Life and death of ‘Organic Jim’, Edinburgh eccentric
◆ Well known to the people of the capital, as a man living on the streets he would have been illserved by Scotland’s justice system, writes Karyn Mccluskey
There are so many funerals of forgotten people; those who die alone in properties and not found for months, elderly people who die in hospitals with no one to hold their hand. And there are others whose transient, difficult lives are beset with physical and mental ill health, often victims of crime and occasionally the perpetrators.
In Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, a man known locally as “Organic Jim” died after collapsing while dancing in the street. Jim was homeless, often floridly mentally unwell, and one of the thankfully small group of individuals who have huge difficulty being maintained in traditional housing.
I first met him 11 years ago and was waylaid in the street for 90 minutes. Jim had at least 300,000 words he had to get out and he would speak to you for hours with a flurry of ideas.
Sometimes you followed the conversation, other times you were clinging onto reality yourself.
He eventually told me he was going for a curry and I gave him £5 – only to be met with the retort, “you’ve not had a wee lamb curry any time recently”, joking that it wasn’t enough. But in the hundreds of times I met him over the past decade, he never asked for money.
He was a gatherer of detritus. He once found an old ipod and asked if I could put some Nana Mouskouri and Celine Dion on it for him. He was genuinely distraught when his possessions were binned or lost and he had to start all over again. He told me once he’d been given a caravan but he left because “it had no feng shui”.
He was a huge character and people took care of him, as much as they could; from homelessness charities to local people who washed sleeping bags.
He could be seen dancing in The Meadows and elsewhere, sometimes talking to an unsuspecting foreign tourist who’d stopped to engage. He was a true eccentric.
There are always two sides to the coin; he could be verbally aggressive when he was very mentally unwell – when my daughter was younger, she was upset on a few occasions when he shouted.
After he was accused of a crime, he physically declined and spent hours speaking to me in the street, hugely distressed, about how he felt maligned.
I have no idea how someone like Jim would manage in the justice system with no phone or address for correspondence in addition to everything else. He would most definitely fail to appear in court.
There are lots of Jims out there. People who are homeless have short lifespans, the average is 46 years for men and 42 for women. Their life is hard, the weather terrible and getting health support on the streets is sometimes impossible.
Jim was different, and rigid systems – unable to bend – often punished him for that difference, as they do so many who don’t fit into neat tick boxes. With Jim, the community stepped in where they could – people cared for and about him. And now he is gone, there are scores of fond memories being shared across social media. I will think of him often. I know I’m not alone.