An empty back street just after midnight in a broken part of town. It could be anywhere - Genoa, Marseille, Hamburg - in the winter of 1977. I’m nineteen. Fine, dirty rain drives past closed up offices with broken windows and the sharp wind explores the depth of every sheltered doorway in a way that discourages drifters and tramps from sleeping there. One doorway is angled out of the wind. I find it, I have a nose for such places. I drag in cardboard boxes that I flatten into a thick, springy mattress and I prop up a bin that’s been left lying so that I feel like I have walls all round me. The only street light that works is more than a hundred metres away. I’m safe. I have a blanket, and when I pull it over my head and breathe my breath can’t float away into the night so it warms my nose every time I exhale. I hear trains shunting, sirens, cats and I’m desperately hungry.Monday, 3 December 2018
Sleeping rough.
An empty back street just after midnight in a broken part of town. It could be anywhere - Genoa, Marseille, Hamburg - in the winter of 1977. I’m nineteen. Fine, dirty rain drives past closed up offices with broken windows and the sharp wind explores the depth of every sheltered doorway in a way that discourages drifters and tramps from sleeping there. One doorway is angled out of the wind. I find it, I have a nose for such places. I drag in cardboard boxes that I flatten into a thick, springy mattress and I prop up a bin that’s been left lying so that I feel like I have walls all round me. The only street light that works is more than a hundred metres away. I’m safe. I have a blanket, and when I pull it over my head and breathe my breath can’t float away into the night so it warms my nose every time I exhale. I hear trains shunting, sirens, cats and I’m desperately hungry.
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