Ian McMillan: Demanding questions that beg to be answered

The man looked threatening for a moment and then stumbled off down the street. I clutched my dad’s hand and fought back tears and asked what the man had been on about. My dad, euphemistically, said that he’d been speaking Gaelic and he’d asked for the train fare to Perth.

Only years later did I realise that this was a drunk and dangerous bloke of the sort you sometimes used to see on the street, and then for a while you didn’t see them, and now it seems to me that you’re seeing them more often. My dad had turned him away with aplomb, and no harm was done, but my usual reaction when I see people like that coming towards me is to cross the road or hide behind a wall.

Over the years there have been quite a few. There was that man who once came up to me in Doncaster and said: “I know where your office is and I’m going to come and empty your waste paper bins out!” He didn’t and he didn’t, but I was still shaken.

There was the couple of chaps outside a station one early morning in London who looked at my briefcase and said: “Have you got a laptop in there, mate? A nice laptop? A nice 
new laptop?”

I hadn’t, as it happens, but that didn’t stop me scuttling to the relative safety of the station buffet. There was the woman who just sat down on the soaking pavement as I walked past and said, to nobody in particular: “I’ll never move from here.” To my eternal shame, I walked by.

And maybe I walk by too often. And maybe we all do.

It seems to me, though, that the 
streets are getting more and more crowded with the sorts of people 
who make me nervous, who could 
be more modern versions of that guy who asked my dad for the train fare 
 to Perth.

Some kind of social shift is taking place and more and more people are being forced to live rough, or to live in places where they get turned out in the morning, or to couch-surf with their mates until their mates get fed up. Cuts in welfare and things like the spare bedroom tax will force people to use the open air as their spare bedroom and that has to be a bad thing. But the dilemma for the person with a job, the person with a roof over their head and a nice family to come home to, is what to do about it?

I was in Bradford the other week with my mate Ian Beesley the photographer when a young lad, in a near-parallel to me and my dad’s encounter in the Scottish town decades before, came up to us and said: “Have you got 50p for a sandwich?”

I was about to get him to tell me where you could get a sandwich for 50p because we’d all go there and have a sandwich party when he suddenly, like an auctioneer, upped the price: “And have you got a quid for a cup of tea?” Ian, being a generous soul, gave him the dosh and we moved on, his thanks ringing in our ears.

So, did Ian do the right thing? Was giving him the money for his 
unfeasibly cheap sandwich a proper way to help him with his problems? 
I’m not sure, but on the other hand we’ve got more money than him so why not have a go at redistributing it? But surely it’s better to buy a Big Issue or give the money to a homeless charity rather than giving cash to people who ask you for it because, let’s face it, they may not spend it on a sandwich or a 
cup of tea?

I think that maybe the thing to do is see everybody as human beings, which is easier said than done when they’re disrupting your train journey because they’ve had too much to drink and they want to pick a fight with a door. That person huddled in the rain begging with a paper cup, that person walking briskly through a shopping centre with a slavering dog on a string, that person who sucks greedily from a can of lager on the morning bus: there but for luck or circumstance go all of us.

Wait a minute: I almost wrote “We’re all in this together!” Quick, get me the train fare to Perth!