It’s about Hillhouse, the housing scheme in Hamilton, where I grew up.
The part in it about looking to the skyline and noting the absence of the Ravenscraig cooling towers and gasometer is not journalism – it’s something that I feel deeply every time I return. Their presence loomed large in my life – my dad and other members of my family worked there.
I’d guess that most people in Lanarkshire at one point either worked there, worked in a job connected with it, or knew someone who did.
The damage done when a major employer like that goes distorts the very DNA of a community. It is felt down the generations, deepening, to nick a great line from Larkin, like a coastal shelf.
What creeps in to fill the void? Too often hopelessness, despair, violence and substance abuse – this was the pattern well set by the destruction of mining communities after the Thatcherite onslaught in the 80s and 90s.
But hope is never completely extinguished. Communities may be fractured, but they still exist.
Particularly in working class areas, the drive towards the collective, to self help, is powerful – conditioned and primed by the facts and experience of existence.
This where Mark Rouse comes in - one of my best pals growing up, and one of my oldest pals.
I know where Mark got the scar above his left eye – it was after taking a header from a flower bed when we were five. And I know where the deeper, and much more recent scars which now afflict his families hearts have come from – from the death of his daughter last year.
It is Mark’s story which forms the basis of the feature – or more specifically, the story of how he and other community activists are doing their best to heal scars – economic and personal – in the embattled community we grew up in.
They instinctively knew that if they want change, they were going to have to have to create it themselves, bottom-up, from the grassroots.
And they have found that the best way to do this is to adopt a third sector model.
And this speaks volumes for our sector’s ability to offer healing and a locus for hope – a commodity that this month’s magazine is loosely themed around.
It’s a credit to our sector and all the work that is done that what we can offer people when they want to change their world is hope and the expertise and the material means to engender it.
That’s why we must shout about and fight for what we do – even as we head into an uncertain new year.
Hope is the thing with feathers, said Emily Dickinson. For us, it’s the thing with funding.
We have tough years ahead – but our work can literally mean the difference between life or death.
I write about absence a lot in the SOC Hillhouse feature. At its best, the third sector can be the most practical and even eloquent answer to absence, in whatever form it comes.
Can you imagine a world without us?
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
