Tower block of commons

I saw this show on Monday 1/2/10. A handful of MPs went to live for a while with the inhabitants of various grotty council flats. It was pretty satisfying to see these wealthy politicians forced to come face-to-face with what I'd call "reality". The methadone addict and the buggered toilet. The gyro. The social, etc. Naturally it made me think of Edinburgh.

I'd been in a Prince's Trust volunteers programme, as part of a group of employed and fairly long-term unemployed people doing various bullshit across Edinburgh. I met Shaun there, not "Sean with an accent", but plain Shaun...  Shaun what? Murphy? I can't remember, this was 1997/8. I went drinking with him one evening at a pub on Cockburn street (when I first started work at High Riggs Job Centre as an intermediary arranging interviews for people of varying aptness with employers looking to fill vacancies), I used to mispronounce that. Like it was a symptom of excessive genital dryness or eating too much English mustard. I was lucky that pretty early on, one client, rough but kind hearted, explained that it was pronounced like James Coburn's surname.

I was impressed to be drinking with a chronic alcoholic. You'd think he was just the same as you. I saw nothing to suggest a gluttony on his part for booze. He bought me a round, I bought him one, maybe we did three or four altogether. He selected bagpipe music on the pub jukebox, and told me how much he loved bagpipes... That admission was, I suppose, the biggest indicator of the seriousness of his drink problem. In time, I left him alone to drink. He must have had hardly any money, but there were no hard feelings. It had just got weird. No real conversation or connection. Just the pints going down.

Before that session, he'd told me how he lived. His accommodation was some kind of flat in a shared house or terrace or something. He wasn't paying for it or renting it and I don't think it was his official address, and that makes me think he wasn't in receipt of housing benefit, but maybe he was, cashing it and bullshitting about what it was really being spent on. He told me he used to collect his gyro from somewhere... the house he was squatting in? a friend's place? the job centre? was it Wester Hailes?... on a Tuesday. I guess that'd be about £48 a fortnight in those days. He'd drink the lot in one day and wait for the next gyro. How did he live? St. Catherine's convent had a charity kitchen for the homeless. He'd eat canned hotpot that looked and tasted like dogfood (he said) from the EC hotpot mountain . He'd squat in his house. He'd wait for the next gyro and drink that too.

That's a part of the reality that these politicians were finally being forced to see. One of the MPs on the show had previously been "done for all them rent boys" as one passsing youth in a group of four told him. "You've got AIDS" he was told. The MP later went outside onto the barren fields around his council flat, lay flat on his face, desolated, and began to weep. Yeah, I think they're feelin' it.