I read this recently in a newspaper:

Rough sleepers on London’s streets have more than doubled in five years because of a lack of support for people arriving from EU countries; cuts to benefits; a chronic housing shortage; and the “longstanding legal injustice” where many homeless people are not considered a priority for help.

How is this happening in the 21st Century which, in the 1980s, held the promise of a bright, shiny future full of exciting innovations?

While I didn’t really expect we’d be hovering 20 feet above the traffic wearing jet-packs, it seemed possible we might be pedalling Sinclair C5s (£399 in 1985*) to our hi-tech offices to work on state-of-the-art Amstrad computers.

The reality is much grimmer.

Every Welsh town and city has a homeless problem. In London, rough sleepers bed down in shop doorways along The Strand – just feet away from West End theatres, a few hundred yards from Downing Street and less than a mile from Buckingham Palace.

Unseen numbers huddle next to warm air vents at the rear of hotels and restaurants. Many of them sleep during the day when there’s less chance they’ll be attacked.

What a way to live.

Most of them are youngsters whose home lives were so appalling they had no alternative but to run away, while others were drawn to the bright lights of London. They all discovered the grubby reality hiding in the shadows beyond the neon glare of Piccadilly Circus.

There have always been people living on the streets.

Today, they’re called ‘homeless’, but in previous decades they were called tramps and portrayed in newspaper cartoons and TV comedy shows as middle-aged men who wore battered trilby hats and flea-bitten old overcoats. They slept on park benches under newspapers and had crafty ways of finding their next meal.

In reality, many ‘gentlemen of the road’ once had jobs, families and comfortable homes and had fallen on hard times due to marital breakdown, bankruptcy, drink or mental issues.

They wandered around towns and cities, looking in litter bins for fag ends and food scraps.

It only takes a shove or two in the wrong direction from Lady Luck and any of us could fall on hard times.

You might do well to think about that next time you pass a genuine homeless person on the street.

*Sinclair C5s now sell for around £5000. As I rarely use mine these days I’ll consider any reasonable offer….