I came across a great busker today. I was walking past our local shopping centre and this amazing sound came floating across the square; a booming bass, a brass section, a rapper bouncing along on top of it all.  His name, it turned out, is Mr Woodnote, and the rapper working with him is called Lil Rhys. It was an ice-cold day with an ice blue sky above our heads; Lil Rhys had a great big parka on, but Mr Woodnote just had a skinny hoody and cargo pants. He had a saxophone slung around his neck,  and a microphone stand in front of him, and then an effects station at his feet which he used to record a bar of sax, or a lilt of melody, before playing them back and weaving them into and top of each other, all in front of our eyes, all out in the large, impersonal square outside the shopping centre.

I watched him and worried about how cold he must be – but he really didn’t seem to feel it. He was so passionate and engaged with what he was doing, and it turns out that this is how he lives, touring the world, busking in front of shopping centres, working with different artists and living absolutely in the music and nowhere else.

I like people like that – so carried away with love for what they do that they don’t even feel the cold. It’s why I like activists so much as well, I like people who find something they really care about and then follow that star, ignoring whether it brings them money or luxury or a nice car in a nice driveway.

In fact sometimes I wonder if that’s not the only thing that matters. At low moments (I admit) I think that campaigning makes no difference, that whatever is achieved, the folk in power will just quietly move the goalposts and make sure that their money is still safe. Is there any point to trying to make the world fairer, more equitable, when there will always be a tiny claque of men (and women) safe in their privately policed homes, with their money buried in Swiss vaults and off-shore bank accounts? And that’s when I think that passion is really all that matters. I think that the man who has a cause, a passion, has more in his life than the richest man in the world.

Now that I write that down it’s not much of an insight, is it? But it’s still what keeps me going, I’m afraid.