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This is how it plays out in this city, every day. We swerve each other on sidewalks and avert our eyes. We stand at bus stops looking expectantly down the road and never, ever at each other. We swarm the underground every morning and cram onto trains at triple capacity and stand politely in each other’s pockets, face to armpit, elbow to neck, ignoring each other even as we inhale and exhale the same air and we look at our shoes and never, ever at each other. And when two teenage boys get into an argument on the Bakerloo Line and start swearing and pushing each other, we don’t react, we don’t interrupt, we silently think please don’t pull a knife please don’t pull a knife and we roll our eyes and look at the ceiling and never, ever at each other.

It struck me today how easy it would be in London to become a nonperson. Like all the nonbuildings and nonsidestreets and nonphoneboxes you walk past every day and never notice. There, but not really. Existing, but not engaging.

Over a period of time, a little well-applied avoidance is all it would really take. You just… dial yourself back.

You turn up to work every day at the same time and go home at the same time. You don’t talk, laugh, joke with your colleagues. You don’t do anything surprising or impressive. You just do your job and go home. You slowly, eventually become an unimposing, unnoticed office fixture.

You stop calling people back. You barely fill your contact quota with emails and texts, and when your friends want to make plans with you you’re always busy, even when you’re not. Eventually you don’t answer your phone at all.

You put on your coat and leave your house and go to Tesco, or Waitrose, or Sainsbury’s (not Somerfield though – you don’t have a death wish). You buy your cereal and asparagus and teabags and salmon. You line up at the checkout and the cashier asks if you have a Nectar card and you say no. That’ll be nine pounds and thirty-two pence. Would you like a bag? Thank you madam, have a nice day.

And you walk away, and you don’t remember what that person you were just talking to looked like, and they have already forgotten you existed, and you go home, and you watch the news, and you go to sleep, and you get up and play the same game tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, ad infinitum.

These were all just hypothetical thoughts on a train for me, but the sad truth is that there really are nonpeople in London, and we do walk past them every day as though they were lampposts and phoneboxes. When I moved here two years ago the only homeless person I’d ever really encountered was a young guy in Sydney when I went there on holiday. He was sitting outside a Hungry Jack’s so I went in and bought him some dinner. It broke my heart the way people with arms full of shopping bags and briefcases just rushed past him, or worse, scoffed and shook their heads when he looked up at them. I thought, never, never, never, ever will that be me. How could anyone ignore somebody so pathetic, so obviously and helplessly in need of just a bit of time, a bit of sympathy?

Two years in London and never, ever has come, and I rush past people like that boy every single day. Two years of stories about fakes and drug addicts and gypsies has made me a cynic; or maybe that’s just the excuse I’ve given myself for not caring anymore. I honestly don’t know. But every time I look away from a homeless person with their hand outstretched, there’s a grumpy pensioner inside me that tuts and says, oh, he’s only going to use it to buy alcohol, while another part of me says, Jessica, you’ve just left the off-licence with a bottle of red, you hypocritical cunt.

And there’s another, increasingly vocal part of me that thinks… if you took away my job and my family and my friends and my self-esteem, that could be me sitting on the ground next to the cash machine and holding out my hand, or walking through train carriages holding a cardboard sign that say Hungry and homeless, please help.

It breaks my heart and makes me sick to my fucking stomach.