A distress signal came last week in the form of a tweet, terse and plain. “Guys pls help me,” it read and tagged me in, along with a few others. You may know its sender. Over the past year, Sharron Spice has been writing occasionally for the Guardian’s heat or eat diaries, detailing what it’s like to be poor in a rich country, to endure a cost of living crisis not for just a couple of years, but over decades. Now bailiffs had towed her car away. In a panic, she’d rung around local pounds, but got nowhere. Now night was falling. “My car is gone?! Where is it please? This is causing me distress, and severe anxiety”. In all the loneliness of social media, she was unravelling.
I knew that bruised sky, the river of cars running forever past her window, because her streets were once mine. She lives in the same nook of outer London where I was born and brought up: Edmonton. For those who imagine the capital flows with milk and honey, or avocado and sourdough, Edmonton is your rebuttal. Once full of light industry, today it has some of the most deprived areas in England.
