Raise the Roof?

More than 130,000 children in Britain will wake up tomorrow in a place they can't call home. Find out how you can Raise the Roof and help homeless children. Shelter has teamed up with online property portal whathouse.co.uk to raise awareness among the home-buying public of the devastating impact homelessness has on children's health, education, and life chances. The Raise the Roof campaign will help fund a new Shelter service for homeless children that aims to end child homelessness for good.

Designer Cath Kidston, best known for her cheerful, vintage-inspired homewares, has created an exclusive product to launch the campaign. Buy a Cath Kidston key ringThe money raised will help Shelter fund a new service to help homeless children in Britain. The enamel key ring costs £3.50, and all proceeds from its sale will go to support the new homeless children's service. Kidston, who used her Gloucestershire home as inspiration for the key ring motif, said:

'As a designer I am highly aware of the importance of home and lucky enough to take my own for granted - a safe, cosy place where I can spend time with my family and my dog Stanley who features in the key ring. But for the thousands of homeless children, a safe and secure home is a distant dream. So I'm asking people to join with me to Raise the Roof and end child homelessness once and for all.'

Homes or ASBO's

This face has haunted me ever since I watched Brain Wood's documentary Evicted, on the November 29th. Chloe came home to find her parents locked out of the only home she had ever known because there had been a delay with their housing benefit. The cheque to clear the rent arrears had arrived the day before they were evicted, and Chloe's mum had called the council's finance department to prevent action being taken, she thought she had everything sorted out. Later she was told that she should have made 2 calls, one to the other department involved, but nobody had told her and she just didn't know. The local authority eventually owned their part in the mistake, but in the meantime the family were told they had made themselves intentionally homeless which exonerated the authorties from accomadating them, Chloe's school refused to send her work to the family's B&B because she was out of their area, if only temporarily.

The other stories were equally heartbreaking but this one may have a profound effect on Chloe's psyche "When eight-year-old Chloe returned home to find her parents in tears... she lost far more than just a roof over her head. At such a critical stage in her emotional development her ability to trust her parents, any grown-ups, the world in general has been shaken to its core. Her confidence and stability may never recover."

I shall be posting soon on what we can do to help, meanwhile I shall be pondering why the anti-social behaviour is central to the public policy agenda, whilst we are simultaneously creating all the risk factors for these children.

"the homeless are the people you step over coming out of the opera"

I love opera, though I know it isn’t to everyone’s taste, I guess it is just because I was brought up listening to it alongside with The Beatles. I definitely don’t see it as an elitist pursuit, and in fact take great pleasure in treating it like an everyday activity, rather than an event. The Guardian today really warmed my heart with its article, much of which I admit to lifing here, as well as shocking me that any minister can be quite so crass. Keith WarnerWaring has produced Ring cycles in London and Tokyo, staged Lohengrin in Bayreuth and won an Olivier for his Royal Opera production of Wozzeck. At the peak of his career, he can now choose to do anything he wants. Which makes it all the more surprising that he has elected to head north for Tyneside to work among the homeless.

Few companies could entice Warner to make the leap from opera house to a homeless shelter, but Matthew Peacock of Streetwise Opera is a persuasive man. A former arts journalist, Peacock was working in a homeless shelter when the then Tory minister George Young's comment "the homeless are the people you step over coming out of the opera" so enraged him he resolved to set up a company that put the homeless on stage. Warners says “…the point at which you've done the Ring at Covent Garden and Lohengrin at Bayreuth is precisely the time when you ought to consider doing something like this. It's a chance to remind yourself why you got involved in the business in the first place, away from the usual aesthetic arguments and the tedious crap you get from critics."

The result is the production Whirlwind which is at the Sage, Gateshead, from tomorrow until Thursday. Box office: 0191-443 4661.