I feel shameful walking past rough sleepers – how must the politicians responsible feel?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/16/homelessness-london-rough-sleeping

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The first job I had in the 1990s after university was in a finely curved office block on the Strand, which was awfully pretty on the outside and pretty awful inside for much of the time. That Dickensian tension between the opulence of the building and the suffocating air of meanness within was all around, too, in the grey London of John Major’s era.

Worst were the poor huddled people sleeping in the doorways. We used to go out after work, to wood-panelled gems like the Cheshire Cheese or the Coal Hole, the pubbiest of pubs, then walk past the rough sleepers hunched down for nights too grim to imagine.

I moved on and back up north, and in the years since have only occasionally been in that area again at night.

Related: Homelessness is much worse than it appears and politicians must act | Jon Sparkes

By the mid-2000s, the Labour government’s various efforts appeared to have made a great difference; the Strand had become a sweep of agreeable coffee bars, and few people in blankets were stretched across the doorways.

Then I found myself there the other night, deciding to walk from St Paul’s along Fleet Street, the Strand, Aldwych, and into Covent Garden, like the tourist I still felt I was when I first arrived in London. It is truly shocking, nearly five years into David Cameron’s coalition government, that the rough sleepers are back in such numbers; for there they were, crowds of people, lying in doorways. Suddenly it is just like we are back in 1990 again.

The official figures bear this out; the number of rough sleepers was the lowest ever in 2005, although the count’s reliability was questioned and changed in 2010. Since then, rough sleeping has increased 37%, with a 60% increase in London recorded between 2011 and 2013. The charity Crisis identifies as prime causes the government’s benefit sanctions and cuts, particularly to housing costs, which it warned when they started in 2011 would be a “catastrophe”.

It has always felt shameful to walk past these freezing people, unable to help, on the way to a warm bed. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in the government, a few hundreds yards away in Whitehall, when you are actually responsible.

Avoiding an Ice Age

There was a gleam of honesty from David Beckham at the Baftas when he admitted he hadn’t seen many of the movies up for awards because he had mostly been watching films with his kids.

Now my daughters are both teenagers we have emerged quite suddenly from those years of computer-animated dreck, with lame jokes thoughtfully included for the grown-ups. I reached saturation point with Barnyard, a dire farm-based effort which featured a bull with udders, when I made my eldest cry by complaining to the Odeon’s blameless manager.

After that, when my family went to the cinema I was generally sent to “go for a coffee”, which tasted all the better for knowing I was skiving Charlotte’s Web or an Ice Age.

Now, we’re through it. We have actually seen some of the Bafta films: about Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing, and the brilliant Pride. Life was lovely when the girls were little, but this is a strange, nice phase, when they are still living at home but we are getting our time back.

A cinematic treat

We are seeing these films at the plush new Curzon cinema which has arrived in Ripon, north Yorkshire, like some Technicolor miracle. Ripon has its cathedral, so is officially a city, but lost its train line to the Beeching axe in 1968 and grapples with the feel of being a place apart, frayed round the edges.

It did not even have a cinema for fully 31 years, then the Curzon, of all luxuries, opened last year. When you ring to book a ticket, it runs through the Curzon branches: Mayfair, Renoir, Chelsea … Ripon. We can’t quite believe it.