Poverty

 Subject: Poverty

How do we define poverty. As a personal experience, as something we have read about, was it the deep lines written on the face of an old African or Indian who we observed on our travels, lines left behind by years of just existing after decades  of toil and deprivation.

The poverty in Mumbai is of a different scale and texture to my childhood in Bradford but you don’t have to look far to imagine the impoverishment of Glasgow described in harrowing detail in the book Angela’s Ashes. The touch and go existence of a Brazilian Favela or a shack in one of the South Africa’s shanti towns, each made much more tricky by the violence perpetrated just to survive.

For some poverty is a binding force, a sort of badge of belonging to a society who know each other and understand, rather than judge. Poverty not only defines you it forms you through childhood on a diet of deprivation which stunts people in all kinds of ways. Compare the troops in the Second World War. The British,  short in stature, poor teeth, prone to fatigue and the Americans, fighting along side, inches taller and physically much stronger, no wonder the girls chose the Yank over the Pom.

Shortened longevity could be measured in years when raised in Blackpool and not in Boston and yet fancifully the pride of a Lancastrian, with their historical past seemed to compensate for all the woes of birthplace and even provided a gallows humour which in part ruled out the obvious disadvantages. The commonality factor, the fact that we were all in the same boat lent a camaraderie to our lives, mutual trust and friendship and an abiding sense of fellowship was evident in even the poorest parts of the country. Sadly today the evils of consumerism have demolished much of what we had and in its place the evil of avarice, the desire for wealth or gain and the inability to measure others by the yardstick of humanitarian deeds of which simple friendship is highly valued.

My most treasured memories were meeting cycling friends at the Lister Park Gates at 8.00am on a Sunday morning for a day out zooming around the then empty lanes of the Dales. Poor weather was set aside as something you couldn’t control and it makes me smile at today’s insistence of checking the weather before setting out, even when enclosed in the sanitised confines of a car. It would have to be very bleak not to turn up and set off towards Skipton the gateway to the Dales. Up and down, the road swept us along winding between the dry stone walls which  stretched this way and that, across the fields as far as the eye could see, the 20 of us chattering like starlings, we were in every way happy. The camping holidays with chums in the Lake District were primitive affairs, the cheap canvas tent which leaked like a sieve when it rained, as it often did, was no obstacle to our get up and go mentality. The rye comments of a disturbed night were the grist of our breakfast conversation as we looked around to see where our pitch the night before had brought us. No camp site, no ablution block, no shop only a field just off the road where, tired out we put up the tent and slept the sleep of angles. There was no rules and regulations other than to leave the site as tidy as you found it. No money changed hands for the privilege of laying down with the sheep, we were encouraged by a mug of tea and a bacon and egg breakfast, the content of the fry up having to be scraped off the bottom of aluminium pan which served as a pan and plate. Simple does as simple is and we were blissfully simple in those days.

It’s a habit which has stayed with me all these years, putting up with simplicity rather than spending money on the latest gadget. The kitchen shelves are adorned with things bought by ‘others’ which never get used, partly because of ignorance but mostly through the habit of sticking to well tried custom. I’m the caveman who sees only the shadow on the wall.

Simplicity has allowed me to stay with the tried and trusted method which then allows connectivity to one’s past and frees one from the fear of the future. Simplicity gives one perspective, a sense of surety in a world which craves for the untested new without first evaluating need.  In our bewildering computer driven existence which dissolves most of us the responsibility of knowing and for which we turn to the prognosticators that new breed “ the enabler” the focus group which provides you with the ability to think and reason in a way which “group think” prospers and independence withers on the vine.

The advantage of a watertight tent is obvious but it fosters the assumption that security is something you can carry around with you because someone else has catered for your needs. It removes the responsibility to be able to cope with the unexpected and substantiates the ‘blame culture’ which is pulling society apart. The cry is for compensation for everything is but an example of not doing one’s own homework and thinking through the eventualities of failure.