A hundred pages into The Social Distance Between Us, the Scottish writer, broadcaster and rapper Darren McGarvey describes the time he spent in Aberdeen while he was filming a series for the BBC. The city, he muses, may well be Scotland’s most beautiful metropolis, where “beams reflect off the granite, rendering even the most ordinary building prestigious and majestic”. But as ever, his mission was to get behind the facade and use his experiences of poverty and want to explore deep social problems and the huge imbalances of power that they point up.
In Tillydrone, a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the north of the city, McGarvey met Michael, who had “moved from England to work as a scaffolder on the oil and gas rigs but, like many, had fallen on hard times since the [oil price] collapse of 2008”. He told McGarvey that he had been homeless for two years since being evicted from his flat. “I went down south to visit my family, who I hadn’t seen for 30 years,” Michael said. “I planned to stay for three days but ended up being there for three weeks. When I got home, I had been evicted. They said it was because I abandoned my flat, but I didn’t.” When this happened, he was 75. More shockingly still, his landlord was the city council.
