EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 17

April/May 1999

OUR MAGAZINE IN THE
CENTRE OF LONDON
EPILEPSY & HOMELESSNESS

I am from Birmingham and I have been homeless about 7 or 8 months now. I have been backwards and forwards to London. Every time I stayed in London I haven't had a fixed address. I am staying in the cold weather shelters at night, but I am finding it difficult to find a permanent address, and I am going to be thrown out of the cold weather shelters and soon I'll back sleeping on the streets again.

Cold weather shelters are free to stay in, you don't have to pay any rent or anything, and all the homeless people go there to sleep for the winter. We are thrown out after the winter and we are back on the streets, basically looking for somewhere else to stay or anywhere to stay. If you can't find anywhere to stay you're on the streets for the night. We go to The Passage in the morning and get a breakfast and try and get a couple of hours sleep in the rest room as well.

When I was in Birmingham I was staying with my sister, but her boyfriend moved in and she had kids and that, so I got out and decided to come to London for a change. While I have been in London, the things I have discovered are that if you have got money it is a great place, if you ain't got no money nobody wants to know you. People look down on you like you're rubbish, basically, like you're nothing, like you don't exist, it's a place for people who have got money. I found it hard to scrape pennies together in London, but I can't do anything else.

What I do during the day, when I get up I go out to beg and get a few pounds. I go to The Passage as well and have a bath there, and then I go out begging to earn a few pounds so I can eat through the day. I have discovered you have to be strong in yourself to survive on the streets, because of a night-time you meet all sorts of people. You meet drunken yobs who want to fight you and you have to be strong minded to survive. You have got to be able to look after yourself and not let people take advantage of you. If you let people take advantage of you, they really do take the mickey out of you.

I am able to look after myself, I was brought up that way. My dad left my mum early, whilst we were young so we had to look after ourselves, that's the way we were brought up. I used to drink an awful lot, I never used to bother with drugs but I'd drink a lot. This is the type of place where you get sucked into those kind of things, like drugs and drink and you end up abusing yourself. So you have to be strong minded to get out of it. I used to drink an awful lot, and when I say an awful lot, like I used to wake up in the morning to about 5 or 6 cans. I took advice off people and that was it basically, I got my head together and got off the drink. What I mean by "getting my head together" is I was going down and down a road where all my day consisted of was drink, drink, drink and either that or I would have ended up with anything, bad livers, kidneys, I was really bad, and I have seen a lot of friends around London who have suffered and even died through alcohol abuse and I didn't want to be one of them - that's what made me get my head together and get off the drink.

I am an epileptic and I see a doctor in The Passage Day Centre who prescribes my medication. It is a bit difficult being on the streets and being epileptic, but you have to grin and bear it, its part of life. There's nothing I can do to change that and at the end of the day, I have to look after myself and my health. When I am sleeping out on the streets, I stay with people that know that I am epileptic, so that if I do have a fit they know how to look after me. If the worse comes to the worse, they will phone an ambulance, and put me in the recovery position and watch me.

Looking at my future, now that I am not drinking and that, I want to settle down and get myself a flat and try and get a job. Not many people employ epileptics, but I can still try. All I can do now is look up to the future.

In the past I have been locked up in prisons. Basically, all there is about prisons is that your locked up 23 hours a day. You get an hour's exercise until you get to an allocation where you serve your sentence. Then you get allocated a job, so you are out of your cell more often and you get association, and all that. I don't want to go back to prison. I am trying to stay out of trouble at the moment and touch wood, I am staying out of trouble at the moment. When I came out of prison after serving a three year sentence, the only problem is that there is not a lot of support for prisoners and help for them, they just shove them back on the streets and 9 prisoners out of 10 just offend again, just to survive.

I'd like to say to Edges readers; never just walk past a homeless person, say hello, give them the time of day, because they're only human after all. Just because one person is bigger than the other doesn't mean that a homeless person is not human.

SteveI HATE SWEAT BOXES

A Sweatbox is what we call the vehicle that takes you from prison to court. It has got a little cell door and a seat. There's a small window, but you can hardly see through it. You're just crammed in it. Some of them hold 8 and some of them hold 12 people, in all separate little boxes. It is a horrible place and I hate them.

By Steve

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