Neighbourly

I am an occasional voluntary driver for Chobham Neighbourhood Care and today I was asked to take a Chobham resident to the Salvation Army food bank in Horsell. Normally I am taking elderly villagers to hospital appointments and this was my first trip to a food bank. I can't go into any detail about the gentleman's troubles but he was a proud man who was very uncomfortable about needing the help of a food bank. But, of course, he is far from alone in needing such help in today's Britain. I remember reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London when I was a lot younger. It made a big impression on me in its account of poverty and inequality in London in the late 1920s. Soup kitchens were common in those days for the homeless but not, so far as I am aware,  food banks for wider use. I wonder what Orwell would make of the country today.