Dust clouds: two weeks in Kenya

“Write a positive story about us. You guys have such pity for us, but it’s embarrassing. We’ve got so much more about us, and we’re proud. So write a positive story.”

Do you believe in magic?

If not, why?

Think about it: When we’re sick, we can be cured. We fly in metal boxes across Earth. We talk to people wherever we are, whenever we want.

We’re relatively close to setting up human colonies in outer space – and becoming the first known species to outlive its own planet.

If this is possible... what else is possible?

We define ourselves by aiming higher, breaking barriers, reaching for the stars. And we’ve barely begun. You just know, with 100% certainty, that our greatest accomplishments are in front of us, not behind us. Because however slow and pathetic we may seem, and however many setbacks we have, we are progress.

We can, and will, do so much better than this. We’ve proved it throughout history.

This may seem a tenuous link to my time in Kenya. But from there I took home this incredible sense of possibility – along with a scarf for my mum, a banana I’d accidentally packed, and some incense sticks.

I spent a fortnight living with people across Nairobi, and on a camping safari in Masai Mara National Park.

Sure, parts of it were devastating. No amount of Comic Relief can prepare you for seeing children sleeping rough alone, women filling up barrels of dirty drinking water from open pipelines, and men pulling overloaded goods carts through smoky rush-hour traffic.

Then there’s the smell of sewage, the rivers of trash, the tin roofs and walls made of old newspaper. The dust clouds that rise violently over untarmacked roads... and lots of other pretty grim developing world problems.

I thought that was going to be the story I told you. It might have been called something like ‘My Live Aid Moment’.

But that would have been arrogant, insulting, and worst of all, it wouldn’t have been true.

Instead, what was and is true is the sense of hope I found there, which I’d never felt before.

Lingua Franca

Here’s a bit about that.

Titus, who lives in Nairobi’s troubled Eastlands area, shared a one-bedroom house with no running water, toilet or kitchen, with two other people.

He told me: “Negative thoughts attract negative events. Positive thoughts attract positive events. So when I really, really want something to happen, I think about how I will feel, and what I will tell my friends and family, when it does happen. I completely visualise it. Then sometimes, the universe makes it happen for me.”

I asked him what kind of positive events he’d wished for.

He said: “I wished for my mother to get better in hospital. I wished for my younger brother to pass his school exams. And I wished for Liverpool to win the Premier League.”

And did these things happen?

“All apart from Liverpool...”

By some twist of fate, later that day I ended up going back to someone’s mansion (“Oh, go on then...”) after a night out in leafy Westlands. He had about six bedrooms, a massive kitchen and – get this – a water feature in his living room. It was just obscene.

Like everywhere across the world, there’s a pretty big gap between the have-nots and the have-yachts in Nairobi.

It didn’t seem fair, because it isn’t. It demonstrably isn’t.

But Titus, in his humble home, told me he’d rather be rich in his mind: “because you can’t lose that, but you can lose money.”

With crippling guilt I thought about him as our Westlands host poured us his favourite French chardonnay.

Ying and Yang

The worst place I went was Nairobi’s Kibera area – the largest urban slum in the whole of Africa. It’s basically one huge market, where people earn their living haggling over baby clothes and mangoes, and then go home to pray. The ground is rocky, and it smells like burning trash.

I spent an afternoon there.

The guy who showed me around was called Peter. He was proud of Kibera. He’d lived there five years.

“This is the nice area,” he said, gesturing at the street ahead of us.

Without going into too much detail, it wasn’t. But the fact he thought it was made me both happy and sad. Ying and Yang.

Peter used to make a living in Kibera selling clothes, before starting a new job as a guard somewhere else in Nairobi.

“You know, I’d really like to improve my life,” he said. “But I’m happy everyone here knows me and I know them. They like me and I like them. It’s good!”

He later told me he wanted to get back to what he does best: selling, and talking to customers.

He wants to build his own business and, shilling by shilling, I really think he’ll make it happen. Because he has the Kenyan spirit.

Wherever I was in Nairobi, children tended to gawp at me, a rare sight of a white man. They’d come up to greet me, ask me questions, or try to hold my hand – their tiny palms gripping my fingers.

