We should have been in Milton Keynes today had we been able to walk towards Rome. We could be there this day next year assuming travel restrictions can be lifted within the coming year. Remembering that pandemic means everywhere, I wonder if it’s just a maybe that I’ll walk by Milton Keynes and visit the National Museum of Computing in nearby Bletchley in 2021. Or will it be 2022?
I opened last year’s diary earlier and found a note about homelessness from this day last year. Consequently, we’re at home wondering what happened to the homeless? I recall that Shelter estimated there were over 300,000 homeless people in the UK in 2018. A very recent BBC radio interview covered a few of the challenges faced by those housing the homeless in the pandemic. There are many reasons that people end up homeless, among them addictions, mental illness and sociopathy. All of these surface as challenges to the authorities trying to house and protect people who have become accustomed to life on our streets. I think there has been a mis-step in helping the homeless in this crisis, creating an unintended consequence. The facilitating bureaucracy in the UK seemed to adapt an off-the-shelf approach from criminal justice, an isolation as punishment rather than rehabilitation. The homeless protection plan seems focussed on reducing the spread of disease by the homeless rather than directly looking after the needs of the homeless themselves. The addicted continue to shoot-up. The sociopaths ignore social distancing. The depressed can and do defenestrate. This does not augur well for what happens after the pandemic to those homeless now rehoused. It’ll rate as an opportunity missed at a time when there is effectively unlimited money available to address the underlying issues rather than simply concentrating them into hotels and the like. This is a world wide problem.
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