The cold war

My body is deformed from all this cold and fear. Woke with stiff, painful joints, and every muscle, in every part of me, feels like flint. Today, all I want to do is lay down on a flat surface. A hard, flat, warm surface; before I collapse down. I need some hint from my muscles, that one day, when all this cold is finally over, they will be able to slide back down again, nearer to where they once were.

Frustrating that I can’t find anywhere to do that — but there just isn't. Considered dragging one of the sleeping bags off into the middle of the woods yesterday, to stretch out on a bed of last year’s leaves. Would have been very muddy, but in the end felt too unsafe to go. Would be too exposed out there in a sleeping bag, where anyone could be watching from behind one of the trees, someone out with binoculars, peering through branches. Someone who might follow me back and realise that I am the woman from the laneway — the madwoman, who is living there alone in her car. I'm not, mad, but if anyone comes by I let them think I am, if they think you're mad they leave you alone. I try to visualise the enormous seagulls that used to land on the wooden tables outside cafe's, their mad, yellow eyes, swivelling with killer instinct, as they strutted about terrorising the tourists, daring them with those insane eyes to make one false move. When anyone walks past when I'm in the car I harden my face and think that look into my eyes. But out of the laneway things are different. Couldn’t bear the other people I come across during the day to discover this double life I am leading.

So I never went to stretch out under the trees in the end. But I’ll have to do something soon, before my legs cease up altogether. It's taking longer and longer to get to sleep. Cramps in my calves almost immediately, and more and more I get splintered pains shooting through whichever hip I'm laying on, ricocheting all the way down the leg to my toes. Have to continually roll over the handbrake in the sleeping bag onto alternate sides, to try to ease it. Last night I had to open the door on the driver’s side and let my legs stick right out, thrashing them about in the freezing cold for as long as I could bear it, to get some circulation going. I was terrified someone would sneak up on me before I had a chance to lock the door, or of a fox or something else being attracted by the interior light, and jumping in, but I had to lay with my legs stuck out there for as long as I could. Legs shoved up against a car door all night are not happy legs.

London is full of flat surfaces: corridors, landings, platforms, roads, benches, graves — and my body is drawn towards them all; all it wants to do is flop down on top of one, and I find myself continually weighing up the possibilities throughout the day. Usually, it is simply the presence of other people that stops me. Because still — after all this time — most of my energy during the day goes into keeping up appearances: pretending that I am fine, that I don’t need any help, that my life is still sunny side up. I dread other people knowing that it’s not. Of course most people do know something — it’s obvious these days that I am living a lie — even after I’ve been in to shower and dress in the hospital, I still look rough most of the time, of course I do, all these months sleeping out here in my car, despite what I tell myself.

But I can’t bring myself to drop the charade, cannot ask for help, which seems to infuriate some people. I can’t bear the glares I get from them these days, the disdain — people like the people I used to know. People who smirk and sniff now as they walk past, who tell me in gestures and glances that I no longer belong, as our eyes clash on the street. I try to shrug it off, tell myself that I don’t want to belong to people who could treat others like that, but I can’t help the coldness that slips in under my ribs, shrivels my heart to the size of a walnut. I dread what the future might be now. But what I dread more is anyone knowing how I’ve always been like this really — alone and unloved. How I’ve been pretending all my life really, ever since I was that little girl sitting upstairs on the pink bed, trembling, waiting for the police to arrive. That little girl who is still there waiting for the hug she never got then, for someone to wrap her in their arms and whisper that it will all be okay, that one day the trembling will go — that little girl who refused to grow up until she got that, who was determined to stick her heels in until that damage was repaired — even if it meant ruining a whole life — even if it meant years and years later living in a car in the woods. But I would rather die, than have anyone know that. Would rather sleep in my car through every winter there is, than have anyone know how deep the pain of the absence of love is.

The way to throw people off the scent is to avoid them altogether. Which is how I’ve managed life so far: keep busy, don’t stop, don’t talk, don’t smile, don’t leave behind too many clues. Books have been a Godsend. But of course you can never avoid people enough, London is seething with strangers: all the mad and the lonely, the possessed and the dispossessed, in every nook and cranny there waiting, with eyes like searchlights seeking me out.

A few months ago, when my back first began rebelling against the contortions I was putting it through in the car every night, was almost permanently moulded to the shape of the car seat and began screaming out for a hard surface, I found one in the hospital. In the chapel in the basement.