It was no different in Kibera. Peter and I stopped off for a soda on our way out of the area, when a young girl came up to me in the room we were sitting in.

She stared for a while, then hid behind a barrel and played peek-a-boo. Her name was Carolyn. I remember talking to her about why she should stay in school and work hard.

Then her dad came over.

He backed me up in the rhythms of Swahili, telling his daughter that eventually, she might be able to get a good education that would take her “to the UK, or America”, he said, too old to dream that for himself.

Who knows, maybe Carolyn will become something really big some day. A lawyer, a teacher, an entrepreneur... or just someone who makes Kibera a better place, one soul at a time.

Police corruption, tribal tension

Poverty isn’t the only issue in Nairobi.

The police aren’t paid enough, so many are corrupt. I was looking for somewhere that did currency exchange in Downtown, and got called over by a guy wrapped in a camouflage suit and an AK-47. He called me out for not carrying my passport, which is apparently an offence.

The passport was at my host’s place in Fedha, so the policeman said he was going to take me to the police station.

After a while I thought I’d managed to talk him around. Then he told me to follow him. We walked for about 20 minutes, and with every step I was more confused where I was being led. But what could I do?

We ended up at a casino, where I could exchange currency. He took a pretty hefty cut of my shillings, then left me alone. That actually happened on my first day in Nairobi.

There are 42 ethnic groups (or tribes) in Kenya. There’s sometimes tension and conflict between them – especially in election years, like 2017.

Kenya’s a multi-tribal jigsaw, and its politicians use the gaps in the pieces to divide and rule. It’s an approach they learned from us when we were the British Empire.

Even today we’re not much better, with our governments contributing largely to the fact that Africa has more weapons than any other continent – despite manufacturing none themselves.

The universe

But you know what? I had an awesome time in Kenya too. This was in no small part due to living in Nairobi’s creative community, chilling out with a fashion designer, photographer, the best singer I’ve ever heard, and their many friends.

We partied on their balcony, visited an art gallery, and spent a random night watching The Fantastic Mr Fox, featuring the voice of George Clooney.

And there was even more optimism. More energy. More life.

Sama was a painter who’d recently quit her job doing “corporate art” to make a living doing more creative projects.

She said: “Have you ever been sat on a park bench and had the sudden urge to leave, for no reason? What is that? It’s something beyond our control. I think it’s the universe!”

Later:

“Love is something that’s real. We can’t explain it scientifically, but it’s powerful, and we feel it. Maybe it’s some evidence of a higher force we don’t understand but we know is real. And it feels right to trust it, doesn’t it?”

I still think about what she said, even now I’m back home and in my own bed.

Singing, dancing, celebrating, thrillseeking, hoping, praying, dreaming.

Maybe it was just these extraordinary people I met, but I’d like to think they are a decent sample of what Nairobi’s all about.

Mixed in the dust clouds there’s dignity, spirit and joy.

And then the animals

I stayed a few days in Masai Mara National Park, home to the ‘Big Five’ wild animals: lions, elephants, leopards, buffalo and rhino.

Me and my safari group didn’t see any rhino, but our jaws were open all day seeing everything else: cheetahs chasing wildebeest at full speed, giraffes munching on trees, lions just li-on around.

The celebrities of our zoos and Attenborough TV shows were just going about their business in their own stomping ground – and I was star-struck.

One day we raced across the park watching wild animals in a rickety Jeep type-thing, met and danced with a Masai tribe in a local village, and compared stories of extremes while watching the sun set.

We spent the night in our tents during a storm. It was pitch black, and every raindrop’s strike to the canvas seemed to swell somehow, as the distant thunder rumbled and the grasshoppers chirped.

It was a Wednesday, and the first and only day I’ve thought: Wow, this might just be the best day of my life so far.

It was kind of, I don’t know... magical.

———

Click here to see my Kenya photo gallery

Click here for more Travel

Click here to follow clarkspeak on Twitter

Other people

There’s a woman on a plane.
Her screen tells her she’s flying over South Sudan.
She looks out of her window, over the wing. 
It’s dark outside, but she sees lights down below.
Clusters of people’s homes, probably, and trucks speeding around dirt tracks made by their own tyres.

