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Sometimes time catches you out & you have to roll with the punches, I was reminded of this when I came across some stuff I’d done long before blogging really existed but it’s all true & I think still worth a look, we shall see.This set out to be a book about the homeless, a look at how a group of them lived out their exile from society, things change however & though the story is broadly the same it’s now more of an insight into a terrible freedom set in a place with it’s own horrific persona. A place where normality was far from normal & peopled with characters who though far from nice mostly didn’t deserve what happened to them, it’s a look at what life was like when the rule book gets thrown away & how we coped or didn’t in the underbelly of civilization. Sometimes it was funny, other times, well, it wasn’t, the humour may not be in good taste but taste is something of a mystery to your average hobo & only to be expected when you consider his diet, before the events of this story I was living on a vast council estate that many believed to be a terrible place full of terrible people, I didn’t consider it that terrible, I was 21 years old, six foot tall, slim & thought I knew everything,there were worse places though & my story is about one of them. (continue reading…)

This time I approached it from the front, it appeared if anything worse than from the back notwithstanding the porch light since this allowed you to see the place, I couldn’t get over the sheer size of it, it must have been as big as a large stately home although they don’t usually have two tramps fighting over a tin of Special Brew at the door. Holding my breath & stepping over the scuffling vagrants I took what courage I had, wished it was whiskey & pressed the buzzer beside the door, nothing, I pressed again & this time didn’t let go, I was rewarded by the appearance of a man the size of a shed who opened the door, seconds later the door swung shut & I was inside fated never to know who the victor of the tramp wars was. (continue reading…)

Notwithstanding this loathsome individual I was still ravenously hungry & not even the sight & smell of all the winos together was doing anything to dissuade my stomach from the fact that food was finally on the horizon. My taste buds were screaming & scanning the airwaves for particles, I could have picked up truffles at a hundred paces, I think I could probably have beaten the local hunt to the fox at this point if there’d been a local hunt or for that matter a fox with a recipe card stapled to it. As I pondered the glory of calories the screens came up & the line of vagrants shuffled forwards, trays appeared & plastic cutlery was scrabbled for, the aromas of bacon & tomatoes made the general air of decomposition almost bearable as I virtually lunged at the counter where I met the battle cry of the breakfast witch. ” Porridge or Flakes? ” came screaming across at me from what seemed to be a mad ugly dwarf of dubious sexuality & appalling manners, (continue reading…)

By late afternoon I’d been roped into a football match between the hostel dwellers & the local kids, I got to see a bit more of Beeston if nothing else but I’m sorry to say that none of my original impressions changed in any way, shape or form though. After an hour or so I made my excuses & headed back to hopefully crash for a few hours, as I went back to the place I would never call home I ignored the taunts & insults from the same kids we’d been playing &, neatly side-stepping the alcoholic wrecks begging for money at the doors I slipped gently into a different & altogether weirder dimension. Scrabbling in my pockets I located my change & setting my face I braved the tea machine, looking back it should have been so easy, find the machine, insert money, opt for tea, white no sugar, wait for said tea then exit sharpish. A simple mission you’d think & it would have been anywhere but here, in here it became a trial of wits, control was the key & expecting the unexpected the only frame of mind that worked, I learnt early that here if nowhere else paranoia was totally justified. (continue reading…)

I was up late the next day so missed breakfast, still hungry then but not about to vomit, you win some, you lose some, my appointment with Shafts housing place had been moved to the afternoon so I figured I’d better go sign on or whatever the homeless & down & outs did to get money. Taking advice from the reception guys I walked into Leeds city centre with my feet smarting from yesterdays’ exertions & eventually located Park Place, the

Not quite a park

DHSS for dossers if you like, a vision in cold steel & concrete with an even colder queue & as welcoming as an STD. Taking a ticket from the dispenser I read the leaflets while I waited to be seen & then proceeded to fail utterly at getting anyone in there to help me at all, after several abortive attempts to obtain the assistance I patently needed desperately I observed some of my fellow residents at Shafts, I watched amazed as they walked in & were almost instantaneously given a giro. I’m telling you, the mounties may always get their man but they had nothing on these guys, they turned screwing the social into an art form & I had to admire the acting, credit where credit’s due & knowing talent when I saw it I asked the one with the least tattoos how he did it. I obviously stood out as a no-hope amateur because he asked me if I was telling the social the truth of my predicament, when I earnestly assured him that I was he went into the spasms of laughter I was rapidly getting used to after my mouth had been open for anything longer than a second. (continue reading…)

The days passed though as days will insist on doing, ours were the same length as everyone elses’ but somehow different, with no chance of work, with our address even the Salvation Army didn’t want us never mind the job-centre, at least the Sally would feed us every so often, the job-centre wouldn’t lift a pencil on our behalf. We spent the days either sleeping, looking for food or more football with the kids off the local estate, the same ones who used to taunt us & throw bricks on a night. I hung out more & more with Sean & most nights would find us in Georges’ room drinking his coffee & smoking his roll-ups while taking the p*** out of our predicament, we swapped tales of woe & studied the lesser hazards of living here, we began to realise that in a place like this everyone you met had their own story so you were bound to find every kind of saint & sinner known to mankind, the saints it’s fair to say were thinner on the ground. For some reason the really strange inhabitants were called Brian, there are no actual statistics to prove it but on my experience alone anyone naming their child either Brian or Colin is just asking for trouble. (continue reading…)