It is quiet and warm down there, and despite all the scraps of paper pinned to the Prayer Board everyday, hardly anyone ever seems to go in there. At least not when I am there. But it is always open, so whenever I need a sanctuary from people and ugliness and all this brutal cold, and can’t think where else to go, I usually end up there. I sit on one of the hard wooden chairs at the back and read, or do crosswords to keep my brain alive, or just do nothing — which sometimes I call thinking, and other times praying. Sometimes, if there is no one else about, I drag a chair in behind the stained glass screen and try to sleep.

There is a peculiar smell of burnt plastic and warm oranges in there, which I’ve got used to now, but there is carpet and vases of flowers and soft lighting too, and sometimes, when I sit at the back in the evening, recharging my phone, with my feet maybe up on the chair in front, sleepily doing my crosswords in the soothing light and eating whatever I have left in my foodbag, it can sometimes feel like home. The staff don't like me going in there though. They think I should go to the authorities and get help, but when they tried to get me to do that at the beginning I refused, point blank. I am not mad, and I am not going to let them or anyone else make me go mad. There is nothing that they can do — they can't section me for being in the hospital chapel — though I know the small, Welsh preist would still like to see me locked up, and after what happened last time I saw him, he is probably convinced, more than ever now, of how mad I am.

I'm not — at least I don't think I am — and they can't force me to go to the authorities — which really could tip me into madness at the moment. Even so it's best to keep my head down, not draw any attention to myself, so for months I have been playing hide and seek with all the staff in there, especially that one priest. I made the mistake back in September of going to them for help, and their reaction shocked me and made me determined never to go to anyone else. I didn't know where else to turn. I told them how I was living, how I had been living in my car since I was in Brighton and didn't know what to do. It was one of the weeks where I hadn't made ends meet, which happened quite a lot at the beginning. For two whole days I had eaten nothing but pumpkin seeds, and some sour apples I had picked from a tree in the walled garden of a vacant house that I once found unlocked. Those apples were the nearest to theft I had come, and I was at my wits end. I locked the gate to the street behind me, and sat on the wet grass under the tree eating them weeping. It was a new low, and I felt so humiliated and alone but just didn't know what to do. I couldn't look anyone in the eye, and with no money and nobody to turn to everything was spiralling out of control, and I knew it could only get worse.

I went into the hospital chapel that evening pleading with God to sort it all out for me. One of the priests came out to tidy the Prayer Board and I plucked up courage and asked if I could have a chat. I didn't really want the chat, I wanted the cup of tea and the possibility of biscuits that I thought might go with it. But in the end I told them my story and they told me I had no choice but to go to the authorities. Their attitude toward me seemed to change completely when they realised I had no family behind me, no money, and had lost touch with everyone else. It was as if I suddenly didn't matter. They got quite bossy, and I had my first taste of how everyone treats you differently when you have nothing and noone — even priests.

I tried to convince them that I would be okay, that I was used to being in my car by then, and just needed to tide myself over for the next three days, until money came. But they were adamant that I should go to the Homeless person's hostel to see if they could give me a bed for the night. When I said I wouldn't go and get help, they played their trump card and said that I shouldn't be in the hospital if I wasn't visiting, or a patient. Their words and stony faces shocked me, I had just discovered the showers in there and they had started giving me staff discount in the canteen. Without those things I couldn't carry on. I left making up a friend that I said I might go to the following day, and they didn't actually get me barred, but that's around the time when the security guards started following me around everywhere.

The security guards seem to think it is funny, my being there every day, a game, always walking around in pairs watching me as I try to be invisible among the crowd, hurrying along corridors to the showers or canteen, or the library or chapel, or some new deserted corner of the hospital I have discovered every day. Biding their time, waiting for me to feel more and more humiliated and more and more hounded. Carrying out psychological warfare, waiting to take me off screaming to the mental wards one day. But they didn't realise how strong I was, and I'm still there, running around the corridors, using the showers, and sitting in the chapel, outwitting them. If ever they come in I walk out. But I haven't seen any of teh priests for ages. The last time was a few months ago, when the small Welsh one stopped in his tracks when he burst in and saw what I was doing, as I stared up, through my knees, at his pot belly, trying to explain as he just walked off disgusted.

