Back to Trafalgar Square for another year, in a strange flat limbo between the departure of the last Antony Gormley plinth-person and the arrival of the big Christmas tree. This time last year - as right now - I was involved in the Radio 4 Christmas appeal, for the work of St Martin-in-the-Fields with homeless and vulnerable people. The fund is shared two ways; half goes to the Connection at St Martin's - shelter and outreach for homeless people - and half to something called the Vicar's Relief Fund (we'll come to that later).
Normally, you'd think that from year to year things would feel much the same. This year, they don't. While economists and companies brightly talk of the recession 'bottoming out' and spirits rising, and bankers suck of bonuses as big as before, the fallout is still absolutely real, right here. In the centre next to St Martins' called the Connection, they have more clients, and most of them are far from being the cartoonish image of the 'tramp'. As someone said last year, any of us is only two or three bad decisions away from the pavement. Sometimes it's drink, sometimes drugs, but as often as not the stories you hear are just about lost jobs, broken relationships, fractured family life, and the sort of pride which stops you from asking for help in time. It keeps you sleeping on friend's sofas or walking all night and dozing on benches by day, carrying a neat-looking tourist backpack so that nobody need know it holds all your worldly possessions.
The blow to pride, and the difficulty of climbing back up to normality without losing it, is one of the recurring themes which outreach workers and clients both stress. The Connection - businesslike, practical, civil, comradely - deals well with it. And in the companionable atmosphere of the art room and the writer's group, the deeper wilder feelings can be let out in safety, and the healing begins.
So I like the Connection, these visits and the voices which my producer Sally Flatman and I collect there. But there's another half to this 83-year-old Radio 4 appeal, granted to St Martins by Lord Reith, less dramatic perhaps but immensely valuable: a fund which provides a stitch in time, a quick necessary patch to stop the whole financial dam breaking and overwhelming people. It is called the Vicar's Relief Fund, and inside the stately 18th Century church, beneath the gilded ceiling, the Vicar himself Nick Holtam likes to run us through some of the year's beneficiaries.
But the name - Vicar's Relief Fund? Blimey, how retro can you get? In an age which prefers to witter about delivery and empowerment and service-users, the very title has a stern Victorian ring to it. Personally, I rather like that (I always fear that my loyalty as a donor to the Salvation Army might erode if it ever abandoned its little 1886 red shield logo or changed its name to "Save!"). But the Vicar's Relief Fund is not at all retro: it provides a very modern service, in the age of fines and mounting interest and compulsory paperwork.
What it does is to give small grants for specific immediate needs - average only about £160, often as low as £40 - and to give them very, very quickly (unlike the DSS). Social workers, clergy, community workers or Citizens Advice Bureaus make the requests, so they are all known to be genuine and urgent, and the Fund responds fast. That stops fines and interest building up, or a domestic crisis becoming dangerous. Sometimes it's rent arrears after a sudden bereavement, sometimes some vital bedding for a new baby, sometimes replacement of a broken cooker (the alternative, if you're poor, being one of those terrible HP scams where you end up paying five times its value). Given a bit of bad luck and trouble any of us could find ourselves needing a small sum, quickly, to prevent the spiral into ever deeper debt. One of this year's Vicar's Relief Fund grants was £60.94 to replace a builder's registration card so he could work - rather than remain homeless. It did the trick. He's back at work. And sleeping in a bed.
So I like this half of the appeal too. It appeals to my quarter- Scottish DNA and the shade of my Fifeshire father - a stitch in time, a brief hand up the slippery slope, a nod to human dignity, not too much said. Sometimes - memorably last year, with a retired engineer who lost the financial plot after his wife died - a beneficiary is willing to talk about what the Vicar's Relief Fund did for them in a hard time. But they don't have to. Quickly and quietly, it does its bit and steps back out of the limelight. Except at Christmas, when we celebrate it - and you fund it. Thanks.
Libby Purves is a broadcaster and radio presenter. She presents Received with Thanks, Radio 4's programme about the appeal
- This year's appeal takes place on BBC Radio 4 on 6th and 10th December. Volunteers from Radio 4 and from St Martin-in-the-Fields will answer the phones, accepting donations from people all over Britain. Last year over £750,000 was raised.
- The photograph, by producer Sally Flatman, shows the possessions of one of The Connection's clients, including a newly-issued birth certificate. When you're homeless or living in a hostel, your bag and its contents take on extra importance. A frequent task for workers at The Connection is obtaining duplicate birth certificates for people who have lost theirs and thus find it hard to get work or a place to live. There are more pictures here.
