Zipping up my boots

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of pounding the pavements with an outreach team working with street-homeless people. We met up for a bite to eat at seven and for the next five hours odd we walked around the west end talking to people who are sleeping rough.

The evening was fascinating, surprising, harrowing, inspiring, frightening, shocking and revealing. It was also bloody cold. At the end of it, the anonymous and marginalised people we walk past every day had become three-dimensional. And my perception of the lives that they lead had moved from hazy preconception to a chilling reality.

Anyway, I'm not telling you this because I want you all to think that I'm a nice bloke. This is my job, after all, and the whole thing was arranged by Centrepoint as a way to find stories that would make their donors dig deep this Christmas.

I'm telling you because the next day I sat down and wrote an appeal that just seemed to pour out onto the page. And at the risk of sounding immodest, I'm sure it's going to do very, very well.

It was a valuable reminder of the importance of leaving the office, meeting the 'real people' (i.e. the ones who do the work) and getting involved with the beneficiaries. It's all too easy to moan that we can't get the stories we need from 'them in operations'. But the stories are out there if you just get up and look. And they're the things that make what we do work.

As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "The truth is powerful stuff. People don't expect it."

James