Someone a little nicer

Teacher in Wolf’s Clothing? May 29, 2009

Ernest, Big Issue seller and Wolf Man of Milton Keynes

Oh joy! Another Big Issue seller. And this time I’m nowhere near Tesco, but heading back from some trustee duty stuff at Milton Keynes Community Foundation.

I have my money out at 200 paces, and the £2 coin is still changing hands as I blurt out “Got many left to sell?” – thinking this time I’ll be brave and offer to take them all off his hands.

Only this Big Issue seller grins when he replies. “Oh yes, plenty.”  And I realise I’ve got it wrong again. He wants to be here. This guy is pleased to have a reason to stop and chat to the occasional Suit, dashing up the city for an M&S sandwich.

So instead of offering him money to go away I stop to talk.

celebrity

Blow me! It turns out I’ve stumbled on a celebrity Big Issue seller. My new (toothless)  friend might be sleeping out under the stalls in the marketplace and selling the magazine for beer money. But once a fortnight, during the football season, he puts on a wolf’s head and prowls the line at the MK Dons’ football stadium. He tells me his real name’s Ernest but he’s known to thousands as Wolfie. He’s even on YouTube. And probably loads of fanzines because he’s got the Dons’ logo tattooed across his forehead. Apparently, he got fed up wearing the logo  on a woolly hat.

We chat about the fact that the Dons let him into matches for free. That Wolfie would rather sleep rough in Milton Keynes where he can still follow his team, than do what the local council suggest and head back to his home city of Birmingham where he’d get onto the housing list. In any case, he doesn’t think after all these years on the streets he could sleep indoors again, he says. It would kill him.

But sleeping rough is hazardous. While he’s crashed out his stuff gets nicked, and there was the time some late nighters laid into him with a baseball bat.

toothless

Wolfie is also a poet and musician, he tells me, and to prove it launches into an energetic rap: his life story told in a series of staccato couplets.

To be honest, the lack of teeth make it hard to follow.

But every so often there’s a hand gesture directed at the forces of law, order and clean streets which I can understand: payback for hassling Wolfie about his life choices.

Milton Keynes’ own  Smiling Man?

What a reward for spending £2. I’ve accidentally stumbled on someone who represents exactly what I mean when I talk about putting myself out there. Wolfie does it every day, hard knocks and all. I have no idea if he’s happy; whether I’ve just  caught him on a good day; whether he’s just making the best of a bad job.  Or if this really is who he is and how he is.

But I do know that he never once stopped grinning while he was talking to me.

And that afterwards I felt like I was the one who’d benefitted from someone being kind to them. Funny that…