I had been fed up of listening to the same songs played over and over on the radio in the canteen that evening, and of being stared at, and of breaking into a cold sweat every time one of the black security guards walked past with keys jangling from their belts. I slammed the lid back on my tea and strode out along the endless corridors searching for a corner to be alone in. In the end I went to the chapel. I sat on one of the chairs at the front, facing the altar, that time, drinking tea and eating coconut macaroons and resisting prayer. My back was in bits. The altar is just a raised, carpeted platform. I sat for ages waiting for someone to come in, but when they didn’t I eventually half-crawled over to it and laid down. Straightening completely was almost impossible, my back felt like it had two humps in it, but after months of sleeping across the car seats the relief was enormous. I lay there groaning in agony, and eventually brought my knees up and tried flattening my back out by raising my hips off the carpet and sliding down. I was almost panting in agony and relief. The door burst open, and I was hugely embarrassed. I looked up through my legs as I half-lifted myself back up and saw the small, Welsh priest standing there, stopped in his tracks with his hands on his hips, glaring over half-moon glasses at me, in absolute horror. It was only then that I realised how bad it must actually look, and how offensive to be laying up on the altar platform like that. He knew I was still in my car and I tried to explain about my back, but he just walked out in disgust. And in case he came back with a security guard I ran back out the back way through the fire door and back to the car. I haven't seen him or any of the others since. But although I still go and sit in the chapel, and it is warm and carpeted and usually empty I daren't lay on the floor again. And there isn't anywhere else. See why people use benches now, though, if I could lay on one without anyone seeing me I'd do it every day.


Determined to eke out food properly this week, but ate whole bag of bagels, 2 packets of soy nuts and carton of yoghurt for lunch today already. Still hungry. Wore 1 layer less, psyching myself up for the snow.

Finding it harder and harder to be around people, to speak to them. Think I'll give up Lonlieness for Lent — speak to one new person everday.

Walk back to the car playing the House Game — which ones I'd buy, and thinking of the raid at the weekend on the Securitas depot in Tonbridge. Dreaming of the kind of homes you could afford with £53 million. What would you do in them though, that's the thing now — even I would probably soon tire of rambling around in a big, rambling house. Besides, you could lose yourself entirely in such a big space.

Islands of silvery light

Last night fell asleep dreaming of children. Warm and laughing — ones I've known, and of my own — the ones I'll some day have. Dream of holding them, the weight and smell and feel of them, the easy way love will come in like a benediction — of all the things I have to teach them. First thing I'll tell them about is trees — of how to be still and listen to them. Because at night, through this deep silence a calmness descends and you almost feel yourself being breathed. And laying there, cocooned in the bag, listening to the comings and goings of the wind, giving up your fears to a sky riddled with stars, it's easy to feel that things are being said, feel yourself leaning towards the trees, straining to hear. But some things are best left unsaid...even here in a blog.

Treating myself to some Brie tonight, was first thought as I woke up today, big long triangle of it. Almost had it for lunch, but trying to train my mind to wait for things. Good self-discipline, holding off having things for as long as possible. 'Choosing' not to eat feels a whole lot better than not being able to. Haven't touched the two dates I bought on Saturday, even though mouth waters everytime I open the food bag to take something out. Might have them tonight, sure the wait will make them taste better.

Not so cold today, was even warm enough at times sitting in the car to pull down the sleeping bag. Sky is a wintry blue, full of islands of silvery light, like pools of liquid mercury. Hard to be miserable seeing so much beauty everywhere. Think there must be something wrong with the wiring in my head. Because sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm homeless, it's too frightening to remember sometimes. Sit here distracting myself with reading, blanking things out...even though I'm sitting half in, half out of the sleeping bag, with all my wordly possessions on the back seat, I still don't register it sometimes, even when I'm sitting here blue-cold, shivering, just inbetweentimes I stare up mindlessly at the sky and the changing light and all around me without a thought in my head most times — alternately stunned by either beauty or fear.

Pink fish bones in the sky

Woke very late, looking up at spangles of silvery-green light, and hearing voices. Not in my head, thankfully only in the laneway. The sun came out this morning, the first warm morning this year, and everyone seemed to come out of hibernation. The top of the lane full of noise and dusty light and splashes of bright sunshine. And a great clot of people were milling around at the top by the main road. Seemed like a guided walk, but didn't wait to find out. Ran a brush through my hair, pulled sleeping bags down, exchanged fleeces and drove off to avoid them glaring in at me as they passed. Ducking to avoid being recognised as I drove through them at the top, and swung out onto main road. Hadn't even brushed my teeth or wiped the sleep from my eyes. Drove off down the main road looking like that, hardly caring that there were so many people about to see me like it. Feels like another milestone, standards dropping even further.

