We are being reduced to begging

Although I have been given enough attitude – while selling The Big Issue on my pitch in Liverpool Street – to last me a lifetime, I am about to sink to lower depths: I mean we are getting close to being reduced to begging, which is illegal.

Declan has told me that if things continue the way they are, we can hold out for two weeks because he is going to stop buying our weekly bus tickets – charming, now I get to walk everywhere. However, I am not holding my breath: when we were living in Birmingham, ooh, a little while ago, Declan also told me we had two weeks before going homeless in London and yet early a few mornings later he more or less told me to get dressed and go and buy two one-way bus tickets.

Why are we being reduced to such a pitiful state? Well, the simple reason is that we don’t seem able to sell enough Big Issues anymore – in fact of late we have been dumping them: 19 magazines last Sunday and 25 today (incidently, these 25 magazines were bought on Thursday morning; the vendor pays 70p for a magazine, which sells for £1.50).

Take this morning at our weekend pitch in Covent Garden. While Declan was watching a re-run of today’s rugby game between New Zealand and South Africa, I stood in on the pitch. I had only been there for about fifteen minutes when a Big Issue vendor came along, situated himself directly across the road from me – taking the crowds that come down New Row and past me on their way towards Leicester Square – and began shouting “Big Issue”, “Big Issue”. He had just rendered me being there so utterly pointless that when I see that he has just taken a little break and is sitting a few feet away from me, I ask him if he is going to stay long across the road. Oh yes, he told me, that is his pitch. Well that is big news for me: Declan has been working our Convent Garden pitch for months now, and never has there been a Big Issue vendor opposite. So there, for all our troubles, we now have a near worthless weekend pitch – isn’t that nice?

Then there are our respective pitches on Liverpool Street, which we are now frequently forced to walk off. Take Thursday evening for example. Declan had to walk away because on one side he had some guy harassing passers-by to take flyers, while on the other side there was the regular London Lite girl, with whom he has had so many problems – vendors can be suspended from selling the Big Issue if they argue with other street traders on their pitches so there was really not much point in being there. The day before, I myself was forced to walk off after two Chinese girls stood directly opposite me, almost within touching distance, and started tossing their flyers to everyone passing. (I was also treated to their presence on another occasion the previous week.)

The Bishopsgate City of London police too seem to be quite aware we are heading towards begging because for the last week, while standing in my pitch, I have seen homeless asking people for money. Of course, I can always find a cash machine and sit there for the day in the hope somebody will toss me some coins. Oh, I forgot, one of the local pimps is also passing by my pitch quite regularly now. So I am really spoiled for choices …

To be a successful beggar, it is primordial your clothes look not only like they are walking off you but that they have been picked out of a bin. A crutch is a very good idea, and so is a dog – apparently some people give money to homeless with dogs so the dogs get fed. But I think that a crutch and a dog are too over the top and so we have settled for the crutch on its own. I must remember to ask the beggar on a crutch that passes by my pitch seven or eight times a day – but who nonetheless can walk very fast when he wants to – where he got his. He also carries a couple of up-to-date Big Issue magazines which he sells to unlucky people that happen to be waiting for a train, a taxi, or simply drinking a beer outside one of the pubs about the station. Anyway, I assume that since the police turn a blind eye to him, and others who harangue people in and about Liverpool Street Station, so will they turn a blind eye to us. Or maybe not, given that we seem to always be singled out for special treatment.

My clothes are indeed starting to look like I picked them out of a bin because I simply don’t have the money to replace them … in one way I am happy the summer hasn’t arrived in Britain yet. I am also running quite low on toiletries. I had been going to Boots in Liverpool Street Station to take advantage of the skincare stalls there, where potential customers can try products by among others Clarins and Clinique – products which I owned before I had to dump them on my first day as a homeless person (because I couldn’t carry them). Almost two weeks ago, while I was at the Clinique’s stall, two police officers passed very slowly by me so I knew my days in Boots were numbered. Sadly, I wasn’t mistaken: yesterday, while at the Elizabeth Arden stall, one of the assistants came along and the way she asked me “Can I help you, Madam?” I knew instructions in relation to me had at last been given – needless to say I am now out.

It also seems impossible to shake the homeless off. On Tuesday at 8.15am, Declan had been at his pitch for forty-five minutes when a homeless told him that he was looking very clean, clapping him hard on the shoulder. When Declan asked him to take his hands off him, this homeless aggressively threatened to do his face in – later the same day a homeless woman shouted at Declan as he was coming out of the local post office that she was going to kill me.

Gordon Brown is turning out to be rather like his predecessor and already we are getting a lot of stick: the church can raise a glass of something expensive to the Brown year(s) to come. As Andrew Copson has pointed out, the UK is moving at a menacingly creeping pace towards a government that is in thrall to religion. Declan jokes that we may have to apply for asylum to the US. Wait – the US?