I keep meaning to check whether such cheap accommodation really exists. I have never got round to doing it though.

She reached into her bag and almost pulled out some handwritten sheets of brightly coloured paper upon which were written her poems, before quickly stuffing them back in the bag and zipping it up again. I was impressed by a fellow creative spirit who, like me, was refusing to expect people to give her money in the street for nothing. She was articulate and polite, but looked as though she could be having a hard time. I had no idea what her challenges were, although were I to judge purely by appearance I could have hazarded a guess, but I was willing to accept that the need for safe accommodation might be one of them. I happened to have money on me and handed her a ten pound note. I could see she already had some money and I knew my offering would make it up to the amount she said she needed. I'm not entirely naive and realised that it was completely possible that I was not being told the entire, or even a partial, truth. I know I've been scammed out of money on the streets before, but if someone is so needing cash they have to ask a stranger for it, I'm usually willing to share if I have something to spare. She thanked me and remembered to ask,

"Do you want a poem?"

"Of course," I replied, "that's what I'm paying for."

I couldn't tell if she was relieved or disappointed that I was taking some of her modest stock of poems. There didn't seem to be many left in her bag. She had gone to some effort to write them all by hand in a mixture of colours on A4 card and put them in protective plastic pockets. None of this was an easy or a cheap option. She could more easily and more profitably have rattled off a few printouts on a library or hostel computer, but she had chosen not to. Given the effort to which she had gone to use what talent she had to produce something she could sell I was happy with the exchange. 

When she had moved on a man closer to the head of the queue came back to squat by me to share his assessment of what he had just observed,

"I don't mean to burst your bubble, but you have just funded her drug habit ..." 

At first I thought I had misheard him, but he smirked and nodded in the supercilious way that people reserve for the ingenuous. He got up and went back to his place in the queue, which was a pity because I would have liked to explore his intervention with him. I found his comment gratuitous and insulting.

In no particular order of priority I want to make a list to work out why I felt so irritated by what he thought it was okay to share. 

• He had no idea of what conversation had actually passed between myself and this woman and it was none of his business anyway.
• He wasn't interested in finding out whether I had a motive for offering this street poet some money.
• I was prepared to give her something for her work and creativity in the same way I hope people will offer me something as a tip or buy a CD when I am busking.
• She and I had a business transaction. She offered poems for sale. I bought two.
• I could see there was a problem. I didn't know how much was to do with a need for accommodation, but if I could offer her enough to make sure she had a bed to sleep in that was safer than being on the street or sleeping in a shop doorway it was a reasonable act of humanity.
• Buying her poems meant I was acknowledging there was a value in the product of her creativity regardless of the quality of the work. On some level I was hoping  that my action would reinforce that this was a safer and more acceptable means of raising funds than stealing or performing some other criminal or anti-social act should they be her alternatives.
• I remember how I felt when a woman paused from tipping me whilst I was busking last summer to ask whether I were "on drugs. I can't give you any money if you are," she had said. Either she had enjoyed the song I had sung specially for her after we'd had an interesting discussion or she didn't. To assume some morally superior stance because she had a problem with any choices I made in my life was demeaning to both of us. By that reasoning we would have to choose not to buy the work of Schubert or Shelley among many creative artists.
• Withholding payment for work done or goods sold because I could make some kind of judgement about how she spent money honestly earned infantilises a grown adult. I don't drink alcohol or eat meat. Should I, therefore, withhold money from others because they look likely to do either of those things? How an adult spends their money is a decision that only they should need to make.

I could go on listing my arguments. The more I thought about the music fan's intervention the more incensed I became. I tried to find him again later on in the evening to challenge his attitude. Forming a judgement of my own I assumed he must have been a Daily Mail reader to have been able to have done what he did based on no information other than his own ill-informed preconceptions. I didn't find him and decided I would try and work out why I felt his intervention was so insulting rather than risk my blood pressure reaching dangerous levels. In the meantime here is a poem by Alexandra Hewitt, who has clearly experienced the loss of someone important in her life, just as I have in recent months. I wish her well. 

"Peace Be With You" by Alexandra Hewitt