Staying at your Nan’s House

Lana's Dream

Another entirely free post. I know, generous or what, eh? There are, however, some things that I say which I would like as many people as possible to see. This is one.

I first visited Dundee on a cold Monday morning in January. When I arrived, it was a drizzly day with low cloud and deep-lying slush. One of the first things anyone said to me was:

“You’ve picked a dreadful day to visit. Mind you, it’s been like this for about a year now.”

When visits start like this, they can cloud your view of a place but Dundee is better than that, it won’t let something as inconsequential as a year of slush put you off. Not even the odd facilities in my hotel could dishearten me. Dado-railed, two-tone walls and garishly patterned carpets led to my room. I carried my case in one hand and the key, attached to a key fob which was essentially a plank of wood with the number written on it, in the other.

In my room, which continued the décor in the corridors but added Monet prints, the radiator clearly needed bleeding as it was making sounds that you really wouldn’t imagine a radiator could make; rather like the Flying Scotsman was starting off on a journey from here. This was definitely not your usual hotel room.

The usual hotel kettle holds approximately two thimblesful of water and has to be boiled three times to fill a modest sized cup. Not so my Dundee hotel room kettle which was actually more like a supertanker with a plug. It didn’t have a fill level on the side, it had a plimsoll line. I could have boiled enough water for the whole street to have a bath. While the kettle was boiling, which took a while, I ironed a shirt for the following day. The iron was the complete opposite of the kettle when it came to dimensions. This one had come from a doll’s house and had a cord which stretched all the way from here to eight inches away from here. It was as though the hotel’s owners shopped in the Brobdingnag and Lilliput branches of Currys. The hotel was, of course, a Best Western. I gave up on tea and ironing and went to explore the city.

I walked down Perth Road which is lined with big, imposing houses built for the wealthy nineteenth-century merchants of Dundee. As you approach the city centre they shrink, becoming bay-windowed semis and terraces of four-storey townhouses. There are occasional single-storey houses which actually have another floor below street level as they’re built into the side of the hill, the rooms at the back clearly offering wonderful views towards the river and the distant low hills of Fife. Most houses and the walls around the bigger properties to my left, further up the slope, are built of great blocks of the pale, local stone. Then the shops start to appear, local, independent shops mainly: a florist, a pharmacy, a butcher, a Chinese takeaway, a barber, an optician, a fish and chip shop and a baker. Okay, not any baker, Fisher and Donaldson, creator of the finest doughnuts in Christendom.

The mix of shops and houses and takeaways continues for half a mile or so until it reaches the George Orwell pub, where it starts to consider becoming a city for real. Dundee definitely is a city, it has two cathedrals: St. Andrew’s, of course, and St Paul’s. However, you could easily walk past both without noticing. As cathedrals go, they are very small, much smaller than the church right in the centre of the city, which is gigantic, it looks like a gothic containership. Dundee is Scotland’s fourth largest city but, as the next half dozen or so in the list are places that you might never even have heard of, that’s not too much to brag about. It is about the same size as Telford in Shropshire or Naperville, Illinois. All of which makes it a pretty good size for the kind of city you could actually like living in.

If you are going to live in a city then you have chosen to do so because of its museums, shops, bars, restaurants and things like that. The trouble with most cities is that they’re just too damn big. I get lost in cities and I often feel that they’re ominous and threatening places, not so with Dundee. It manages to have all of the upsides of city life with very few of the downsides. Of course, being a city, it does have downsides and one of the most obvious was homelessness. The scale of homelessness is very difficult to assess, many people sleep on friends’ sofas or in bed and breakfast accommodation or hostels or shelters, as well as those we pass living on the streets. It is estimated that around 230,000 families and individuals are homeless in Britain, about 14,000 of them being in Scotland. The average life expectancy of a person living on the streets in forty-five for men and forty-three for women.

Bearing in mind how cold it was, and how cold it had been for the last year, apparently, you couldn’t help but feel for the young people huddled under coats hoping to collect spare change in their dirty Starbucks cups. One of the young girls I saw looked so pleadingly, almost as though as well as money, I might give her hope, suggest an answer, a way to not live this life. I spoke to Lana, she was in her twenties and had been brought up by her grandmother. She’d fallen into drugs and an abusive relationship but three years earlier had got out and got herself clean. She’d refused methadone as she didn’t want to swap addictions, she wanted to be free from them. Her grandmother took her back in and helped her kick the habit, Lana then stayed there and looked after her grandmother when she became ill. Her grandmother had died a year earlier and Lana was not able to stay in her council flat, so she’d been homeless since then. Today she told me that she was trying to get together twenty quid for a bed and breakfast for the night.

People say that you should not give money to homeless people as they will just spend it on alcohol or drugs. I say, so fucking what? If that’s how they choose to spend it, then that’s how they choose to spend it. Once you’ve given something to someone it is no concern of yours what they do with it. Of course, I hope Lana had enough to go to a bed and breakfast that night but if she chose to dull the pain with a bottle of cider or if she was lying to me and she hadn’t shaken off her addiction and that’s what got her through the night, then so be it.

I spoke to another young lad who had had his benefits stopped about six months earlier and couldn’t pay his rent, so ended up on the streets. I know that both of these young people, as well as having had some bad breaks, may well have made some poor decisions, but surely in January, in Dundee, we shouldn’t be letting people sleep in the streets. There are well over a thousand empty houses in Dundee, is there not something that can be done to shelter these poor young people? I know that the council would say that some houses were unfit for human habitation and that they were dangerous. Guess what? The streets aren’t a fit place to sleep, either.

I thoroughly enjoyed my short time in Dundee. What I enjoyed most, though, was the fact that I was going back to a warm and dry hotel room and not out on to the streets of this city. I am aware that this is, at best, a fifty-fifty split between good luck and good judgement. My father died when I was seven, my mum re-married and was then widowed again, she was then in an abusive relationship with a man who drank heavily and we lived in a succession of rented properties and she had a series of low-paid jobs. I was in the Royal Air Force for a while before being medically discharged and tens of thousands of ex-serviceman end up homeless. Certainly after leaving the RAF, there were times when I struggled financially and I often drank too much.

I have to be very grateful that I didn’t wind up in the same circumstances as the two youngsters I spoke to. I’m certainly in no position to judge them. In life we are never too far from things that we can grumble about, like oddly decorated hotel rooms and tiny irons, but, if we look around, we are never too far from things to be grateful for, either. It was minus eight that night as I slept comfortably in my hotel room with my massive kettle and a radiator that sounded like a steam train. So what if the Best Western was like staying at your Nan’s house? That’s what Lana dreamed of.