Down and out in Bath and Salisbury
I have come that they may have life and have it to the full – John 10:10.
SHOULD YOU ever find yourself in these circumstances, based on my experience, this is what is likely to happen to you if you are caught trespassing at 2am in the scullery of a hotel kitchen in Warminster: zilch.
When the night concierge decides you’re unworthy of police attention, that you’re more to be pitied than feared, that’s when you know you’ve graduated into the ranks of the irredeemable, and, possibly, the invisible.
Some context might be helpful. I ‘slept rough’ and was then hostel homeless for two years, beginning in November 2015. Don’t believe the Jack London stuff; as a lifestyle, it is sub-optimal.
The whole piece is well worth reading because it isn't about sleeping rough, but a much wider context in which sleeping rough is embedded.
Finally, I learned that you’d have to be an idiot, and at several comfortable degrees of separation from the poor, to be a socialist. The machinery of the State operates perversely when let loose on real world situations. My first Christmas was to be spent in a shelter in Bath, but it didn’t happen that way. The temperature dropped so low that a cold weather emergency protocol was triggered, and the local authority requirement – that shelter should be offered primarily to those with a ‘local attachment’ – was suspended. I was asked to leave the hostel to make room for some homeless people from Eastern Europe. I was not alone.
Finally, I learned that you’d have to be an idiot, and at several comfortable degrees of separation from the poor, to be a socialist. The machinery of the State operates perversely when let loose on real world situations. My first Christmas was to be spent in a shelter in Bath, but it didn’t happen that way. The temperature dropped so low that a cold weather emergency protocol was triggered, and the local authority requirement – that shelter should be offered primarily to those with a ‘local attachment’ – was suspended. I was asked to leave the hostel to make room for some homeless people from Eastern Europe. I was not alone.
3 comments:
After recent experience with a relative and staff at Doncaster "social services" I'll be ready for any story of lack of giving a damn you care to come up with. There are a few - very few - who do their best. Many don't care and spend their working days getting needy people from their "in" tray to their "out" tray as quickly as possible. From my observations, the few are not helped by a system-wide unwillingness to communicate and by the way sub-contracting of essential parts of what should be a coherent whole has become a nightmare for users. These, of course , have been warmly welcomed by the many with their battle cry of "that's not my department / job / responsibility ".
Sleeping rough … there, but for the grace etc.
"kindness exists in the small transactions which happen between people, and the State’s intrusions often are little more than a comfort blanket for the less charitable among us."
Very true, and the best thing I've read for a while. It's no surprise, though; the State does as well at kindness as it does most other things.
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