Coming Home: Taking the Long Way

By Thembi Mutch

October 25, 2008

People continue to lose their homes in England. Home repossessions continue to rise. And for the first time in seventeen years, unemployment figures are rising again.

Homes are interesting places; they are inside four walls, not in public. One of the definitions of home is that it is NOT the pavement, the park, and this is the problem with the homeless. As well as being a reminder that we have failed as a society, they remind us that the homeless have no privacy, no personal space: they sacrifice an element of their personhood when they become homeless. What you lose when you forgo your home is status, ability to impose your taste, shout and sing a lot, wander around naked, have a small chunk of freedom, where you are the boss.

I am sitting on a plane, writing this thirty-thousand feet up, about an hour outside of Nairobi, Kenya, thinking about home. London is my home. London is my lover: We fight, I hate it, I resent it, but I know it intimately.

I was born in Richmond, West London, and raised in Dulwich, South London, and I will ultimately always return, loyal to the last. Since my heady student days almost 20 years ago, I have been hanging out in Soho, cycling through London, dancing on the pedals at traffic lights, sticking two fingers up at White Van Man, the enemy of the cyclist. Possessive and proud of the city I despise and adore, I know every street and never need a map. London is my retreat, my known quantity, the place I feel safe.

I woke up this morning before setting off to the airport – comfortable, warm, wrapped in a duvet, drinking coffee, thinking about safety, bolt-holes. We all need bolt-holes don’t we? We all need the proverbial equivalent of a duvet where we can burrow under, make a nest and hide from the world. We all need a safe place to sleep, and enough sleep to allow us to function, to make good decisions and not get ill. For some of us this place is home, and all it represents. Which is why the failure of the sub prime mortgage market strikes so deep: It hits us where it hurts, our homes.

So what happens when we feel threatened? Do we even know if there is danger, or does a feral throwback decide for us, and instinctively we lash out, or run? This week I’ve been thinking about this, for a number of reasons, some global, some personal, as I contend with the rippling beginnings of the credit crunch, and the fact that I am packing up my glorious, safe, micro-constructed life here in the UK, in order to go and live in a place where it’s much too hot to have a duvet, and the small corner that is my bolt-hole is likely to be the Indian Ocean. (Sometimes swimming right out to sea feels curiously safe, although please be assured I DO NOT mean in a Virginia Woolf kind of way).

As a possible antidote to the repossessions of people’s homes, Dr Richard Wiseman has designed ‘the most relaxing room in the world.’ Maybe he is marketing it now for stressed out bankers? The room is bathed in green light, suffused with a smell of lavender, with an (artificial) view of a clear sky, and gently pulsing with the notes of a specially composed piece of relaxing music. It is, apparently, the result of years of research, to produce the most ultimately relaxing environment. Lavender induces beta waves in the brain, whilst music of a certain beat, near to the heartbeat, coaxes the brain into believing there is no threat. Interesting that rather than change the conditions, Wiseman’s approach is to change the reactions to the conditions. So whilst people may be falling horribly into debt all around us, at least they are relaxed about it.

Meanwhile last week in Soho, Central London, an old friend and I sat outside the Coach and Horses Pub, the legendary drinking hole where Geoffrey Barnard (famous literary wag), Francis Bacon (famous artist), and Peter O’Toole (famous Actor, roué and drunk), all hung out in its heyday. Soho at this time of year is lovely: The tourists have gone home, so, consequently, have the thieves. Chinese businessmen drink alongside local hairdressers, Congolese cab drivers and Polish builders. Front of house staff from the local West End theatres relax with the local media luvvies – there is a sense as we all unwind and discuss ‘the munch’ (new slang for credit crunch) that we are in it together. In the last few years Soho has had several face lifts: The massage and sauna parlours have been pushed into new districts, and whilst there are some still some diehard sex workers patrolling the streets and doorways, most of the hard-core, more dangerous businesses have disappeared, to be replaced by the ‘friendly’ side of sex work, strip bars, erotic reviews, and a handful of excellent drag clubs.