There’s a girl looking up at the plane.
She sees its wing and tail lights flicker between the moon and stars, as her mother screams through another life-threatening home birth in the hut.
The girl used to think the plane’s lights were the souls of dead people floating towards heaven.
Then her school teacher told her they were things that take other people to places where they could enjoy the things they prayed for.


The woman pulls the shutter over her window and closes her eyes. The girl blows a kiss to the sky.

———

Click here for more Poetry

Click here to follow clarkspeak on Twitter

No more cereal for pudding

Stone stood above it for a while, hypnotised by its mystery – or perhaps by a rather dull lack of coffee. Something must have leaked out of something, and a lake of green matter had nestled in the grooves of the tiles over by the walk-in fridge. He thought that maybe it was soup. Whatever it was was darker than before, and would probably be more difficult to clean. But Stone walked past it. It wasn't his job to deal with it.

Stone knew what his job was, and he wasn’t prepared to give anything more, as he threw his weight onto a trolley, where his equipment was, and pushed. And pushed – the wheels’ resistance echoing around the quiet supermarket stock room.

Two of the wheels turned begrudgingly, while the other two weren’t turning at all, and Stone’s stifled grunts of exertion sounded pathetic, even to him. But now he was hunched over the trolley, he felt he might as well struggle on. If he could just get it through the double doors and out onto the shop floor ahead, it’d be fine.

So he kept pushing, and it kept squeaking. He passed a cling-filmed wooden pallet stacked high with budget kitchen roll, and around it he noticed the pretty girl who worked on the delicatessen. Jennifer. She was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor by the walk-in fridge, where he’d just been stood.

“This green stuff is manky,” she said, climbing to her feet.

She threw a torn cloth towards a bucket, but missed, as steam rose violently from the frothy water inside. Stone liked how a thick strand of her blonde fringe swept across her forehead and tucked around her right ear, which was held down by a straight white hat. He didn’t like how, blotchy, sweating and red-faced, he didn’t look great in any way.

“Oh really, well I don’t know anything about that,” he said, standing over her. “What sort of green was it? Was it soup?”

Jennifer sighed and ran her hands under the tap, then ripped a few hand towels from the plastic dispensary on the wall and dried herself. She looked at Stone.

He looked back at her and recalled how he’d tried to fill his head with thoughts of her in order to dream about her, every night in bed that week. But if he had, he couldn’t remember it. Maybe this was how it began, right here at work. Maybe he’d leaned in and kissed her softly, before unbuttoning her long, thick shirt and… maybe that’s how it went.

Jennifer looked at Stone’s name badge and said: “Is that your real name?”

Stone inspected the plastic plate that was pinned to his lime green shirt.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” he said, his voice breaking as he forced a chuckle.

The conversation was dead, and they both knew it. Although Jennifer smiled at him, the way her eyes narrowed and nostrils flared as she left suggested she was about to laugh. She disappeared through the door and her footsteps fluttered up the stairs. Stone mouthed “I love you” after her, then shut his eyes and felt his heartbeat return to its normal pace. The blood drained from his face.

He knew that if he kept screwing up these fleeting moments they had together, which were once a week at best, then he’d never make any progress with her. If he’d had more time, or was speaking to anyone else – literally anyone else – he was sure he could have come up with a much better response to her question. Already, one had occurred to him.

Squeak-squeak-squeak through the double doors, and then, “woah”, Stone said, blinking a few times as he edged onto the over-lit shop floor.

He’d never got used to this. The humming fridges with their strip lights reflected in mirrors, the beeps and bleeps of distant checkout tills, the gossip of customers getting in each others’ ways, the music – everything felt bad and wrong, as usual. Looking down at his wrist, he saw a milky white line where his watch should have been. Must have taken it off before he had a shower. Left it in the bowl of potpourri on the bathroom windowsill. Probably only another three hours until home time, he reckoned.

Rubbing his eyes, Stone staggered over to the meat fridge, where he began his job of finding products that were close to their expiry date, reducing them by a third of the price, and putting them back on the shelf.
And so he lifted the packets of food no higher than necessary as he checked the dates of sausages, gammon, pate – his trolley squeaking every step of the way. Yoghurt, cheese, butter – creeping along the wall of fridges, inch by inch. Apples, mushrooms, salads – playing a whole album in his head to keep him entertained. Chicken, mince, crabsticks. Pies, pizza, quiche. Soup. Squeak squeak squeak.

