Hiya!

You have to hand it to them. I mean, I couldn’t stick it for even an hour, sitting out there on the damp pavement outside LIDL or Tesco’s or next to the cash machines. I betcha they get dog’s abuse but not from me; they have my admiration.

I wonder if they hate us, yet they have to keep that cheery smile going, that ‘hiya’ which is possibly the only utterance they own in our language. ‘Hiya’ they go with a little supplication of a hand gesture inviting coinage or, perchance, notes.

God knows what they’re thinking. Probably they only have to achieve a level of income before they can go home and divi the spoils and we’re all walking by not even acknowledging their presence.

Makes perfect sense to me in this corrupt world of graft and avoidance. If you can make a living just by sitting on your arse and saying ‘hiya’ then fair play. While other folk are scurrying about delivering Amazon parcels to the wrong address or are zero-hour-contracted in some restaurant kitchen, these folk are prepared to sit in the cold for 8 or 10 hours while every one in a hundred flings them a pound.

I think maybe they are modern-day ascetics: those biblical folk who could sit in a cave and meditate for days on just a sip of fig juice and a morsel of unleavened bread. They’re probably tuned into some higher power or philosophy while we’re all tuned into our ruinous consumer culture, emerging from hypermarkets with trolleys full of plastic and baked beans.

Funny how we’re all trained to look down on the poor – in this case, literally - "bloody disgusting, coming over here and begging" – while the likes of Russian oligarchs and Saudi warlords are feted and fawned over and given every tax-break legal and otherwise. ‘Benefit scrounger’ is never on the same page as ‘hedge fund manager’ and ‘tax cheats’.

It’s easier, I guess, to disparage the powerless.