Yesterday I was lucky enough to meet and get time to talk to John Healy, the writer of The Grass Arena.

Healy’s book deserves a much bigger readership than it has had so far and he deserves much more credit for it. His book changes how you think about something going on around you – the subculture of the lives lived by vagrants on the streets of London. It is a subject that most of don’t want to think about. When we do think about it most discussion is about what to do about it, what our policy should be. Few of us have any understanding of what these lives are really like.

Healy’s book is an autobiography of a life whose different stages – his father’s violence towards him, the experience of racism towards Irish immigrants, the way alcohol started to take over his life and why, his time in the army, his escape to Ireland, his slide into life on the streets, his periods in prison and his unexpected emergence as celebrated chess player – are so well described that they do not easily fade away.

Subcultures tell us something about the culture they live within but apart from. The Grass Arena’s strength is that you come away from the book with a sense of the sheer extremity of the subculture of street vagrants he reveals – the violence, squalor, brutality and horrific internal logic of it. His clear, straightforward description of how alcoholism takes control changes how you think about it.

I first came across his book at a reading hosted by the writer Charlotte Raven at the time of its re-publication as a Penguin Modern Classic. Charlotte is a propagandist for the book, quite rightly.  Although I bought a copy at the time of its re-publication I put it to one side and only got round to reading it earlier this year. More fool me, as I am now a convert and cannot recommend it highly enough. In this article for the Guardian Erwin James describes the impact of the book as instant. He’s right.

I doubt that John Healy will read this post, but I wanted to say what a pleasure it was to meet him yesterday – and to urge readers of this blog to buy his book.