Inspired by someone I met, and would like to get to know more, on one of my weekly homeless walks through London… I have not seen him for some time, and wonder where he is. Autumn is setting in, foreshadowing winter with sudden gnarly gusts of wind and rain, which promise cold and tortuous nights …
Inspired by an evening of volunteering last week for Under One Sky, a charity which provides essentials, amongst other things, for those living on the street, I decided to write something… Hackney, mid-week, and it is a cold and wet evening there, as night beckons and winter looms, full of foreboding for those that must …
Society Today, Vol. 1, No. 2, November/December 2005 This is the question on our lips when we walk past a man or woman huddled in the doorway of a shop front like some desperate animal, wrapped in a dirty blanket clinging to it for warmth, hiding a face smeared with grime and shame, and clutching …
Roof, Shelter’s Magazine, October 2008 Imagine this. You are forced from your bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night, tied up and dragged off, half-naked and barefoot, into the wilderness. You are made to walk for twelve hours, then permitted to rest, but for no more than two hours, on hard ground, on …
Roof, Shelter’s magazine, September/October 2006 The plight of the homeless first really dawned on me when I was twenty-one and living in America. My friend, Justin, and I were fast running out of money and needed work: we’d prepaid the rent on a short-term let – a poky studio flat just big enough to swing …
Miami … what a place! And the people that live here … they are so affluent. This is the impression I get as I sit in a cafe on the opulent Ocean Drive sipping on a pina colada no less, and watching an impeccably dressed middle-aged man stroll towards me, the picture of material success …
The bus he gets on is packed. He scans the bottom deck for an empty seat, then goes upstairs. As he reaches the top, he glances round and spots a vacant aisle seat two from the back. He sits down and almost immediately finds himself drifting into warm reflections about his time with Catherine in …