I must confess to being a bit phased this evening. I’d planned my story to be about going from the ‘centre of the universe’ to the ‘middle of nowhere’ in a day.….I started my day at work as always and one of the work things I’ve done is to go to a REALLY swanky do in the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane in London. Tonight we’ve travelled the two hundred miles from home to home if you see what I mean - we’re in Cornwall for the first time since New Year.

The swanky do was the PM (Pharmaceutical Marketing) Society annual awards ceremony. There were 1300 people at this event and the tickets cost somewhere over £120 each - maybe £150, I’m afraid I don’t even know the absolute number. The food and drink flowed freely from 11am and were still flowing freely when I left just after 4pm. There were three comedians booked to entertain the guests as well as a celebrity host. Many of the other guests will still be there now (11pm) because the event moved into the ballroom after 4pm, to a ‘Blues Brothers’ themed bash.

On the table when we arrived were envelopes with instructions to place paper money (the smallest paper denomination we have in the UK is £5 which at current exchange rates is about $9 or €9) into an envelope for a charity draw to take place later in the event. I stuck a tenner in one and loaned a colleague a fiver for hers - it’s not done to not contribute. Not that I minded in the slightest, it was going to the tsunami fund and with 130 tables of 10 guests, that was going to raise a good deal of money for the cause. Interestingly, the total sum raised was £7500 or so.

I had to escape after the awards ceremony itself, even though the party was in full swing because we’d got plans to come to Cornwall for the weekend and I’d promised DM that I would get home as quickly as possible so we could get off.

As I left the hotel it was bitterly cold for central London - it was only about 4 degrees centigrade, just higher than the point at which the drizzle that was falling from the slate grey sky would turn to sleet. It was windy too so felt even colder. I walked back along Park Lane, one of the poshest roads in London, past BMW and Lexus dealerships to the Underground Station. I walked down into the subway to get into the station itself and saw a young man sitting begging on the floor. He must have been frozen - the floor was stone so his body heat would have been sucked out of him in a jiffy.

After the excesses of the afternoon, I thought he deserved some money so I got my purse out. I gave him less than the price of a coffee at Starbucks but he looked up at me, smiled broadly and said with no hint of irony ‘thank you - have a nice day’. Without thinking, I smiled back and replied ‘you have a nice day too’. Then my heart sank. This chap’s day must have been a battle against cold and hunger, without even considering the humiliation of asking strangers for money. I felt wretched. Moving on, I saw another young man in a sleeping bag this time but also asking for money. He too got some of mine, but he didn’t have an ignorant middle aged woman say ‘have a nice day’ to him - this time I managed something more appropriate.

So, from a story about urban to rural, it’s turned into a confession of stupidity and waste. The ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. I am lucky to be a ‘have’. I know now that I feel compelled to try to do something for the homeless. It was easy and ‘required’ to stick paper money into envelopes for the tsunami in front of my colleagues and clients but people in our own capital city are living such terrible lives and people walk past them as though they are invisible. It’s been bothering me ever since I got onto the train and I now feel it’s my duty to help. I looked into the face of a very different world this afternoon and didn’t like what I saw one little bit.

Last year I was snotty.