We have no right to feel too comfortable in this life. Sometimes, I have to challenge myself by considering other people’s stories. Consequently, I listened to the life of poet Lemn Sissay on the radio and it was harrowing. He was given up for adoption by his mother. Subsequently, his adopted mother then gave him up when he was a teenager and he was placed in a children’s home. However, all they seemed to do was indoctrinate a feeling of failure. That he, for no fault of his own, would come to nothing. The rates of failure for those from Children’s Homes is appalling. For certain, it all comes down to poverty and childhood in the UK.

Long Lost relatives

I then watched Long Lost relatives on ITV. Because a child had been put into a Children’s Home, he had, effectively, grown up excluded from society. Firstly, his teeth were all rotted. Secondly, he lived in a southern UK coastal town, where poverty is rife. I had visions of my expensive dentist when I lived in Cardiff. Outside, on the drive, were two very costly Porches, his and hers, with personalised number plates. Suffice to say that he did not do NHS dentistry. This blatant unfairness gets to me. The dentists make excessive earnings and NHS dental treatment is almost impossible to find. Why can’t they do low cost NHS treatment one day of the week?

Poverty and childhood in the UK

I knew poverty and it stank. However, it’s not just the shortage of money or the poor address. For certain, it’s the powerlessness that really impacts. Everybody talks over you, you go cap in hand to public officials, you feel a nobody. You spend your life looking in on everybody else. They have a life and you don’t. It reminded me about being invited to a birthday party for a schoolfriend. I was about 9 years of age and walked to his farmhouse across fields, with my younger brother. We ate jelly and ice cream at a table in the garden. The big garden had been turned into a treasure hunt, little treats secreted all over. What joy it was to find one of those. Then we walked home, aware that nothing like this could, or would, happen in our home. It was upsetting then and still is now.