I've always found Big Issue sellers friendly and polite, though by the nature of things, there's bound to be above the normal incidence of mental problems. There's a thousand and one ways of finding yourself homeless, from drugs to depression taking in alcohol, divorce, and simple inability to cope on the way.

Here's a song I wrote a few years ago, based on two Big Issue sellers I talked to in Derby and Nottingham. the tune's "The Road and the Miles to Dundee":

One dark stormy evening, a week before Christmas
The shoppers were thronging the streets of the town.
A girl in a doorway was selling Big Issue,
Sheltering there from the rain pourting down.

I gave her the price, and a little bit over,
But the beer in my belly was making me bold,
So I asked why she stood like an out-of-work angel,
Shivering there in the rain and the cold.

She said "I was born in a pit- town near Mansfield.
My Mum's alcoholic, her boyfriend sells crack.
When I came home one night he attempted to rape me;
I left the next morning, I'll never go back.

So now I am homeless, and I sleep in a hostel,
But I don't mean to stay there for ever, you'll see,
For I'll soon get a job, and a flat, and a boyfriend,
Stay home with a takeout, watch soaps on TV."

Well I straightaway wished I was thirty years younger,
I'd have offered to help her to work out her plan,
But with me over fifty, and her only twenty,
She'd have laughed in my face for a dirty old man.

So I gave her a fiver, and felt like a miser.
If I'd given her fifty, I'd still have felt mean,
And I've not seen her since- but I'll always be looking.
I hope that she's living the life that she dreamed.