“Hello!” said a voice next to Stone.

A boy standing behind Stone was holding one of the packets of mince that Stone had stacked on his trolley.

“How much are these going to be?” said the boy, dressed in what appeared to be a school uniform.

“Why, what are you going to with them?” said Stone. “Do you know how to cook?”

The boy shook his head.

“They’re for my dad,” he said.

“Right,” said Stone.

He tried to ignore the boy, but found it difficult to concentrate on anything else with him just standing there with a hopeful, expectant glare.

“How old are you?” said Stone.

“Seven,” said the boy.

“Well I’m knocking a third off the price, so these are going to be about £1.30,” said Stone very slowly and clearly.

The boy frowned and momentarily drummed a beat on the side of the trolley with his index fingers.

Then he said: “OK,” and turned his back.

“Well, whatever. For you I’ll make it half price,” Stone said. “So £1 a packet.”

The boy smiled like it was his birthday or something.

“Take it or leave it,” said Stone.

“I’ll just go and ask my dad!” said the boy.

The boy skidded down the biscuits aisle, and Stone kept his focus there, hoping to catch a glimpse of the boy’s father. Stone had been living in this town all his life, and hadn’t once seen the boy around. He didn’t sound like a local. After a couple of minutes, Stone assumed they must have paid up and left. He got down on his knees to reach the large tubs of margarine at the back of the bottom shelf.

“What about this stuff?” said the boy.

Stone turned around and saw the boy carrying a swaying column of packets of meat. There were about nine or ten altogether, neatly stacked on top of each other.

“Hey, you’d better put those down or you’ll drop them!” said Stone.

“No I won’t, I’ve got hold of them,” said the boy. “I won the egg-and-spoon race last year, I’m good at balancing things,” he said.

Stone smiled and said: “Oh yeah, where was that?”

“Just at school,” he said.

Stone laughed. “You should get a job here,” he said. “People who can carry things as well as you can are pretty useful here.”

The boy laid the packets of meat on the trolley, just as Stone’s boss walked past them both. His boss was despised by all the young people who worked in the store – and the feeling was probably mutual. This time, he didn’t bother Stone. He barely even acknowledged him as he held his head unusually straight and high, with the confidence of a man who’d read a book on how to look confident. His shiny shoes clip-clopped through the double doors, and beyond.

“Actually, maybe not,” Stone said to the boy. “You don’t want to work here. Promise me you’ll never work here, ever?”

The boy laughed.

“It’s not that bad in here,” said the boy. “It’s warm.”

“It is that bad, believe me,” said Stone.

“And you must get free food!” said the boy.

“Promise me…” said Stone.

“OK, I promise!” said the boy.

“Say: I promise…” said Stone.

“I promise…” said the boy.

“That I will never…” said Stone.

“That I will never…” said the boy.

“Work in a supermarket,” said Stone.

“Work in a supermarket,” said the boy.

“Good,” said Stone.

He looked down over the packets of meat the boy had laid out for him, and shook his head.

“See, I can’t reduce these. They’re nowhere near their expiry date,” said Stone.

The boy sighed, and tried to take the packets back. Stone stopped him.

“Don’t worry, I’ll put them back,” he said. “I tell you what, you find me anything that says the 18th of May on it, and I’ll reduce it by more than half, just for you.”

The boy scampered off as soon as Stone’s sentence had registered. Two minutes later he returned, and dropped some more stuff on Stones trolley.

“It’s all the 18th of May, so it all needs reducing,” said the boy.

Stone was amazed. He hadn’t expected the boy to find anything, because he’d been looking in areas that Stone was already supposed to have checked – clearly not too thoroughly.

“Cheers mate,” said Stone. “Wow, you really would make a good worker here.”

He slapped reduction stickers on the packets the boy had brought him.

“But still, never, ever work here – understand?” said Stone.

The boy nodded, and watched as Stone scanned more packets and printed off more reduction stickers.
“There you go, that’s two-thirds off a joint of gammon. A real bargain, that,” he said.

