[image error]I’ve had one of those moments recently, where what I’m writing collides with what’s happening in reality.  What am I writing? The last book in a trilogy about a time-travelling gypsy.

No, I have not stumbled upon the Tardis so I have not, alas, been time travelling.  Instead I’ve been watching the arrest of gypsy beggars from Romania, who have moved into Marble Arch, in London.

While writing this Travellers Fate series, I’ve been worried about how it will be received.  After all, tinkers, pikeys, gyppos and travellers, nobody likes them (not unless you’re one of them).  But that’s not who I’m writing about and it’s not who’s being arrested.

The people being arrested are straight out of Rromania, some of them Rroma (gypsies) and some of them not. It’s a discomfiting thing, to see them pointing to their disfigurements, huddling over their children and pleading for a crust. They’re being arrested because they’re a nuisance, they annoy people and make us feel uncomfortable as we walk past them in our pinstripes and designer scarves.

[image error]But here’s the question…shouldn’t we be uncomfortable? After hundreds of years of hunting, disfiguring, burning and branding them, ought we not feel a little nervous in their presence?  Being that we used to cut the ears off their children, is it a surprise that they don’t trust us to educate their babies? Should we be shocked when a population we’ve spent centuries subjugating, finally grovels at our feet as we walk down the street?

Maybe it’s not the beggars who make us nervous.  Maybe our consciences see them and recognise a universal wrong.  Perhaps it’s an awareness of poverty in the face of our own (relative) wellbeing, that makes us squirm.  It’s okay to be discomfited by these things; that makes us human.  Putting them in handcuffs and dragging them away?  Well…that just means that nothing’s changed.