Parked at the hospital, but instead of going in to have a shower, ran across to the hotel on corner of mainroad with my washbag. Can wash in relative luxury there, which do at least twice a week. Hardly ever bump into anyone, but if anyone does come in I just avoid looking at them in the mirror, finish the wash routine and leave as quickly as I can. That's where poetry comes in, to have it in your head to recite at moments like that — moments when you are standing in a hotel bathroom brushing your teeth or splashing your face with water and someone's eyes you want to avoid are boring into you. I always make sure I never leave any mess, so probably not much they could say anyway. Although it's the things people say with their eyes that bothers me most these days. I want to sceam at them that, 'homelessness is not a crime.' But instead, I keep my eyes down, take a deep breath — despite all the noise they are making to get my attention — and go sit in that place in my head where all the poetry is.

Walked down to the supermarket. Out of the sunshine it was still cold, but the sun has taken most of the bite out of it today. Can't be long til it's always like this though, can't stay cold forever. Everything passes. Still had to wear all my layers — though all clean ones today from laundrette last night. Which made me feel almost human again. But even in the sunshine everything still looks dreary, every day the world a little more down at heel.

Hate that my perceptions have changed, that what I am seeing is changing. Used to see mostly good everywhere, not exclusively, but my eyes seemed tuned in to beauty. I'd pick it out wherever I was, and not even see the rest. Now all I see is the grime, all the meanness and misery and all these marginalised people whose images I can't shake from my mind. Harrowing sights many of them. Hate that I'm absorbing it all, becoming it. Hurry back from supermarket trying to look only at children, but dark, shuffling men lugging duvets or sleeping bags over their shoulders seem to be everywhere. Staring straight at me. Find myself constantly having to wrestle my eyes away from theirs.

In and out of bookshops and cafes most of the day. Lunch in McDonald's, crazy music and legions of mostly lone men lurking silently on the corner tables. Keep my eyes down. Know they probably feel same way as me, know I should react differently, be more gracious, but can't bear the tragic or lecherous looks some of them give me — that flicker of recognition when they look up from their coffees and see me walk in. Sends shudders through me. How can they recognise me? What do they recognise in me? I am not like them!... never ever will be, ever! Say it over and over to myself like a mantra as I chew on dry chicken nuggets and scrape my tray into bin, before bursting back out onto the street, into painfully bright sunshine and the arms of more hostile strangers. Everywhere I turn there is hostility and aggression, strangers and grime and doors slamming closed one by one. Doesn't seem anywhere left to run.

Refuse to be bullied by strangers eyes on the way back, and instead of lowering mine to the pavement as I pass them, I look up at trails of long pink clouds shaped like fish skeletons stretched out across the platinum-blue sky. I miss colour. Nice to see some back in the sky. Feels auspicious, think it'll be a good day tomorrow.

Worn out soles

Fed up of dragging myself through cold, grey streets all day, towards nothing and no one. Of just waiting for yet another day to end. Of searching out cafes and places to sit where I'm not yet familiar. Of face after face snapping shut when I try to smile at them. Of being an outcast. Of feeling uncertain of everything and unsafe, of not belonging...anywhere. Of feeling black and blue all over in this cold.

The soles of my shoes are worn slippery and I can feel every raised surface, every stone and crack I tread on. Can;t afford new ones, but can't stop walking either. More and more, I have to walk; walk away from all these disjointed thoughts, these painful memories that come like forks of sudden lightening across my mind. Life has been reduced to simply overcoming this cold, and getting through each day.

Harder and harder not to stare in at the glow of orange light in all the windows on the way back to the car.

Tonight I'm going to fall asleep whispering all my secrets to the trees.

Sleet, sleet, and more sleet...

Feel slightly detached today, everything a bit wrong. All the daily degradations and dissappointments are starting to get to me. Trying not to think about it too much, but hard to stay steady; up, down, up, down most of the day now. People still disapoint me. Still, after all this time I allow myself to be disappointed by them; some things just don't seem to learn. Not in any individual, just people, in all of us. All this life, this beauty, this opportunity — squandering it all.

Really didn’t want to get out of sleeping bag today. Waking up is getting harder and harder; taking so much longer. Everything a hideous effort. Stunningly cold. Whole head feels like a lump of ice today, face frigid, ears stinging, hands don’t work properly. Nose feels blue-cold, can’t tell if it’s bleeding anymore until touch it.

Phoned health club yesterday, job gone.

Only way to get through this whole thing is to shut down completely. Dressing and undressing in the car is a shock every time. Whole body and mind screaming at me not to do it. Defences on high alert, still protecting me. So tempting to just not bother, to just stay in the same clothes that I've slept in, for the whole week. No one knows me, what’s it going to matter? But it does, even now, and in a way I’m happy at that.