The boy smiled and held the gammon like a trophy, before he dropped it into the basket he held with his small hands.

“Mikey!” said a man behind them.

A man approached them wearing a flannel shirt. He was quite short, and his long hair looked thin under the bright lights, which beamed off his pale scalp.

“What have I told you about hassling people?” he said, winking at Stone.

“Ah he’s no bother,” said Stone. “He’s actually been a real help finding the all the out-of-date stuff I’d missed!”

The man laughed and ruffled his son’s hair. The man carried a basket of his own, but there was very little inside it.

“He said he’d made it cheaper than it usually is,” said the boy, holding up a strawberry milkshake. “Look at this, dad.”

The man again winked at Stone and ruffled the boy’s hair, but Stone could tell he was quite taken aback as he read the price sticker.

“Good work, Mikey,” he said. “Good work.”

The boy buried his head into his father’s midriff, and his father threw his arms around him.

“You old softie,” said the man.

“The more you can find, the more I’ll knock off,” said Stone.

“For the 18th of May?” said the boy.

“Yes the 18th. And the 19th actually, let’s go crazy,” said Stone.

The boy disappeared one of the aisles and came back with some pork chops, couscous, and three punnets of strawberries. And he wasn’t done. He went back to get more. Coleslaw, quiche. Tomatoes. Even his father got involved. A roast chicken, some peppers. After a while they needed to go back and get a trolley to put all the stuff in. And then the printer ran out of ink, so Stone just started writing the prices on in pen. He was reducing things by as much at 95%. It was ridiculous. But he could tell how much it meant to them.

“No more cereal for pudding,” said the man. “For a while, at least.”

“Actually, forget about the dates,” Stone said. “Just bring me anything you want and I'll reduce it.”

The man and the boy left with two large trolleys of food. Stone expected questions later on that shift from his boss, but he didn't care. He wasn’t earning a living here, anyway – just a disposable income.

Upon realising he hadn’t taken a break for a while, Stone felt in his pocket for cigarettes, and put one between his lips as he walked through the stock room and upstairs. He lit the end just before walking into the smoking room, where Jennifer was sat.

“Hey,” he said.

“You up for your break already?” she said.

She opened the ringpull on her can of Coke and quickly put her mouth around the rim to catch the fizzy brown liquid she hadn’t expected to gush out so much. Stone hadn’t noticed. He stared at the woodchip wallpaper and tried to imagine the man and the boy unloading all those bags of food into whatever car the man drove. He wondered where they were going.

“Hey, I said are you on your break already?” said Jennifer.

Stone stirred. “Sorry. Yeah, I'm done for now,” he said.

“I haven't got much to do, either,” she said.

They both took long draws of their cigarettes and exhaled. Then Stone got up and walked towards the window and looked out over the near-empty car park. The streetlights didn't light up much.

“So anyway, I was thinking,” said Jennifer. “Do you want to get a drink somewhere when you finish? Like, just us two? Somewhere in town? I'm not at college tomorrow.”

Stone saw a couple of shadows next to a car’s open boot, and squinted as he tried to make out who it was. But he couldn't. It was too dark. It didn't look like the man and the boy. A car was waiting at the traffic lights, and he thought maybe that was them. When the lights turned green the car drove away. No more cereal for pudding, he recalled repeatedly, nodding slowly. No more cereal for pudding.

When he returned to his seat, the smoking room was empty. Jennifer’s cigarette withered away from where she’d clumsily stubbed it out, and the leather was still rising on the base of seat that she’d clearly only recently left. Stone noticed a brown puddle on the table where her Coke was, and thought about wiping it away.

———

Click here for more Prose

Click here to follow clarkspeak on Twitter

Taking issue with the Big Issue

Published by Qmunicate Magazine, 9 April 2008

You've probably seen Jamie around. He sells the Big Issue on Byres Road, and whether you're heading for your eleven o'clock lectures, some shopping or a cup of coffee, he's probably the one you either walk straight past or give £1.50 and some small talk to. As far as Big Issue vendors go, he's quite eccentric – known for his leather jackets and his quiff – and he often seems less subdued than the students he's selling to. “Doing this job can be a laugh,” he says, wiping the rain off his forehead as we dodge a crowd of umbrellas. “But there is a certain input of ignorance in the west end, people can be quite patronising and ingenuine – they sometimes ask questions to be polite, but then don't listen to the answers I give. Selling the magazine can be good though, most people in the west end are friendly.”

