We don’t talk about homelessness because we’re too afraid of what it might mean for us My journey to work begins and ends with homeless people. At Finsbury Park, I see rough sleepers, mostly the same […]

My journey to work begins and ends with homeless people. At Finsbury Park, I see rough sleepers, mostly the same faces, but their numbers growing all the time, sheltering from the worst of the weather in layer upon layer of clothing. And at Westminster, where I work, there are, again, people sleeping in the subway tunnels, where although it is frequently cold, the worst of the weather can mostly be avoided.

This morning, in one of the alcoves, instead of a person, there were flowers: because on Tuesday night, one of the regular rough sleepers died. That, depressingly, isn’t all that unusual: the average age of death for someone sleeping rough is 47 for a man and 44 for a woman, compared to 74 for a man and 80 for a woman.

If you speak to anyone living on the street, you know that death – from violence, from an overdose, or simply from bad weather – is always terrifyingly close. Most people don’t talk to those they pass by, unless “Sorry, mate, I don’t have anything on me”, and I can understand why: homeless people are frightening.

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The people around us

I don’t mean that in the sense that they are likely to turn violent or anything like that. Talking to – or even thinking about – the people you see sleeping rough is terrifying because the longer you do it, the easier it is to imagine yourself falling into a similar fate.

At university, I learnt that the man who regularly sat outside the history library had first lost his aged mother to a long illness which forced him to remortgage his house, then his wife had died, he began drinking, lost his job and shortly after his home.

Each of his misfortunes, any one of which alone wouldn’t have forced him out onto the streets, any of which could happen to any of us at any time, had combined to make him homeless.

We put the people who we pass in the street out of our minds, because that means we don’t have to confront the fact that any of us are a series of bad accidents from disasters

Or another man, who sold the Big Issue near my mother’s then-workplace, whose mental health problems worsened exactly as his landlord sold the property he lived in. He’s comparatively lucky, in that he has managed to keep his car, where he can sleep in relative warmth.

Almost everyone living on the streets has a story that it is terrifyingly easy to imagine happening to you, or to someone you love. Yes, there are a few people – teenagers fleeing abusive parents – where you can, if you’re lucky, as I am, comfort yourself that could never have happened to you. But for the most part, to talk to someone sleeping rough is to learn just how perilously we all cling to the skin of the world.

It could happen to you

The decision not to have children, a bad investment, a crooked landlord, an abusive partner: these are things that happen to all of us. We might weather all of them, just about. But once you talk to people living on the streets, you can no longer pretend, unless you are incredibly wealthy, that homelessness could never happen to you.

Talking to people sleeping rough also scares us because it makes us feel powerless.

You can give food, money or conversation, the last of which is a gift that people sleeping rough are very rarely, if ever, given. But unless you are very, very lucky indeed you can’t, on your own, do anything to change the trajectory of every person you see or meet on the streets.

So we do what we always do about things we worry about, but can’t change: we stop thinking about it. (I adopt a similar position towards my pension, my alarming grey hairs and Brexit.)

Talking to the people you see sleeping rough is terrifying because the longer you do it, the easier it is to imagine yourself falling into a similar fate

We put the people who we pass in the street or on our way to the cinema out of our minds, because that means we don’t have to confront the fact that in the 21st century, in the world’s sixth biggest economy, any of us are a series of bad accidents from disasters.

And that’s why I never took the time to get to know the man who slept outside the building where I work, why I put off writing about the scandal that is the United Kingdom’s rising homelessness problem.

I was one of the thousands of tiny acts of neglect, from his fellow citizens, to the local council, to the national government, that helped usher him to an early grave. All I, or any of us, can do is work to do better in future.

Stephen Bush is special correspondent at the New Statesman

@stephenkb