Now a book has been published which can take its place easily with those great classics: ‘Stuart, a Life Backwards’, by Alexander Masters.

Masters worked in a hostel for the homeless in Cambridge. Just before Christmas 1999 two dedicated senior workers in this field were given long prison sentences for allowing the premises of Wintercomfort, a rough sleepers’ day centre, to be used for drug-dealing, a charge so ludicrous as to be almost unbelievable.

Stuart Shorter, 31 at that time, joined the campaign to overturn their convictions. His first-hand knowledge of The System and how it affects the lives of those who are on the receiving end of it was invaluable. Gradually, as Masters got to know Stuart, he realised that his was an important story which had to be told.

Stuart Shorter was a fizzing bomb always on the point of going off, a “nightmare Clockwork Orange figure.”

His life was chaotic. Nearly always drunk or out of his head on cocaine or smack, he was regularly banged up for varying lengths of time, either for committing robberies of pantomime incompetency or exploding in savage unpredictable acts of violence against anyone in authority.

When not in prison he lived rough for months at a time because no hostel could tolerate his behaviour for long. He harmed himself as a matter of routine. In July 2002 he walked in front of a train and died instantly.

But Masters saw from the beginning of their association that Stuart was more than a mad, screaming drunk. He was “my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning of the twenty-first century: a man with an important life.”

He was also a man with a knife-sharp insight into his own situation and what brought him there. When he sees the original manuscript which Masters produced, with it’s glib catalogue of “hypotheses for delinquency” and “conduits of corruption,” he knows immediately that it won’t do. “It’s bollocks boring. You want something what people will read.”

So they sit down to write it together, this time backwards, to try to get to the source of the trouble, why Stuart has become the person he has, who killed the person he was and should have been.

For someone like me, whose only experience of sleeping on the street is queuing for 24 hours to get a ticket for a Bob Dylan concert, this book provided a grim illumination of a world most of us would prefer to ignore and certainly never have to inhabit. For those caught in that world “every day is a hum of casual outrages. In the worst cases they are hardly human at all, but like shells walking round crammed with minced ego.”

But Stuart nearly always manages, in his mind anyway, to float slightly above the morass and convey his responses, at times hilariously.

On the homeless in general:

“ …that’s the point of them. The homeless are what’s left over after all the usual things what keep people straight and narrow – yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir – like family, careers, the army, have been taken out.”

On being asked why his life is so out of control:

“You know, to be honest, that sort of question don’t mean nothing to a person like me. That’s what you’re going to find difficult to understand. You grew up with order so you’re going to want order to explain things. Where, me, anything ordered was wrong. It weren’t part of my days. My life is so complicated it’s hard for me to actually say what happened in them days, let alone in what order.”

Most of us think the life of the very poor must be quite simple. In fact, it is intolerably complicated.

Read this book. You’ll never again walk past a man with a dog in the tube tunnel and think the same thoughts you did before reading it. And if you can get through the last twenty pages without getting a lump in your throat, well I pity you.