On a damp Tuesday lunchtime at the north end of Regent Street, George is working his beat as one of one of London’s Big Issue sellers. I have not come to interview him, but his experience is so relevant to what I will be talking about for the next two hours that I feel duty-bound to ask him about his life, and how things have been in the past 15 months. When he is not in the centre of the city, he tells me, he lives in a hostel for homeless.