‘I’m forty-one years old,’ says David, ‘and I have spent half my life regretting that I missed the sixties. I read about the energy, and I imagine what the music would have sounded like when you hadn’t heard it a thousand times before, and when it actually meant something, and I’ve always been sad that the world is different now. I got a bit excited about Live Aid, but then you realize that these problems… They’re too big now. They’re never going to go away. We can’t change the world, but we can change our street, and maybe if we can change our street, then other people will want to change theirs. We have hand-picked ten kids who are living rough and who need some help. They’re good kids. They’re not winos or junkies or thieves or lunatics; they’re people whose lives have gone badly wrong through no fault of their own. Maybe their stepfather has thrown them out, maybe someone died on them and they couldn’t cope… But we can vouch for them. If I can find ten spare bedrooms for these kids I’d feel that it was the greatest thing I’d ever done.’

‘Are you having one?’ someone asks.

‘Of course,’ says David. ‘How could I ask you to do this if I wasn’t prepared to?’

‘Can I ask where we’ll be putting him or her?’ This from the lady at the back, who already supports two children, a spiritual guru and a husband who has lost the will to work.

‘We’ll sort it out when everyone’s gone,’ says David. ‘Does anyone want to talk more about this?’

Four people put their hands up.

‘Four’s no good to me. I need more.’

One more hand, then nothing.

‘OK. Half now, half later.’

Weirdly, the whole room breaks into a spontaneous round of applause, and I feel as though I might cry the sort of tears that come at the end of soppy films.

GoodNews and David take the Famous Five into his study (a study that, presumably, is about to be converted into a bedroom) while the rest of us watch. It’s like that bit in a church wedding where the bride and groom and a few others shuffle off round the corner to sign the register, and the congregation beam at them, without knowing quite what else to do. (Is there singing at that point? Maybe. Maybe we should sing now—You’ve Got a Friend, or You’ll Never Walk Alone, something where the secular just starts to rub against the spiritual.)

For the record, the five volunteers are:

1. Simon and Richard, the gay couple at number 25.

2. Jude and Robert, a couple in their late thirties, who someone once told me were unable to have kids, and were trying to adopt, without much success. They’re at number 6.

(So, for those of you who have a need to understand why anyone should wish to do what these people are doing, a theme begins to emerge…)

3. Ros and Max, diagonally opposite us at number 29. Don’t know anything about them, because they’ve recently moved into the street, apart from 1) they have a daughter of Molly’s age and 2) just before David turned, he said he’d seen Ros on the bus reading his column and laughing, so perhaps her willingness to offer up a bedroom is some kind of penance.

4. Wendy and Ed, an older couple at number 19. They’ve always stopped to talk when we’ve been out with the kids; I don’t know much about them either, other than that they are both enormous and their children no longer live with them.

5. (Terrifying, this one) Martina, an old (properly old, seventy plus), frail Eastern European lady who lives on her own at number 21. Her grasp of English has always struck me as being remarkably weak for someone who has lived here for forty years, so heaven knows what she thinks she’s volunteered for; we’ll probably be given a large cake tomorrow, and she’ll be baffled and horrified when someone with dreadlocks knocks on her door in a week’s time.

A woman I’ve never seen before in my life comes up to me. ‘You must be very proud of him,’ she says. I smile politely, and say nothing.

We don’t get to bed until after midnight, but David’s much too hyper to sleep.

‘Is five any good, do you think?’

‘It’s amazing,’ I tell him, and I mean it, because I had anticipated nobody, nothing, a dismal and humiliating failure and the end of the story.

‘Really?’

‘Did you honestly think you could get ten people to volunteer?’

‘I didn’t know. All I can say is that when I was going through it in my head, I couldn’t think of any arguments against it.’

That’s it. That’s the whole David/GoodNews thing, right there: ‘I couldn’t think of any arguments against it.’ My problem exactly. I want to destroy David’s whole save-the-world-and-love-everyone campaign, but I want to do it using his logic and philosophy and language, not the language of some moaning, spoiled, smug, couldn’t-care-less, survival-of-the-fittest tabloid newspaper columnist. And of course it’s not possible, because David’s fluent in his language, and I’m a beginner. It’s as if I’m trying to argue with Plato in Greek.

‘What arguments are there?’ he says. ‘I mean, these people are…’

‘I know, I know. You don’t have to argue with me. But that’s not the point, is it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘There are never any arguments against anything you want to do. People are hungry, give them food if you’ve got it. Kids have nothing to play with, give them toys if you’ve got too many. I can never think of anything to say to you. But that doesn’t mean I agree with you.’

‘But it has to.’

‘That isn’t how the world works.’

‘Why not? OK, I know why not. Because people are selfish and scared and… and brainwashed into thinking that they have no alternatives. But they have. They have.’

And what am I supposed to say now? That people have a right to be selfish if they want to? That they don’t have any alternatives? And what’s the Greek for ‘Please shut up and leave me alone’?

The next morning I sit eating cereal with Tom while GoodNews and Molly and David clear up around me. I’m not moving. I’m selfish, and I have a right to be. In the Guardian there’s an article about a gang of youths who beat a man unconscious and left him under a hedge in Victoria Park, where he died of hypothermia. Unless he was dead already—the coroner doesn’t know. Three of the youths were homeless. OK, I accept that I shouldn’t have read the story out loud, given that our children are relatively young, and we have a homeless youth coming to live with us imminently (I presume that still to be the case—no one’s mentioned anything to me) and they will have nightmares for weeks about the poor and almost certainly harmless kid who’ll be sleeping underneath them. But I’m feeling bolshie, and the ammunition was just sitting there, at the top of page five, waiting to be fired.

‘Oh, great,’ says Tom. ‘So now Dad’s going to get us killed.’

‘Why?’ says Molly.

‘Weren’t you listening to what Mum was reading? A homeless person’s going to come round here and rob us and then probably kill us.’ He seems quite phlegmatic about it all; indeed, he seems to relish the prospect, possibly because being murdered would prove a point, and make his father sorry. I suspect that he’s being naive, and his father would be regretful and sad, but not sorry. Not the kind of sorry that Tom needs.

‘That’s not fair,’ David says to me angrily.

‘No,’ I say. ‘One against five! He didn’t stand a chance.’

He looks at me.

‘What? It’s here, in the paper. It’s nothing to do with fairness. It’s a news story. A fact.’

‘There are so many other things you could have read out. I’ll bet there’s an article about, I don’t know, changes in the benefit laws. I’ll bet there’s something about Third World Debt.’