The White Collar Tramp

In another life, he interviewed Margaret Thatcher and took holidays in Goa. Now, he sleeps on the street. Ed Mitchell, a former television journalist, has been homeless for the past year, after losing his £100,000 job at CNBC.

It's a sad tale of drink, debt and despair, but according to Mitchell, he's far from being the only "white collar tramp", and the worst may be yet to come:

"There is a tsunami of bad debt about to hit this economy," he said."Pandora's box has been opened."

In the meantime, Mitchell survives on the kindness of strangers and a philosophical outlook on his new life.

"Now I look at each day and think 'what is going to happen today?'," he said. "It is an existence that makes you appreciate small luxuries and kindnesses." On Thursday night he returned to his bench to find a wrapped Christmas present containing a bar of Dairy Milk, hat, gloves, a razor and deodorant."

Reading Lessing

Doris Lessing the 2007 Literature Nobel Laureate has lamented the death of reading among the young. In her acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy, she singled out the internet for special criticism:

“...it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance computers...We never thought to ask how will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging."

She also noted how indifference towards writers in the developed world, contrasted with her native Zimbabwe, where she was met by hungry children clamouring for books. Referring to a pregnant mother of two “somewhere in southern Africa” who has to travel to procure scant water for her family and yet craves a copy of “Anna Karenina”, Ms. Lessing concluded:

“I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.”

I agree with her, up to a point, about the internet. I certainly wouldn't want to see books abandoned for the sake of a blog or an online story. But reading is reading, and if someone of any age finds it more comfortable and enriching to read on-screen rather than turning the pages of a book, who am I to deny them that pleasure?