It's around eight o'clock when Jamie sells his last Big Issue of the day, and after often twelve hours of selling, he catches the subway to something like home. He currently stays with a friend in Townhead; a grey, concrete paving slab of redevelopment near Cowcaddens, from which he commutes daily.

Jamie's life reads like a Hollywood script with the wrong ending. He was born and raised in the Drumchapel district of Glasgow, and left school when he was 15. “I think that so many young people from areas like that face a glass ceiling when it comes to education in their chances in life,” adding, “so I spent ten years travelling the world. I lived in lots of different places in Europe doing odd jobs, just making enough money to move on again – Munich, Istanbul, Morocco. It just became my life.” When he returned, Jamie then began studying for a degree in social and economic history as a mature student. “I was the first person in my family to go to university. Nobody suggested it, nobody expected it.”

However, when he was in his early thirties, he found it difficult to find real work, and spent years in low-paid jobs. But he shared a flat with his girlfriend, where they both paid their share of the rent, and he got by. Then one day, his girlfriend left to visit her family in Dublin, and never returned. At around the same time, Jamie's landlord wanted to redevelop the area and then let rooms out to the new Polish workers. “I didn't really mind,” says Jamie, taking a drag off a cigarette. “I've been a guest worker in lots of other countries so I know what it's like to come to a new place and look for somewhere to stay. So I lost my flat, and the rest is history.”

Jamie's been without a permanent home for over a year now, and he got the idea of selling from another homeless man. “Before I knew it, I had my own badge and it's a good opportunity, but selling the Big Issue should only be a stop-gap in between different circumstances. I know people who've been selling for fourteen or fifteen years, since the Big Issue began in 1991, but I'd feel very cheeky if I was still doing this for another five.” He's optimistic for the future, but admits that it's difficult to progress with so many barriers. “There are all sorts of obstacles, the main one being the lack of a permanent address, which immediately prevents you from getting beyond an application form for most jobs. No fixed address, no chance of a job; no job, no chance of a fixed address.”

“I've tried to find work in restaurants, hotels, but I'd much rather be learning again. Still, an address is needed by most educational institutions, which is why I've applied four times for teacher training. I think I'd be a good teacher because of my outlook and life experience. I'm not giving up,” he adds.

On our way down to the Tennents bar, Jamie greets another seller, and tells me that “there's no professional rivalry at all, all of us are in the same boat and have either temporary homes or live in hostels around the city. We help each other out where we need to.” The Big Issue sellers in the west end share a camaraderie, exchanging pointers on new housing incentives, job opportunities and occasionally, going out for drinks just as students do. “The only problem lies with,” Jamie adds, “the Romanian sellers.”

Jamie reflects a recent tide of disgruntlement which has been seeping into the change bags of Glasgow's local Big Issue sellers. Ever since Romania and Bulgaria entered the European Union in January 2007, a new demographic has crash-landed on Glasgow – and in this case, our Big Issue sellers are feeling its tremors. “They give the Big Issue a bad name,” argues Jamie. “They can't engage with the public because they don't speak a word of English and they're not local.”
Another Byres Road vendor added, “we try to take it up with the [Big Issue] office, but it's dismissed as racism. Political correctness? Political crap.”

As many people understand, the Big Issue serves to give local homeless people the chance to work themselves out of poor conditions, but as the Big Issue Scotland national sales manager Michael Luby describes, it's homelessness in general they are trying to find a solution for. “When the EU expanded its borders, in many ways they left us to pick up the pieces. Over 7,000 Romanians have arrived here in the past year. They expected the streets to be paved with gold, but they aren't, and a lot of them found quickly found it difficult to find a home, just like the local sellers did. In that way, the Romanians met our criteria, and nobody who meets our criteria will ever be turned away. If their only other options are begging or stealing, I'm proud that we've given them a chance.” But Michael concedes that the Big Issue has attracted negative publicity for doing so.

