I saw a poor, lonely man wandering the A4 – then realised the sheer joy of where he was heading | Adrian Chiles

The football shirt gave it away. Suddenly, he didn’t look like the loneliest guy in the world, but someone on the brink of unlimited camaraderie and cake

It’s 6am on an unpromising Saturday, and I’m heading west out of London on the stretch where the A4 runs beneath the elevated M4 – two roads for the price of one choking up the same corridor of air. It’s a bleak spot. Even at midday the sun doesn’t trouble this murk. Distressingly, incredibly, there’s sometimes evidence of human settlement in the grim void between carriageways under the flyover. Shelters cobbled together from scrap wood, you know the kind of thing.

It’s the last place anyone should be sleeping, obviously, and no place for a pedestrian, either, at any time of day. But here he was, with dawn barely broken, an old boy bearing a shopping bag. A little stooped and listing to one side, he was making slow progress along the pavement. The poor, poor guy.