Tenth visit by the police … and walking everywhere

There is so much material for this blog I’m afraid I have to cherrypick. OK, first thing: the tenth visit by the Bishopsgate City of London police on Thursday to the porch we sleep in at night – I was almost asleep while Declan had just tied our bags, which naturally had to be untied once we were asked for identification.

And unlike the Met’s ninth visit on 1 July, which saw us being questioned by two police officers on horses, this time round it was two police community support officers on foot – in fact, one of them was so at ease, she sat at the end of my sleeping bag. I will spare the details of this half-an-hour exchange since their questions seldom vary, except that this time the sitting officer was quite keen to know what chances we thought we had of getting off the street.

I lay back in my sleeping bag thinking about a quotation I read in a blog by literature Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka – the next morning I went looking for it so I could write it here: about the world being better off without religion … “I think so. It would be less beautiful perhaps, because some religions have created really beautiful architecture, incredible music, some of the most moving dances stem from religion – this idea or acknowledgement of something that stems from something larger than yourself. But I have a feeling that the world would have found a way of substituting it, or creating the same thing from a different source of inspiration”.

Apart from this visit, there has been plenty of action in the porch. Every day this week (Monday to Friday), a cleaner has been putting in a short appearance: he goes into the office building by the porch at about 5.10am – while we are packing our bags to leave – grabs a mop and starts mopping (the carpet) inside the glass porch door, leaving by the porch at about 5.25am, a few minutes before we ourselves pull out.

Maybe he should mop the porch – not while we are there, as he is threatening – although given that we are not paying rent, I suppose the least we can do is keep cleaning the porch floor every night (my job) and tie up the rubbish bags left by another cleaner for collection, sometimes inside the porch (Declan’s job).

And to keep me busy with this blog, yesterday morning at 4.00am I woke up to find an almost full pint of beer beside my head. I hid it away in a corner of the porch just in case I knocked it over or worse, somebody emptied it over me.

This cleaning job is really a very small inconvenience compared to that of having to now walk everywhere carrying all our bags (one of mine contains a thick European law book and notebook): this morning we walked from the porch to Liverpool Street Station to wash in the public toilets, and then all the way to Idea Store Whitechapel library – a tidy hour and forty minutes.

In a nutshell, this new tribulation (a first since we started selling The Big Issue back in December) comes as result of not being able to sell enough Big Issues this week to buy two weekly bus passes. I will also spare the reader a repetition of the problems we have been facing on our two pitches in Liverpool Street and our weekend pitch in Covent Garden and direct anyone interested in reading a litany of difficulties to the previous blog quite prophetically titled “We are being reduced to begging”.

In an attempt to scrap the money together to buy the two tickets (£28), Declan actually went all the way to the Big Issue head office in the hope they would buy back 42 magazines (£29.40 to us), which we bought on Tuesday and Wednesday, but head office said no. Worse to come is if we cannot afford food next week – without transport we can’t even travel to where free food is handed out. Already I only eat once a day for about £2.50, while Declan hardly eats anything in the evening.

You would reckon that whoever is orchestrating (or manipulating) events around us would take a well-earned break – but no, there doesn’t appear to be any signs of it. Not with the problems I have been running into with both the Sisters of Mercy-run Dellow Centre and the Tower Hamlets Council-run Idea Store Whitechapel library.

In the Dellow Centre I don’t seem able to grab a shower: in addition to the usual homeless woman (a resident of the local Salvation Army women’s hostel) that keeps snatching it from me – it doesn’t matter if it is a Monday at 10.00am or a Thursday at 10.30am – a new homeless woman has now let me know that she too is on my case. Oh well, it sure looks like I am going to do all my washing in a toilet cubicle with a wet towel and some shower gel – advice which Declan gave me some time ago: what does that say about the problems he has in grabbing a shower?

Which brings me to the issue of my hair. I am in desperate need of a hair cut and although the Dellow Centre has previously had a volunteer in on Wednesdays to cut homeless’ hair, that (short-lived) practice hasn’t taken place for, er, about three months. It means I must cover my hair with a cap at all times.

As for the Idea Store Whitechapel library, we are talking about the deletion on Friday of my computer booking. Because this is the second time it has happened in little over a week, Declan emailed the manager of the library, Zoinul Abidin:

Subject: Computer access

Dear Mr Abidin,

I refer to my registered letter to you of 19 July with which I enclosed, in the absence of acknowledgement, copy of my email to you of 8 July regarding the above.

In my email of 8 July I stated the following:

I wish to confirm that this evening I advised your supervisors Ms Mita Dutta and Ms Bhavia Parikh that my wife discovered that her final computer booking (which she had booked through one of your booking computers as usual) for the period 4.05pm to 4.45pm had been allocated to somebody else. Said supervisors were also advised that earlier this afternoon my wife was automatically logged out in the middle of a one-hour session and had to find a member of staff to be booked in again before she lost the computer to someone else. It was further submitted that the same logging out and re-booking occurred on two other occasions earlier in the week.

I can confirm that this afternoon my wife advised your supervisor Ms Yvonne Rowe that she discovered that her final computer booking (which she had booked through one of your booking computers as usual) for the period 4.30pm to 5.30pm had been allocated to somebody else.

Please would you acknowledge receipt.

Yours sincerely,
Declan Heavey

Specially fitting for the end of this blog is a sentence from Sir (despite Muslim opposition) Salman Rushdie – it is from an article he wrote for The Guardian on 14 March 2005 in relation to the law Tony Blair tried to pass in Parliament against incitement to religious hatred:

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me. Religion was a part of my subject, of course; for a novelist from the Indian subcontinent, how could it not have been? But in my opinion I also had many other, larger, tastier fish to fry. Nevertheless, when the attack came, I had to confront what was confronting me, and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. Now, 16 years later, religion is coming after us all, and even though most of us probably feel, as I once did, that we have other, more important concerns, we are all going to have to confront the challenge. If we fail, this particular fish may end up frying us.

“Religion may end up frying us all.” A fine motto, suitable for embroiding on any teacloth.