Sometimes I feel like the local clergyman pontificating about the world and all within it, however, I had to smile at a TV show I watched the other night, about the ‘poor’ woman who was getting food handouts.The programme was seeking to identify ‘poverty in Britain’, and went along to interview the single parent who was receiving food parcels because she was below the poverty line. The somewhat controversial former Member of Parliament (MP) and Tory Minister, Edwina Currie, asked the lady how much it cost to feed her Boxer dog each week. “About £15,” came the answer. There was also the huge TV screen in the lounge – that must have cost a bit? – as well as the mobile phone and a host of other modern day trappings.By contrast a colleague who had been working in India, was telling me recently about India’s ‘food poverty’. I do not claim to be any expert on the Third World but, as I understood it, the government guarantees you enough cash to buy ‘food’ when you are in danger of starvation. That is ‘food’ poverty.Now that’s what I call poor! I also saw similar poverty when I was in Kathmandu in Nepal and, indeed, parts of Tibet, however, there is something else I also saw in abundance – happiness and smiles. In communities that have not experienced the trappings (should that be the ‘trap’) of materialism, they do not have that burning desire to have, to own, to get, to desire………they have simpler values; to be happy, to care for people, to smileSometimes I wonder if we have totally lost direction in the UK. On what day and in what year did ‘stuff’ suddenly become more important than people? Was it part of the post Thatcher legacy? (no I am not a Communist!), or did it happen gradually? Perhaps when we start to concern ourselves more about our neighbours’ well being, and start to think a little less about ‘spending’ ourselves out of the ‘recession’, we will begin to find true wealth because, at the end of the day, when all the stuff’s gone, all we’ll have left is people and they’re what matter. Here endeth the sermon!