This isn't the first time the Big Issue has been vulnerable to criticism. In Oxford, there were around ninety registered Big Issue vendors – quite a large number for a relatively small city. For the local vendors, it was difficult to sell effectively because of the disproportionate number of sellers to streets to sell on, and they found this to the detriment of their own profits.

Michael also admits that there's an increased number of “blaggers with mags”, or fraudulent sellers, since the European enlargement. “This is something we work with the police on. We have an outreach team who check badges and who stop people begging whilst selling, which is against our rules. We have a very rigid code of conduct, but there will always be a minority of rogue sellers.”

Oddly, when Jamie was giving his interview, there wasn't a single Romanian seller on the street. Apparently, some members of the Big Issue's 'outreach team' had come to the west end to check badges that day, so a few of them hadn't turned up. “They didn't want to get caught. They'd been informed by someone,” claims Jamie. “By who, I don't know.”

In a largely depoliticised society where popular culture is more prone to discuss Pepsi v Coke than most wider issues, many people simply pop up their umbrellas to shelter from the drizzly political weather. But if you buy Big Issues – make sure you know exactly where the money is going, or else the meagre profits of many in “homelessness or vulnerable housing” kicked into the long grass.

Skip Surfing USA

Published by Glasgow Guardian, 7 October 2007
The freegan community across the Atlantic share similar stories, with blogger ‘Madeline’ explaining how “with friends this week, I served Rondele cheese with crackers, followed by a pasta with tomato and eggplant sauce, a lovely big salad, and strawberries with whipped cream for dessert. The following morning I had a big glass of fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, then an omelette with shitake mushrooms and fresh sage, accompanied by whole-grain sourdough toast.”

There are freegans all over the world, but New York City has emerged as a freegan hub, boasting a vast community of dedicated followers and volunteers. Earlier this year, following NYU’s class of 2007 graduation, a group of around thirty men and women assembled to take advantage of the end-of-year move-out – and pocketed free televisions, desk lamps and other objects for re-use.

Most were there in response to the NYC-based freegan website (http://www.freegan.info/), which posts details and listings of such events and rendezvous ‘dumpster diving’ points in the city, as well as information for followers across the globe. The site, run by volunteers, has become a database for all things freegan – including a recalled products and food safety alerts list (updated daily), a reuse/recycle directory and even an ‘internship and opportunities’ section. The website also posts a fanzine, a 34-page tirade against capitalism and globalisation, with the occasional quirky cartoon – sort of a bizarre marriage of Karl Marx and Quentin Blake. They claim that there are “at least 400 to 500” freegans living in New York who are part of their network alone.

But Adam Weissman, activist and co-creator of freegan.info, is however quick to dispel the notion that his movement is a brainchild, instead preferring to emphasise the collective nature of society. “We did not begin the freegan movement. The website is simply an organisation that exists to promote freeganism and to teach people how to live as freegans. The term ‘freegan’ goes back to (I think) the 1980s, and the practices and ideas it refers to are even older.” Speaking to the New York Times, he continued, “it has resonated around the world with people who love community, cooperation, and our planet. We believe that the survival of life on this planet requires a shift to the replacement of industrialism, capitalism, and globalism with a society that consumes less and shares more.”

The success of the movement in New York may also be owed by the quantity and quality of New York waste. According to the Environment Protection Agency, 245 million tons of municipal solid waste has been produced by individuals, businesses and institutions since 2005 across the whole of North America, equating to 4.5 pounds per person per day. New York’s equivalent figure is 7.1 pounds. Poverty statistics are just as alarming – one third of the city’s children live below the poverty line, every day 2,500 are turned away from food pantries and soup kitchens and 400,000 New Yorkers suffer from “moderate or severe hunger”, according to the website’s own findings.

Freegan Fighters

Published by Glasgow Guardian, 7 October 2007

They strike in the early hours, while most of the city sleeps; sometimes alone, sometimes in crowds of a dozen. Anyone is a suspect. Put this paper down and have a look at the nearest stranger – could they be? Meet my new favourite community of people – Freegans.