Home naff home

I don’t think we’d have noticed Lewis & Claires’ arrival if it hadn’t been my giro day, I’d been here a couple of months by now & was an old hand by Shafts’ reckoning, Sean had been here for a fortnight before I turned up & George was already settled in by then so it’s anyones’ guess as to when he’d got in, we were already stuck in our own routines. Because the majority of people just came & then went after seeing the conditions we were forced to live under the staff got used to those of us with no choice but to stick it out for somewhere to live, we’d all been many times to the mandatory housing interviews & we’d all been lied to about how long we’d be here for, because of this we had a little more leeway than the norm. Given the fluidity of the general population in the hostel the people who stayed were the only ones who had absolutely nowhere else to go, by now we were almost completely nocturnal, living in a world of dullness, hunger with only our giros to look forward to & a severe case of sexual frustration. Up at the crack of dawn on giro day & lamenting our lack of 01 status we shot off to the post office & after stocking up on cigs, onwards to Nettos, the cheapest place to shop & a mecca for us poor folks. (continue reading…)

Like us Lewis had been to the housing dept. & like we were before him was confident of being out of here in six weeks or less, when we told him they were lying it was his turn not to believe but when we told him how long we’d been there already he was a broken man. It wasn’t the housing dept.’s fault as such, no estate manager would house us without an 01 specification & even then they weren’t what you’d call eager, no-one wanted us, it was however their fault for not telling us the truth & for insisting that they weren’t lying even when we’d been there in some cases longer than they had. To cheer Lewis up we filled him in on the clown situation & took the breakfasts apart, not being able to tell Lewis that he wanted to screw Claire Sean was forced back onto his favourite topic, Lisa & Louise, Louise was the only female night porter & was sound in a lot of ways & Lisa was all our vagrant dreams come true, the unpalatable fact that he had no chance with either of them was a source of constant upset for Sean. After an hour of listening to his insane plans to get one or the other, or in his wildest fantasy to date, both, into bed (continue reading…)

Brian though just couldn’t give it up, he just wouldn’t let it go, the fact that all he’d had to do the previous night to stop it was to shout out or shut a window was totally lost on him although we agreed whole heartedly with Jodies’ opinion that she wished we’d never met! Brian however demanded an apology & a new pair of jeans, okay so they’d fallen on the balcony but they weren’t all that clean to start with & if we could find the launderette then so could he, this was not on. I mean, fair enough what we’d done was no doubt inexusable in a civilised society but we weren’t in a civilised anything, in the dog eat dog scavenger tribe we were compelled to live in what he’d done was completely out of order & he’d got off bloody lightly, due to this we were in no mood to be nice & went ahead with another strike while he went off to console Jodie. Because I was always doing caricatures of people I was ” chosen ” to portray Brian & Jodie in a marker pen sort of way across the wall of his room while the rest of the mob wrecked it, I ended up drawing Jodies’ body with Brians’ head whilst she was stark naked & shagging a large articulated lorry, it wasn’t art, or nice or in any taste whatsoever but it was funny. Having restored our battered egos we called it a day & went to bed, when we woke up we found out that Brian had been thrown out & so had Jodie. This was a bit much but it turned out that he’d tried to have us kicked out for what we’d done, the only reason it hadn’t worked was because the cleaners had been back to his room before he had & had alerted the day staff. Once they got wind of the situation they immediately pounced on him, even then he’d have gotten away with it, the whole thing was obviously not his handiwork & even the day staff weren’t that stupid. I’m afraid to say that the picture did for him though, he was so incensed by it that he blew his top completely & decided that Sean had drawn it, the staff had restrained him as he attacked Seans’ door & with his ensuing & sad appeal to the man in charge, Lawson, the story of having a girl in his room came to light & he was out. It took about five seconds for them to discover which girl it was & she went with him, justice wasn’t swift in Shafts but reaction was shit hot. (continue reading…)

Dawn would have fixed him though, to put it bluntly Dawn would have fixed anyone! She turned up on another memorable night, some bloke wandered into the mixed TV room & proceeded to take all his clothes off while bollocking the vending machines. We were waiting for George to get back from wherever & it gave us a laugh, the really funny bit was when the staff found out that he wasn’t even staying in Shafts but lived round the corner! The place was a bloody magnet for nutters, Dawn & her chap turned up a couple of hours after all the excitement so we went to have a look, admittedly she wasn’t much to look at but compared to our ” mutt ” standards Sean figured she’d probably be worth shagging & if not then he could have some fun anyway. He was in the same frame of mind the next day much to Claires’ disgust but as it was his giro day we were busy, it was now early August & we’d settled into a steady routine of keeping each other alive & fed that worked quite well. We got by on a bit of grub, usually three to a plate of chips, a bit of spliff since not eating meant that we’d be pissed on half a lager, a lot of nerve & a bit of basic begging from our families. We still had to wander the streets occasionally searching for free food & tabs to make roll-ups with but we got by, Sean would head for his sisters when things got bad as George headed to his mums’ place, Lewis & Claire to Lewis’ brothers & me home to the folks. As time went by Shafts became, if not a home then the place where we lived, you couldn’t explain it to people unless they’d been there just what it was like, no-one believed that you could get stabbed for a cig or spat on for breathing or that the only thing you could do was to build an image & never, ever break it. If you ever had to threaten something then it had to be something you were prepared to do because if you backed down once you were finished, the hyenas were always there. The real value of our group was in keeping each others’ hopes alive, so long as you were angry or happy you could make it through the day so the games kept on & in time we arrived at Dawn again for the simple if frail excuse that there was nothing else to do. (continue reading…)