(Brian Boat’s periodic look at the life of… well… a graduate loser.)

Part 4

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SCENE: Deep within the belly of the beast, late, late at night, five leading lights of 21^st century thought turn their not inconsiderable minds away from sums and towards ethical debate. Like Trotsky and Lenin over a samovar, Marx and Engels over their beards,  Socrates and Plato over a glass of hemlock, the combined intellects of Me, Posh Dan, Jerry the Boss, DJ Scandalous and Thai Joe come together in the following symposium: Under what circumstances should one, or should one not, give pound coins to tramps. It is, you will agree, the Big Question, the ne plus ultra of moral quandary, and well worthy of our weighty attentions. So important is it, in fact, that we have abandoned all pretence of being concerned with Microsoft Excel and adjourned to the comfy chairs.

Enough coffee has already been consumed by all present that it must surely begin to count as a narcotic, thus adding a prickly edge to what is already a sensitive subject. Thai Joe reverses his baseball cap as battle lines are drawn, indicating that he means business. Posh Dan strokes his stubble in a manner intended to be philosophically intimidating. DJ Scandalous hitches down the crotch of his baggy jeans and makes a mental note not to concern himself with anything over four syllables (I include him under the rubric Graduate Loser because strictly speaking it is true – he has an HND in music technology – but all the same I should qualify this by adding that were he a knife, Thai Joe a loaf of bread and Posh Dan a slice of ham, there would be long odds against making a sandwich). I cross my legs and loosen the knot in my scarf, ignoring all jibes about my dubious claims to heterosexuality. Jerry the Boss, main perpetrator of said jibes, spreads his legs like a bored hooker into a position he considers manly.

And they’re off, Benji Morton thundering towards the first on his high horse, blazing ahead of the field in a whirlwind of hastily conceived, quite probably flawed, ethical logic…….

The Main Thrust of My Argument (only without all the ums and ers and annoying interruptions from Scandalous, king of the non sequitur, which are uniformly shite and not worthy of inclusion) As Jane Austin once wrote: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single tramp in possession of a quid, must be in want of some smack.’ [1] And she had a point. All tramps are smackheads. Everybody knows this. Give a tramp and quid and, sure as Christmas, he will stick it in his [2] arm. On this point, we are all agreed. Where we differ, however, is in that I do not really have a problem with this. The burden of responsibility for the outcome of the transaction, surely, does not lie with me for giving the tramp my quid, but rather with the tramp in what he decides to do with it. Being a tramp, it must be said, is quite a shitty existence. Nobody (with the possible exception of George Orwell) if you sat them down on Santa’s knee, would actually ask to be a tramp, yet via whichever unfortunate circumstances this is how some people find their cookie to have crumbled. Life, sometimes, can be a bitch. So the reason that I give my quid to the tramp in the first place is because I am aware that his existence is considerably crapper than mine and I would like, in however small a way, to try and mitigate the difference. [3] The sole purpose of my donation is to try, in some non-specific fashion, to improve his lot. But who am I to say, in the context of this quid, how his lot might realistically be improved? It really isn’t my call. The one thing that I know for certain, however, is that he will spend it in the manner that he believes will benefit him most. If the thing that he values highest at this particular moment is a sandwich, he will spend it on a sandwich. If the thing that he values most is a Penguin Classics copy of Jane Austin, he may well be insane, but if he wants to put himself through it as a means to feeling better then that’s his lookout. If, however, the thing that he feels will make his life considerably less shitty is a bag of smack, then this is also how he’ll spend the quid. And who am I to argue? Sure, in the long term it probably isn’t going to do him an awful lot of good. It isn’t going to drag him out of his tramphood and into a fifty grand a year job with a beemer and a laptop. But then the same is true of sandwiches and turgid nineteenth century literature. All three, in fact, are short-term solutions; but then short- termism  is in the very nature of being a tramp. Show me a tramp with a five year plan, and I’ll take it all back and admit to being a pompous twat with a crap argument.

It seems, therefore, that when presented with the tramp’s raised palm and glazed eyes, we have four options:

Option one: Give him a change of clothes, a flat, a razor, an education, a stint in The Priory, the promise of decent employment, the love of a good woman and a year’s supply of tabs.

Option two: Give him a quid that he will spend on smack, but which he will thank you for.

