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“I left Margaret, Minnie, Paula, Mrs Knightsbridge and all the rest, but they haunted me for weeks, daytime ghosts … The strain of engaging emotionally with all that misery was exhausting.” Toynbee p.203

“I was watching The Bill on television and at one point the police raided a flat on an estate that looked just like Clapham Park’s east side. Watching it from here, I realised these are the only images ever shown of council estates - crime, dysfunction and disaster. Ordinary people who live here and in the thousands of places like this do not figure on the national landscape at all. They are the forgotten, the invisible, only good for tales of mayhem in outlaw territory. These are the badlands of the national imagination, not ordinary places where nearly a third of the population live ordinary law-abiding lives.

“If I was here for life and not just for the weeks of Lent, how would it feel? In truth, I don’t know, because this is not my life and I still cannot honestly imagine myself into it. Sometimes, standing at my fourth-floor misted-up window, I feel as far away as a foreign correspondent up in the hills of Kashmir or Afghanistan - yet I could run home in ten minutes from this other country.”

Toynbee p149

“But if I had brought him up as a child on Clapham Park so he knew these other boys well, he might have to make stark decisions about whose side he was on, whom he might have to placate and appease with what gestures of mutual vandalism or crime … I could, at a pinch, imagine myself living permanently on the estate if I had to. But I would do anything to avoid bringing up children here. It doesn’t take many bad families or many bad children to destroy the social fabric of the place.” Toynbee p 132

“What would I say to some fellow political journalist, some MP? I need not have worried. Women pushing buggies are unnoticed in Whitehall, part of the women’s world that doesn’t count. A middle-aged nursery assistant pram-pushing along with a row of others was an absolutely invisible non-person out there.” p120 Toynbee

“This instinctive sense of pride in hard labour has always been traded on by employers. I saw it among the coal miners thirty years before, watching them underground on their knees bent double as they hacked out coal with dangerous power tools in seams three foot high. Among the miners there was less indignation at being required to do it than pride that they could and did do what to outsiders looked impossible. The danger and the hardness of it bred a solidarity between them that bound them together and bound them to their work. But it never seemed noble to me, just a psychological way of holding on to some pride while doing a terrible job there was no avoiding.” Toynbee p111

“In case anyone worries that I cheated Lambeth council by failing to pay my rent, I ran two parallel economies. In the real world, I paid all my outgoings on time.” p90

Also see p91

Toynbee p. 87

“At least I have never had any romantic illusions about the simple life or the joys of downsizing. I was never one of those who pine for some better golden era before ‘consumerism.’ I have always liked consumerism, but think this pleasure should be more fairly shared between people. I like shopping, which is the nation’s pastime. (Those who worry about the domination of global brands and logos should try shopping in cheap places where there are only weird and suspect-looking packs of food and toiletries, no reassuringly familiar brands to guarantee consistent quality.) I like eating out, going to movies and theatres, cooking and dining with friends, wine, clothes, holidays and the pleasure of flying off to some foreign city for a long weekend. I do not wring my hands at the wickedness of modern society and its materialism. Humans were always materialistic, hence the striving for progress absent from animals’ thinking. I have no problem with acquisitiveness. Apart from concern about things that may damage the planet, I have no moral abhorrence of the comfortable life, absolutely no nostalgie de la boue or fond notions that the life of the poor of the earth is in some way morally superior or closer to nature than that of the well-off.

Re-reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, I found I had forgotten his self-loathing, his casual contempt for a middle-class education and bourgeois way of life that his ‘happy workers’ went on to seize with glee whenever they got the chance [see p88 too]“

“Do I exaggerate? When I wonder if I overdramatise this great fissure in a society that likes to think itself increasingly classless, I only have to tell friends or colleagues what I am doing and they are electrified, fascinated, full of questions, intrigued by how it feels, what it’s like, how my accent was received. If I had said I had just been up the Amazon alone in a dugout they would have been far less interested in my traveller’s tales. Sometimes I thought I was daring, in bed at night listening to footsteps and sounds on the staircase. Sometimes I thought this was all absurd since a third of the population live on housing estates and do low-paid jobs, so what’s new? But when I see people from my own world look so astonished at the idea that one of us could for a while live like one of them, I know how wide the gap still is. Or I just think about the day I dropped back home from my cleaning job to find my own cleaner vacuuming my front room, which brings a laugh of wry recognition about the way we all live, we on the well-heeled left of centre too.” Toynbee p. 19