Despite the ‘cleaning up’ of Soho, there are still handfuls of men and women living above shop fronts, who remain anonymous and have possibly arrived here illegally from Nigeria, China, or Albania, and almost certainly have crap lives working as sex workers. Equally worryingly, there are more and more homeless people. They have changed, the homeless, both in their profile and in the way they approach us, the ‘home-ful’ – is that what we are?

In 1991, when the first medical, dental, and HIV clinics began appearing in London for the homeless, the media was rammed full of articles about this phenomena. I spent three days in a homeless area interviewing people about coping strategies, and a ‘Beggar’s School’, which, even then, seemed very Brechtian. There was still, at this point, a sheepishness about begging, an embarrassment, and we, the ‘home-ful,’ were shocked when ‘innocents’ – young women and men, tidy people – approached us. Now, in 2008, what is shocking about the begging is the sheer amount of people who come streaming past us in a two-hour slot. We count twelve people, that’s one every ten minutes. And each homeless person is polite, alert, clearly not stoned or drunk, and each one has a story, and we listen.

Mostly these stories of the homeless are plausible, sad, could happen to anyone, and ram home how a couple of wrong decisions, a failure of good friends, and ‘whoosh’ you’re under, down and out. Justin, a 32-year-old roofer from Cornwall (in the west of England) has the most heart-rending tale. He is ruddy, healthy looking, and clearly has not been on the streets for long. His wife in Cornwall is 12-weeks pregnant, he has been made redundant and has come to London to ‘prove’ he can support his wife. He feels a strong sense of obligation: yet he has already been robbed three times, lost the phone numbers of people who offered him work and a place to stay. He is shaking with fatigue and hunger but is, in the way of someone who is beginning to lose the plot a bit and rely on willpower rather than rationale, determined to make it work. He leaves us at 8pm explaining that sleeping bags are given out by the Church about a mile away, and he needs to go and pick one up.
Life in post-industrial, post modern capitalism is perilous, fragile, and very contingent, and we kid ourselves it is not.

I am struck by the fallacy of difference between ‘us’ who can afford to sit outside the Coach And Horses pub in Soho drinking, and ‘them,’ who must approach us asking for money. As long as the fantasy remains that those who end up homeless are somehow either intrinsically at fault (because of a pathological defect, or a poor decision) or deranged, we miss the obvious. And the obvious could be this: Our society only functions because we have the poor. We need the poor, we need their failures, their fuck ups and their blunders, because then we can justify our own successes, even if these successes are pretty meagre.

A few years ago the Historian Francis Fukiama – who is a big deal this side of the pond – published a thesis called the end of history. It is a much misquoted treatise on why ‘there are no more certainties,’ no more absolutes because post modernism has effectively eaten everything. Well, not exactly eaten everything, but gorged, vomited, binged, spat it out, and then moved on to the next party. I don’t think he is right: I think there are still certain absolutes, and one of these is that we all need a sense of safety and that we need to be much more constructive about how we protect our homes.

We are only at the beginning of the recession here in England. The numbers of homeless will continue to rise, and the mainstream media will increasingly become obsessed with bleating about either the concomitant rise in crime, or the parallel drain on resources. At some level we need to be much more consistent. We either change our attitude to homes, or we make it easier for people to keep owning their’s. Either way, we need to make the connections between a highly distorted, unaccountable banking system, and apparently, the things we hold dear – our homes.

Thembi Mutch

BIO Thembi Mutch is a freelance journalist focusing on human rights issues. After graduating from the London School of Economics with a BSc in Political Science and Anthropology, Thembi launched Shocking Pink, an alternative anarcho-feminist 'zine in the late 80s. In addition to her radio and television reportage, Thembi has been widely published, including in the London Observer, British Journalism Review, the Financial Times, the New Scientist and with the BBC. She is currently writing a thriller about international foreign aid and is working on her PhD thesis on the subject of women's political marginalization in Tanzania and Zanzibar. Thembi is a lazy gardener who likes growing her own food, and currently lives in Hastings, England.

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