Option three: Give him a pre-bought sandwich which he will not thank you for because he’d rather you gave him the money to spend on smack, because at the end of the day, sandwich or no sandwich, he’s still going to be a tramp, and in light of this he values heroin over cheese and pickle.                   

Option four: Tell him to fuck off (and maybe give him a kick).

My Conclusions:

Option one is clearly the winner, but really only available to millionaire philanthropists. Option two is the best, and kindest, of what is undoubtedly a bad bunch. Option three is narrow-minded and in many ways rather cruel, like the promise of hot sex being delivered in the form of a poorly-executed handjob (so great is the anti-climax,  you’d really rather have had neither). Option four makes you a total nob-head.

So the threes have it, folks. Give a tramp a quid today. He’ll still be a tramp, but at least he’ll be so high that for a while he’ll either forget or won’t give a toss which, if you are cold and homeless, can only be a good thing.

What DJ Scandalous has to say on the matter……

Having gone outside to smoke a fag and consider the ins and outs of the argument, DJ Scandalous and his hair have concluded thus: Tramps, in his opinion, are the scum of the fucking earth. He’s worked for his money, mate, and he’s fucked if he’s going to give his hard earned cash away to some pikey smackhead gypo. If they want money they should get a fucking job like him, and anyway they’re all loaded and secretly drive Porsches because they make at least a thousand pounds a day through begging. The shivering and the blanket are just for show. The sores on their face are carefully applied by the freelance makeup artist in the studio behind the secret entrance to the NCP car park. Don’t give them a quid because they’ll only go and spend it on a new wide-screen tele and dinner at The Ivy.

Some Thoughts From Posh Dan……

After much stubble stroking, Posh Dan pontificates thus: He is, he confesses, an idealist, and for this reason he does not give money to tramps. He accepts that there are going to be tramps, and that they are going to take smack regardless of his quid, but he cannot, in all good consciousness, bring it upon himself to contribute to what he considers a social ‘bad’. By not giving, he argues, he is preventing the perpetuation of heroin addiction, if not in real life then in his own mind. He knows it is idealism, but then also thinks that this is no bad thing. Between an idealist and a cynic, he would rather be the former. And can I knock him for this? Not really. More Wilde than Orwell, but then politics ain’t everybody’s cup of tea. And he looks like a beat poet in his roll neck jumper, so what did you expect?

Jerry the Boss…..

Jerry, it turns out, is a hard man. This is perhaps in part due to his mid-life crisis, which I’ve heard can make people bitter. He has just bought a leather jacket, and is perhaps not feeling at his most altruistic, caught as he is in the vortex of his own marital strife. Bad luck! he says. It’s unfortunate, for the tramp, but life is tough and it’s not his lookout what some other poor fucker has been through – he has his own problems (it’s true, he does – that jacket is total shite, a single-breasted failsafe contraceptive). His quid, he says, is not going to make any real difference to the state of poverty in the world, so he might as well keep hold of it. The misfortune of others is a shame, he thinks, and he wouldn’t wish it upon anybody; but at the end of the day he isn’t going to lose sleep over it (he doesn’t sleep anyway, he just paces all night and frets and curses those with wives and hair and good jackets).

And Finally, The Gospel According to Thai Joe……

With all this heated debate playing out around him, Thai Joe stays uncharacteristically quiet.  A genuine force for peace, he has remained Zen-like throughout. Were he a rich man, he says, he would like to think that he would go for Option One, the millionaire philanthropist. He would give all his money to the poor and starving (very nice boy that he is, only a tiny percentage would be spend in massage parlours). His more immediate solution, until vast riches strike and while he remains a GL, is The Power of Love. Jennifer Rush, apparently, if played loud enough…..(sorry, Joe, couldn’t resist the gag mate, and there you were trying to be all serious). Joe’s solution, however, is unique, and although the precise details remain a little woolly due to his bizarre and idiosyncratic twist on the English tongue, the basic gist of it is, I think, that instead of a quid, one should give a tramp a hug. In the view of Joe, it is the lack of hugs (and how metaphorical he is being here I leave for you to decide) in the world that are the cause of all the sadness and all the trampiness in the first place. More hugs, less smack, less misery, less tramps.

What the tramps of B____ would have to say about Joe’s solution I’m not entirely sure. They may well look upon it as a good opportunity to lift his wallet, but maybe that’s just me being cynical again. Maybe, at the end of it all, Joe, in all his Messianic wisdom, has the perfect solution. Maybe he is right.

Answers on a postcard.