Will Self, writer of books such as Great Apes and Cock and Bull, owns a pair of the deepest set eyes I have seen as
if they are looking out from a tunnel and inspecting and dissecting every
aspect of modern life.
When I say to him
that I am a fellow writer he sympathises admitting that even writers of his own
generation will never reach the stature of the generation before with the likes
of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. The changes in publishing and in reading have been such that it's very difficult to get yourself noticed. The advent of creative writing courses means there are plenty of writers, just not readers.
We are at the Watershed in Bristol, Will has just arrived and is getting
his picture taken with his back against the harbourside, for an event about
Mental Health and Homelessness, which takes place during Mental Health Week.
I confess to have a vested interest in this event in having been diagnosed with Bi-Polar and also technically homeless due to my illness. In the context of a steadily increasing homelessness and more becoming housed in temporary accommodation with an increasing suicide rate, according to government statistics, it seems to be a timely event for St Mungos to put on.
St Mungos recently launched a new initiative called Safer Off the Steets (SOS Bristol), a fund raising fund raising campaign to help tackle the rising problem of homelessness.
Will Self is known for his scathing attacks on politicians
and general cultural he unusually turns out to be a generous and deeply sympathetic, as
well as a (not so unusual) deeply articulate, speaker. His voice has a particular drawling quality as if it was made out of a strong wood like oak with someone raking the bark. It's as deep set as his eyes and unerringly always at the concept level of ideas.
His talk began with an article that he had
written for the New Statesmen, which was not published and subsequently for
which he was fired for (“O woe is me”). It was about a homeless man he knows called
George and about the housing culture of which he tries, and tries and tries, to
get a footing in. Normally he is found
under a cash machine trying to get a few pounds for a drink so he can be
somewhere warm and to temporally forget his situation.
Will talks about how new houses are
being developed, which are normally luxury flats way out the means of people
like George. He describes how he helped
George to get back into the system with the council as it is the only way he can
get into some sheltered accommodation and, with some hope, get a stable place
to live. George is only one of the many people who have fallen into homelessness. He wasn't always like this once he had a wife, a home, a good job, now all lost where all attempts to get any of it back have resulted in hopelessness. Things can be done on an individual level that can make a difference.
“Personal contact is important”,
Will says, “because once you know of the homeless person in question’s name they
cease to be a ‘homeless person’ and they become someone who actually want to
help get off the street and help them achieve what they would like to achieve
out of life. To give what you can give
is also very important as it may be a vital stopgap to hunger before they get
some real help.”
“In some periods of history there
may be only so much you can do but”, Will encourages, “we here are all people
who would wish to help- in fact probably most people here have probably waited
with someone at A&E or have spent time talking and providing food for
someone who needed it- and that’s not a bad number.”
“In London where I live I saw a man
in a wheelchair rolling down a busy highstreet, his leg newly amputated because
I could see it was still raw and bloody, and his look was the look of a crazy
man and I thought this thought, which I don’t think often, is that we have
stopped being a civilised country, we have become Calcutta.”
“Calcutta was a country that became
a byword for every sin and nastiness you could find because of it’s large poor
population. In a sense we distrust poverty,
hate it, which is right but we hate the people who are in it and ascribe
negative characteristics to those people of whose fault is not of their own
making. That’s what’s happened here and
a lot of that is because of our new Victorian values we have been coerced into
believe because of neo-liberal dogma that we’ve allowed to govern so much of
our lives.”
In being asked a question, that
refers to Dostoevsky’s quote about how you can tell what a country is like by
how they treat their mental insane, Will admits to being pessimistic about
hospitals’ futures and generally pessimistic about how people on the lowest
rung of the ladder are treated by governments.
And on a question of politics Will said how he would vote for Labour if
only they were more honest about their proposed government.
“If they had said ‘We’ll be poor
for ten, twenty, thirty, hell, a whole generation, we’ll stop buying iphones
from China and stop consuming the shit out of everything but everyone will be equal’
then I’d vote for it but to think it can get everything it wants is dishonest”.
A question from someone in a housing
association for drug addicts told how he was having to leave the property because
the association has calculated that it will not make enough profit. To which Will said with disgust, and worry,
of how poorly people like this man and himself (Will Self was a drug addict for
twenty years) will be treated and are treated shows how badly the market based
system has encroached on our moral ability to look after each other as
everything has to make it’s own way without central government support.
The
Grass Arena by John Healy is recommended by Will. A good book if you want to understand the nature of addiction.
A weighty evening yet an enjoyable one,
a happy one where a major writer gave his thoughts about the concerns of the
day and also a sad one where our group of around thirty or forty people felt
just as ignored to by most people as the homeless he was talking about.
But the difference we can all make to those who are less fortunate and are struggling their way though life can make all the difference. I have started asking the names of those whom I give money to as a beginning of a friendship that may one day be as useful to me as it is to those without homes or family.
