Rick can't leave drink alone. I’ve been on the streets since I was 18 years old and now I’m 33. I had disagreements with my family. My mother and father were divorced and I didn’t have anywhere else to go so I came out on to the streets. I still talk to my family but they now except the way that I am.

Over the last fifteen years on the streets I’ve seen a lot and you learn to take everyday as it comes. If you wake up in the morning you are lucky.

I’ve been drinking since I was about fourteen years of age. My father was an alcoholic and I’ve seen my father treat my mum bad. I thought that was the right thing to do but in the end I developed a problem myself. I just drink everyday now. I drink three or four cans a day depending on whether I’ve got the money in my pocket. If I do have the money then I can drink all day. There’s no excuse but it’s just to block out the hardship.

My days consist of seeing other people who are in the same situation as me . You get a close net thing around here. You look after each other, that’s they way it is on the streets.

I have had a disease of the marrow in my bones since I was young. Hopefully it’s getting better now but one of my legs is shorter than the other. I had to have an operation and I knew if I didn’t have it the disease would have gone further into my body. I was in hospital for seven months and had to go through physiotherapy to get my leg back working properl y. If it had gone through my whole body I would have been disabled for the rest of my life. It is still painful no w. I went into hospital for the operation and they had to drill a hole into my hip and scrape all the disease out of the marrow of my bone. I had to be in there for seven months to wait for my marrow to grow back. After I had my physiotherapy and everything they told me to go swimming and cycling to get my muscle back.

When I came out of hospital I was still homeless. I tried to get into hostels saying that I was vulnerable. There are so many people who are homeless now that they give the places to people who have got more priorities than me. That was five years ago.

Over the last five years I’ve been with my friends out on the street. You have got friends out there. They are not like everybody else who brush you aside and think you are nothing. There’s a close nit family out there.

I do sleep in different places but most of the time there is a little crew of us. A close knit place where we can get the soup run,something to eat at night. I get my head down about one O'clock in the morning when everything is quiet. You’ve got to be awake when the pubs kick out because you don’t know what the drunks are going to do. They’ve got something against you,I don’t know why. I’ve seen people being kicked, punched and I’ve even seen people being killed out here.

The government are trying to help us. They are opening the cold weather shelters again but they haven’t got the spaces for the amount of people out there. As far as I am concerned they are not being prejudiced or anything like that. They should look after their own before they look after anybody else .