Back in the 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher’s government and hard winters were making it tough, the statistics relating to deaths due to hypothermia rose dramatically. I was a journalist in Glasgow at the time and to provide some background to the reasons for this statistical spike I asked the Meals on Wheels teams to take me into the homes of the elderly.
One lady I visited sticks in my mind. She was typical of those on the Meals on Wheels circuit, but I visited her on December 18 – my birthday and hers. As we chatted and this shared birthday emerged, we did a bit of bonding. Her circumstances took me back to the many elderly relatives I had visited with my mother in my childhood. Like theirs, this lady’s home was an icebox. In the post war years, such conditions were ‘normal’, but this was the 1980s and my new friend told me that she got up in the morning and put on a small gas fire for a couple of hours. Her lunch was delivered around 11.30am by the WRVS team. She ate it while it was hot, put the fire out and went to bed – she couldn’t afford to burn the fire any longer than that and bed was the warmest place. For the rest of her lonely day and night.
Our readers were very generous and food parcels piled up over Christmas in response to the articles I’d written. In the early new year, I asked if I could take something to this lady and have another chat with her. I was devastated when the Meals on Wheels people told me she had died. I was convinced that the loneliness, as well as the cold, had added her to that winter’s cruel statistics.
Fast forward to 2017. Our Justice and Peace group at St Margaret’s in Lochgilphead had suggested a range of actions our parish could take in response to Pope Francis’ designation of November 19 2017 as the first World Day of the Poor. He made it clear this was to be interaction, not simply a matter of a second collection after Mass.
One of our suggestions was to volunteer with a local organisation called Grub’s Up, which provides Christmas lunch in a local hall as well as delivering lunch boxes and gifts to people who can’t get out. I was one of a small army of volunteers (of all faiths and none) who spent a couple of hours each day over the long Christmas weekend making this event work. The Grub’s Up people masterminded the operation and we decorated the hall, wrapped gifts, set out tables, delivered lunch boxes, cooked, washed up, cleaned up – and enjoyed the company of people who wouldn’t otherwise have spoken to a soul over Christmas.
One of my tasks on Christmas Day was to go with a ‘buddy’ to deliver a lunch box to a gentleman living in an isolated rural spot. Invited into his home I had a flashback to that winter in the 1980s. The house was icy and the gentleman explained that he lit the fire after lunch then went to bed around 8pm when the heat had risen through to his bedroom upstairs. He has a good neighbour, but was alone over Christmas.
The 45 minutes we spent talking revealed an interesting and complex character who’d be good to share time with. It’s up to me to make the effort. Will my ‘interaction’ with the poor and lonely be a one-off conscience salver, or the start of a rewarding friendship? As always, Pope Francis has set us a challenge. Donations of money or baked beans to food banks keep the ‘poor and lonely’ at arm’s length, marginalised and isolated from society. But they are our brothers and sisters and that challenging word ‘interaction’ is one I’m thinking about very seriously as we start a new year.