Alone in Crowded Places

Maybe it's the bite of winter.  Or the fact that I'm on a cold dark railway platform listening to melancholy music. The train is late and I'm encased in the sound of Kate Nash singing The Nicest Thing. Lots of us are waiting and we all find our own ways of passing the time, staying safe in our bubbles of solitude. Eye contact is avoided by tapping at phones, reading papers on benches at which we sit, careful to place bags between us and the next person to make absolutely sure we don't touch. 

But perhaps my sadness is explained by living in a city in which a young woman has just taken her life and that of her newborn daughter.  A city through which she walked a considerable distance or perhaps took a cab or a bus.  I'll leave the speculation as to causes to others, as well as the handwringing and the downright triggering shock coverage to the gutter press.  What saddens me most of all is how alone many of us feel, despite living in densely populated places, with so many means of communication our heads spin with the constant connections. I wonder what I'd do, at the sight of a woman in slippers walking through the streets with a child in a blanket.  Unless she was in evident distress, I think I'd glance, worry and move on.  I'd be afraid of being seen as judgmental, or a middle class do-gooder.  How did our society get to a place where a term like do-gooder is used sneeringly and pejoratively. But imagine what might have happened if someone had reached out and asked if Charlotte Bevan was ok? Perhaps nothing.  Perhaps no one saw her.  But I find that hard to believe, in a city packed with CCTV cameras and busy with people socialising, leaving work, heading home or visiting friends.

There will be an inevitable inquiry and outrage that feckless NHS staff should have DONE SOMETHING.  We will read about it and roll our eyes, shaking our heads at the failure to protect this young woman and her child. But we're all to blame, you, me, and especially a society that is founded on keeping ourselves to ourselves, keeping the doors of family homes closed and keeping silent when we see bad things happening for fear it may be us next.  Self-reliance is fetishised whereas helping is at best undervalued and at worse, mocked. But needing help, of any kind places you at the bottom of the heap, an invisible person for others to step over.  It should make me angry. But tonight it just makes me sad.