Penny Woolcock's On The Streets: Some Thoughts.

Watching this on BBC Four right now. Stark, brilliant, horrifying but humane and heart breakingly honest. Others have already lauded it in more detail, so let me simply recommend this film.

Now some thoughts, through the medium of bulletpoints:

• Divide and conquer works - English homeless people are conning themselves if they think their 'countrymen' despise them any less than the East Europeans they think they're better than.
• Also, well done on getting off the streets later on. But remember you've got advantages a lot of fellow homeless don't have, and sometimes the dice never roll your way.
• We really need to do something about people after they've left the army. Sod your poppies - actually start looking after these poor sods, who were silly or desperate enough to be dutiful servants of a nasty, selfish, hypocritical state.
• Brian Haw, you're a cunt. How dare you treat that wonderful man like that? Your life is a waste - placards, and platitudes and bullshit and hate. You will change nothing. An unarmed prophet. A worthless, nasty little cunt. Actually helping Iraqis isn't half as fun as the purity of opposition, though, is it? As said, you're a cunt.
• You get the horrible feeling that a sizeable swathe of the population would do away with the homeless if they could get away with it. Another sizeable swathe would look the other way.
• Brian Haw, you're still a cunt.
• Dogs are a higher form of life than most humans.

POSTSCRIPT: On Saturday, I bought the last Big Issue off a seller on Charing Cross Road. He was overjoyed, and so grateful. I felt a bit embarrassed but wished him well. Then I went off and spent a small fortune on a play and dinner, like tens of thousands of other people in London, night after night, and without end.