Sunday, 17th May, 2026
A warm and bright morning to drive up to sunny Surrey for a Birthday Party. It is a birthday party that has led to me doing some quite unusual things over the past couple of days. Anybody who knows me will know that I do not do clothes shopping; I do not go into clothes shops.
So, it was strange to find myself here. It was a in a search for a teeshirt for a 90 year old. A teeshirt was bought but it wouldn’t have been my choice. My view was that, if you can’t wear a jokey teeshirt when you’re 90, when can you? I lost that argument until ….
…. at 5.00 am yesterday when I was woken to be told we need a printed teeshirt for the birthday. Amazon couldn’t do same day delivery but Google rarely lets me down. I found a local ‘business’ that said it would do printing-while-you-wait. We drove over there to what turned out to be a semi-detached house. The owner arrived on a motorbike as we parked up and he met us and took us in to what I assumed was a workshop. It was cluttered with little ornaments, bottles of spirits grubby furniture. It was filthy, very ‘unloved’ and ill maintained. A woman shuffled in from a kitchen and I suddenly realised that was their Lounge.
I had one of those double-take moments. How could you live like that? Would you really not clean and tidy it? How could you be comfortable in that chaotic situation? It made me quite emotional and trembly. It took me back over 50 years when I was looking for somewhere to rent in Oldham as a young teacher. The quality of accomodation was so desperate that it reduced me to a blubbering wreck. I was asking the question: How can people live in these circumstances?
The house was across the road from a Secondary School which I learnt the owner had attended. Thinking about it later, he must have been a Special Needs boy who, in his terms, had made a success of his lfe by running a business from home. He had got together enough cash to buy the equipment for Stencil Cutting and Heat Transfer Printing. He said it made him enough to live on. Obviously, it didn’t provide much more than that but he seemed happy with it. We paid him £10.00 for a 15 minute job. Certainly, it is salutory to be reminded of the poverty that some people are condened to cope with and just accept as the way life is.
As I knew it would, the image and sensations haunted me throughout the night and it was the first thing I woke up thinking about.