Switched on the radio last night to be greeted by a slurred voice I hadn’t heard for years.  When the presenters cut in, the reason was clear.  The voice’s owner, the Glaswegian singer/songwriter John Martyn, was dead.

His name may not trigger much reaction in most of you.  But I was transported straight back to 1992, when I was working at the Prison Reform Trust.  We’d been helping to support a woman whose brother, who’d had a long history of mental illness, had been found hanging in his cell.  As a thank you for our, largely unsuccessful, efforts she decided that she would stage a benefit gig for the charity.  The name she came up with – and duly provided – was John Martyn.

This is a long, and not entirely palatable, story.  Suffice it to say that the gig did take place: in fact, we sold out the old Town and Country Club (now Forum) in North London, not an easy task given a capacity of 2,000, and made over ten grand.  But for me, the night was most memorable not for the money or the music, but for John himself.

That he was a fantastic talent is not at issue.  As a man – well, he oozed charisma but he’d come up the hard way and never forgotten it.  His connection with the issue of prison deaths was more than a little remote and he had a very clear idea of his own value.  So the night of the gig was dominated by a series of running discussions about exactly on what terms he was going to take to the stage.  It was on and off, on and off, all the time with 2,000 hardcore fans waiting for him to appear.  Then, all of a sudden, when I’d wandered off to have yet another emergency conflab with the venue, a roar went up and there he was.  And all the crap he had put us through for the previous weeks was forgiven in an instant.

On the radio, they were competing to tell John Martyn stories, about the pubs he’d wrecked and the people he’d hit.  A character, they said.  We all know what that means, and it is easy to condemn.  But I know enough about his early life, and about the money he’d lost and all the times he’d been ripped off, to know that in his mind he was just giving back some of what he got.  And the life of an icon can’t be easy.  At the after show party, when we were standing chatting, a woman came up and simply said: “John, you are my God.”  When you have 25 years of people either throwing themselves at you, or conning you out of your earnings, it is not easy to maintain equilibrium.

A difficult man.  But that talent…

Later:

Just read Erwin’s blog on the Guardian website on the same subject.  Looks like I misjudged the old boy’s commitment to prisons.  I apologise to his memory.

Anyone who has worked in charities for any length of time gets used to the notion that what appears to you as being entirely reasonable and uncontentious can appear to those in authority as somehow deeply questionable.  But even I am gob-smacked about the position the BBC (and now Sky) are taking about the Gaza appeal.

Mark Thompson is a reasonable man (or that’s the word, at least) and, for all its faults, the BBC does seek to explain itself at moments like this.  So the reasons for the BBC turning down the approach from the Disasters Relief Committee are set out explicitly on its own website.  There are two of them: first, that there are doubts that the aid would reach those who need it; and second, that because what happened in Gaza is a contentious issue, the BBC cannot broadcast an appeal because it might influence its reputation for impartiality.

We can dismiss the first fairly quickly.  The question of how effective aid would be is one in which the DEC, the charities on the ground, are expert, not Mark Thompson.  Indeed, having raised the point, he quickly dismisses it himself.

No – it is the question of the contentious nature of the conflict which is clearly at the heart of the issue.  The BBC will not show the appeal in case people think they are taking sides, he argues.  What is interesting here is that this is not a judgement they commonly make.  When there have been famines in Sudan or other parts of the world where conflicts have been a major cause of disaster, the BBC has not been noticeably reluctant to support humanitarian efforts.  There, the victims have been treated as just that  - victims, people who are suffering and need help.

The question here is why that is not the case in Gaza.  Are they not suffering?  Is there something about them which means that they do not qualify as victims?  Or is it that the Director General is more afraid of being put under pressure over where he stands between Israel and the Palestinians than on where he stands between the various factions in the Sudan?

Charities do not make moral judgments about people in need. People in Gaza are homeless and homeless people need housing.

Another day, another Government plan to rescue the banking system, and another repossession horror story.  In this case, it was a man called Terry Armstrong, an intelligent and articulate 68 year-old who, seeing his former home still lying empty some four months after he’d lost it, promptly moved back in for Christmas.  And now he sits there with his family, advertising the fact on national television and defying the new owners to force him out.

A distressing case and, like all distressing cases, a valuable one.  But, as always, the story which gets presented in the media (in this case, we were together on the This Morning sofa) hides a far more interesting tale.  Terry’s was not a case of straightforward repossession by an unsympathetic mortgage company.  In fact, the action was taken by a solicitor to whom he owed costs following a court action which he lost.  The full story (www.the-repossessed.com gives the details) is clearly too complex to be dealt with on a daytime TV chat show.  TV prefers its case studies to come in a simple, pre-digested form.

But real life is rarely like that.  There is no such thing as the perfect victim, no story which comes ready-wrapped for public sympathy or policy gain.  There are always aspects you want to play up, always things you would prefer not to emphasise.  At the margins, that is OK.  But sometimes, like when researchers ask you to avoid putting up case studies who are black (“we don’t want the public to confuse housing need with immigration issues”, as one told me a few years ago), you end up in very dodgy territory indeed.  Getting media coverage is one thing.  Pandering to prejudice is something very different.

My children are in mourning.  If the – belated – revelation that Father Christmas does not in fact exist and that the tooth fairy is their mother in a dressing gown has hit them hard, the pain is nothing to the closure of the last of the Woolworths stores.

For my kids, Woolies was paradise.  The disruption to their routines of our move from South to North London was significantly softened by the existence of a Woolworths just ten minutes walk away.  Toys, sweets, video games – all there, all enticing, all affordable to the pocket-monied.  And the dowdiness and chaos of the shop itself meant that the parental “Don’t touch” and “Put it back” were far less frequent than normal.

Now the shop stands empty.  And we wonder: will M&S across the street be one of those targeted by Stuart Rose for closure?  What about the Next round the corner?  Will the slow march of gentrification which has made the area so enticing to people like us go into sudden reverse?

And my mind goes back to the Sunday of the last Labour conference in Manchester.  Bored out of my skull and desperate to escape the airlessness of the political village, I wandered vaguely off piste in search of lunch.  When I came to, I was standing in the middle of a huge area of un-let new office buildings and empty shops, all deserted, all built with the confidence of Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams (or, for those who prefer their references British, Peter Kay in Phoenix Nights).  We built it.  But we may wait a long time until they come. 

And now we have to think about what we will do with all these empty commercial buildings in the meantime.  There are models of use – not least the short-let caretaker model familiar to so many students in Holland – which we could employ.  They will take imagination and energy.  But we must not let them simply stand there degrading, a symbol of the hubris of the first years of the new Millennium.  And the still visible remains of the Woolworths sign on our old local shop causes my kids too much distress.