Tuesday, November 07, 2006

St Mungo's

I woke at 3.50am and saw that Declan was fast asleep. Still, I called to him and asked if he wanted to get up. I find it quite easy to write my blog between 4.30am and 6.00am. As I am walking to the Whitechapel Mission, the darkness and silence helps me to put my thoughts together with some structure. By the time I'm sitting down in the Mission, I'm already writing freely.

Anyway, Declan was warm in his new sleeping bag and wanted to go back to sleep. My back was aching because I had slept in the same position all night; with clothes, big coat and runners on inside my sleeping sleeping bag, it was too cumbersome to move.

What happened next was quite surreal – even for us. At 6.30am (we were still asleep), the alarm in our patch went off. We woke up and reckoned that this must have been planned by the police to give them a reasonable excuse to approach us. We agreed that the best strategy was to leave the patch (together with our cardboard) as fast as possible. Declan must have been working faster than me because when I turned around, he was talking with two young people ... our Contact and Assessment Team (CAT)!

I let Declan do all the talking (how much talking does a rough sleeper need to do?) and started folding our sleeping bags and tidying up. The talking went on for over 20 minutes – and also the alarm (no, I am not lying). By the time they left, daylight had broken and activity had started up on the street.

It turns out that contrary to what the internet says a CAT does, the visit was not to provide us with a referral to a night shelter. It was simply to establish that we are in fact rough sleepers, which requires further verification by the same CAT at 6.30am tomorrow morning.

Before they left, they took a digital photo of us in our patch. They said they were going to send us a copy via email. (If they send it, I will post it in this blog!) Before they left, Declan got the girl's card. I still don't know how he managed it, with the ongoing excruciating noise and flashing blue light in the porch. They come from St Mungo's, which is another Catholic charity and London's largest homelessness organisation. They house more than 1,200 people each night, and run over 60 hostels and care homes. They also provide supported housing.

Tomorrow I will report on our second encounter with this CAT. Hopefully, their verification will not take long and we can may be promoted to sleeping on something like two chairs, out of the elements.