I know a lot of people.
[Hey, I’m not boasting. I never said I was `friends’ with a lot of people. Or even that a lot of people like me. Who knows what they think of me? That’s between them and public posts on social media.]
As I was saying, I’ve lived a fairly long time - I know a lot of people.
Some of them are saints, all of them are sinners, some are grafters, some are grifters.
None of them would feel good about having to depend on someone else to feed their children day in and day out, week after week, year after year.
Yes, some people do like to get something for nothing. Not everyone is filled with suspicion and misanthropy, there are those who believe we live in a world of bounty of which they are entitled to some share.
But a shiny pound picked up in the street, second bar of Galaxy from a vending machine or `enhanced’ insurance claim is not the same as knowing that you can’t feed your own children day after day, week after week, year after year.
The grinding monotony of that is as far from the rush of unexpected windfall as a chain gang is from a funfair.
When I see people online and in other columns sneer at parents relying on free school meals or welfare payments as, `You breed, we feed’, I wonder who they are talking about. Who specifically? Who among the people that they know has a life which has been enriched by being dependent on the goodwill and whims of strangers?
I think about the people I know and even the fliest of the fly would feel diminished not exultant at such an existence.
That’s the point, isn’t it? It’s never anyone they actually know. It’s the other, the hordes at the gate, take, take, taking from their plate. Supposedly.
The decision of councils across England to contract out their free school meal catering to replace the food vouchers distributed during the last lockdown is the latest example of this mentality.
One mother told how the parcel supposed to last her 12-year-old daughter all week, contained two potatoes, one onion, two peppers, a satsuma, single tomato and carrot, two eggs wrapped in cling film, a small tub of soup powder, another of tuna mayo and a small bag of grated cheese.
Another found no fresh food except two potatoes, with frozen bagels nine months out of date; while three high school children were sent a small loaf of bread, apple juice, three apples, a bag with a handful of pasta each, three small bags of raisins, cheese slices, a tub of butter and three tins of beans.
We think of faceless companies, but companies are made up of sentient human beings just like us - whether they are the ones `low-balling’ a quote to win a contract or packing up those paltry parcels to send to children whose already precarious lives have been further dislocated by the closure of their schools during a deadly pandemic.
Did their judgment of total strangers crowd out their compassion as they measured out a few spoonfuls of dried soup mix and hacked a short stub of carrot?
Or shall we be kind and think maybe they were just stretching what they had been given as far as they could?
Once again it was Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford forcing the accountability, holding meetings with the company involved and updating people on his Twitter account before he saying apologetically: “I have a game today so have to log off.”
As those words suggest, making sure children don’t starve in the sixth largest economy in the world is not his job.
That buck stops somewhere else.
