Sunday night, a gig at the excellent Trinity Centre, but first a pre show pint or two at The Phoenix, the Tinder and Grindr friendly boozer just across the road from the retail behemoth, Cabot Circus. But, on an exceptionally mild autumnal evening, the pub is closed and we have to come up with an alternative venue – and quick. We walk down the lane next to the pub, which is populated by homeless people, some of whom are just sitting around by boxes and sleeping bags and many more who are queuing at a soup kitchen. Shocked, I feel tears welling up and I take a deep breath. Here in the darkness, a few steps away from a playground of the affluent middle classes, is another world.
I do not know quite why I am so shocked. I feel I know about Bristol’s underclass and the miserable lives they lead. I see them every week at our food bank, I saw them for years in my time at work. But in a way, I have been insulated in a world to which I can escape when my day’s work is done. I switch off from one world and step back easily into my own and never the twain shall meet. Except last night.
We walk through dimly lit Champion Square and then left through barely-lit-at-all St Mathias Park, eventually arriving on Old Market Street. If St Matthias Park did not feel entirely safe, even at 8.00 pm, then Old Market Street felt completely unsafe.
It feels like Old Market Street is home to everyone the world forgot about and left behind. Here are the drug-addled, limbless and toothless people who in all likelihood had something once upon a time but now had nothing. We are spoken to regularly by people begging for money. Feeling slightly guilty, we avoid eye contact and move on, calling in on the Old Market Tavern, another gay friendly pub (there’s a theme building here) for a pint. Hardly anyone is there, except for a transexual (or transvestite) bar tender and a gay couple, along with a ‘straight’ couple enjoying a bottle of red wine. The pub is a little tired, but it’s clean and tidy enough and far safer than the streets outside. Our pints’ finished, we leave and head to the Trinity.
There are people huddling in the doorways of the shuttered shops. Others wait outside the brightly lit ‘convenience’ stores, a woman hurtles by at speed in an electric wheelchair, an elderly black man cycles by at glacial speed. I mention to my partner that I don’t feel completely safe and that I would be extremely concerned if she was to walk along here at night, alone. She makes it clear that there is no chance of that happening.
The main feeling, though, is more sadness than fear, the feeling that the chasm between the haves and have nots appears wider than ever. Here is the real world where people cannot afford to buy or even rent a place to live, a world in which people spend what money they have on drugs and alcohol – addiction is rife on the backstreets of our city – and people look malnourished and sick. I make contact with one woman, blink and look away as discreetly and quickly as possible. I note her eyes look dead. I wonder how long it will be until she is?
We arrive at the Trinity for our gig, the Canadian band Crash Test Dummies. Immediately, we are in a different world, which is a few steps away from other people’s reality. I pay more than £13 for a couple of pints, a few quid of which is redeemed later by returning the hired plastic glasses, which should really be called plastics. The Merchandise stand is doing good business, even with T shirts selling for £35 and vinyl records for £40. There is money here, quite a contrast to the broken Bristol we walked past before arriving. For an hour or so, I become absorbed by this band I knew next to nothing about, realising that I have missed out on something rather special. The homeless people queuing at the soup kitchen become yesterday’s news.
Post show, we get an Uber home. I don’t like paying for taxis whether conventional or Ubers at the best of times, especially with my elderly person’s bus pass hiding in my pocket, but it’s nearly 10.30 pm. The people on the streets won’t have gone home because they don’t have a home to go to. I do and I want to get there nice and quickly. Watching someone else’s poverty is not fun at the best of times. A feeling of guilt washes over me.
It doesn’t need to be like this. The reasons for broken Britain are many and varied and the fixes are not easy nor cheap. Sorry – actually, I’m not sorry – to bring up politics but homelessness, food poverty, the near collapse in mental health services and just about every aspect of the public sector has been diminished after 14 years of Conservative misrule. There were a handful of food banks in 2010, when David Cameron’s right wing Tory government in which some Lib Dems took jobs, and now there are more than 2500. When we, as a society, make political choices there are consequences.
It’s another day now and I’ve been thinking about what a great gig we saw and how upsetting some of the streets of Bristol can be. My feeling of not being entirely safe was probably irrational given that so many of the lost souls would struggle to walk, never mind carry out an aggressive act.
I love the Trinity Centre. It’s a wonderful venue and community asset. The area surrounding it is frighteningly decrepit. When you read about it, you can always turn the page but when you walk those streets you can feel it and, if you’re anything like me, you are ever-so-slightly haunted by it. We are still so wealthy in our country, yet the newspapers have far more sympathy with tax dodging multimillionaires (and billionaires) hoarding land in order to avoid paying tax than they have with people whose lives are little more than a kind of existence.
Who knows how things could have turned out in our own lives, had we made bad decisions or just been very unlucky? Either way, as they say, something must be done. And that something is spending public money on finding homes, treatment, jobs and, yes, benefits in order to help put people’s lives back together. Many people are, I fear, too far gone down the road of addiction and abuse to be completely cured, but they still deserve our love and care and their own dignity. Surely the lives of our fellow human beings matters, doesn’t it? There must be a better way?