You might think that consuming waste food lies deep in the preserve of the impoverished or daring, but it's also a rather practical alternative to extortionate weekly shopping at Somerfield and Iceland, as many Glasgow students and residents have found. Supermarket waste bins in particular have become free-of-charge vending machines in the last few years, because of the excess amount of unsold food and goods thrown out to waste at the end of the last shift – their lids forced open and their contents raided by night by the munchie-craving. But it didn't stop there. The practise has become so popular throughout Britain that it has snowballed into a phenomenon known as 'Freeganism' – and the ethical backlash against British supermarkets has been rattling teacups in their head offices ever since.

The Freegan lifestyle involves salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket waste bins – food that has passed its expiration date, but is still edible and nutritious. They salvage the food, not always because they are hungry, poor or homeless, but sometimes as a political statement against the over-disposability of consumerism.

“To be honest, part of the appeal is that it has to be done in the cover of darkness, and it's a lot more exciting than your average supermarket experience,” comments Ailsa Kay, 21, a Glasgow student. “However, the more I frequented the bins, the more food I discovered. It made me determined to undermine huge supermarkets by using their waste and not spending a penny more than I really needed to.”

The Marks and Spencer bins on Ashton Lane in particular served as Freegan youth clubs last year, with sometimes up to a dozen taking anything they liked the look of – giddily burrowing through plastic bags like a bunch of seven-year-olds dizzy on lemonade. At best, you could come out with anything – currys, juice, new potatoes, pies, salads, sandwich fillers, Yorkshire puddings, (including my favourite – two chicken breasts wrapped in bacon, topped with a creamy white wine sauce) all hitting their expiration on the day or the day after; at worst, a few loaves of bread to cram into the freezer. So why buy their crap if you can eat their scrap?

“The first time I went I found an Irish soda bread and a chocolate Swiss roll, both still sealed in their packaging and their sell-by date was the following day,” says Ailsa. “It's a great feeling when you manage to feed yourself and a group of friends without spending a penny, and re-using food that would otherwise just be taken to a landfill site. I've come across many characters in the early hours – some in suits, some in kilts, some curious and some who either look extremely confused or disgusted.”

However, the Freegan party has recently been busted by a harsher enforcement of wastage policies. Marks & Spencers have begun locking their bins at night, and are known to now purposely open the packaging of waste food, to prevent people like Ailsa from taking it. “It's common sense to know what's edible. I find it particularly frustrating when you find a bin choked with food, only to discover that an employee has slashed open the packaging, making the food unusable.”

A supervisor from Marks & Spencers claimed that new health rules had been in place for a number of years, but only recently had head offices begun issuing preventative measures to combat freeganism. A moral pulse exists however, in their 24-hour stores, who occasionally have food waste picked up by the charity Rainbow, and distributed to the homeless. This progressive agreement is exempt from such wastage policies as the waste in 24-hour supermarkets is thrown out minutes after being removed from the shelf, when it is left for sometimes a full day at room temperature in stores with opening hours. The Greggs bakery on Byres Road was also until recently partial to giving away a few unsold sausage rolls and on mornings they are collected – but now the delivery driver is explicitly forbidden from giving any food away, on the same health grounds.

After the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004, I wrote a long letter to the Co-op I used to work in – challenging the wastage policy of our store and suggesting that some of the waste be sent over to the worst-off parts in East Asia, or at least be put to some other use. One of my points was: “Surely starving people would appreciate countless loaves of bread and other goods, regardless of their expiry dates, and would rather have their lives saved and have a stomach bug than starve to death.” All I received was a chuckle and when I suggested that they send the letter to their head office, my manager said that no-one would read it. The following day we threw away twelve stacks of bread and five full bags of snack foods, all of which had 'gone off' over the Christmas closing period, and all of which was delivered to a landfill site – 34 miles away. And to achieve what, exactly?

When it comes to food waste, shops and supermarkets have two options – one costs something and achieves nothing, the other costs nothing and achieves something. I've not set out to flood these pages with hyperbole, and I've tried to avoid churning out yet another hymn to recycling. The redistribution and availability of unsold food in Glasgow should be given the green light, or even debated in the relevant circles – when it is a glaring truth that our supermarkets cannot contain the issue by simply locking their bins.