Almost numb with cold, wriggling about under sleeping bag pulling on and off clothes takes forever. Sit for longer and longer before I start, just staring out at the sleet falling all around me, sleet trying its hardest to be snow. Watch it fall pure white, and darken in the blink of an eye on the ground of the laneway.

Sit stiff, immobile, behind the wheel, full of unnamed fears, too cold to think or do, to react to anything at all. Conserving my energy for later. But I remember the advice is always to keep moving, so clench and unclench my hands, and at the bottom of the sleeping bag shake feet.

Run through in my mind how best to get dressed while losing as little bodyheat as possible, where exactly to lay my hands on everything I need, rummaging through the bags on the backseat in my mind, pulling things out: clean socks and underwear, the other outfit I wore the day before, boots, gloves, scarf, jacket, mentally dragging them all across the seats onto my lap, before I will myself to half-lift out of the sleeping bag, twist around and make a grab for it all, for real. Sometimes have to resort to tricks: this morning I think of those people who walk over beds of nails, or lay naked in the snow or on slabs of ice, and of how cold it must be in Moscow or St Petersburg right now — of mind control. Try to train myself to shut down more and more — to seal myself tight against this draughty world, the even icier cold that I sense ahead. But it doesn’t help much. Just sit there shivering as much at the thought of it. Have become very blasé about the chance of people walking down the lane and seeing me sitting here in sleeping bag, hardly care anymore; there are worse things.

This morning woke slowly, feeling uneasy; full of sad, defeated feelings. Must have dreamt badly. The sky was low, pearl-white, the air full of this continuous sleet, not easy to raise spirits against sleet. Thought it might snow, felt cold enough to, but it didn’t. Just white skies dripping white sleet. The light in the laneway still drips green though, which is quite remarkable. Don’t know why that should be, maybe it’s just all the ivy on the trees and bushes around here, and the moss and holly. But this morning it’s a much nicer thing to focus on. On each side of me, as far across as I can see, I’m surrounded by tall, winter trees — long, thin, grey-brown trunks coated in moss and lichen and squirming branches reaching out in what looks like agony across a pearl-white sky — but a lot of the trunks are thickly wound with ivy —scruffy, rampant ivy which grows climbing over everything — so there’s a lot of green still about. Green is a good colour to wake to, restful mostly. It’s a lucky colour too — sure I read that somewhere.

Disturbing thoughts to try to stay with this morning, difficult, abstracted. Decide to waste petrol by turning on ignition to listen to the radio instead. No one around to draw attention, and daytime, so okay. Rough, clanky sound of the engine worries me — if anything happens to this car, God help me. I dread that. Every time I turn the ignition in this weather I half expect it — a flat battery, or something else fatal. So far have struck it lucky. I swear there must be a guardian angel watching over this car. I really do mean it. At least that's what I tell myself as I walk away from it these days, leaving it there waiting in under the bushes, almost the same colour as them — racing green, streaked mud-brown by months of dirt and rain, perfect camoflage here in the bushes — all my boxes and bags recklessly lumped up under an old dyed-black sheet on the backseat. I walk off imagining a pair of angels either side of it. Huge, white-feathered wings draped across the green car roof, shielding it. When I get to the end of the laneway and look back over my shoulder, I see them there, standing either side of it —huge and white and radiant. Maybe angels really summoned that way. Becoming harder and harder to tell what’s inside my head sometimes these days and what’s outside it. A bit worrying that the difference sometimes seems less important these days too.

Behind the wheel, with the sleeping bag pulled up under my chin and earflaps from hat still down over my ears I sit motionless in a cage of sound — the Benedictus from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis coming over the radio raises hairs at the back of my neck, feel the sting of goosebumps along my left arm. Gorgeous, gorgeous, special music. As I peer off through the emerald light further into the woods I allow myself to be re-vibrated by the music, and feel some of the tension trying to find a way out of me. I eat breakfast quickly, wishing it were a bowl of steaming hot porridge — the last of the cottage cheese with a pile of digestives and one of the enormous, juicy oranges I have left. I save the other one for later. That, and about eight Digestive biscuits are all that's left of the food until money comes through tomorrow. Wish I could trade them for porridge. That’s all I want when I wake up these days, a big bowl of it topped with grated apple. Not sure I’ve ever had it like that, but these days crave it. Curious how my desires have scaled down as much as my needs since I’ve been in this situation, pared back to simple, natural things that I never really hungered for before, as if there was an essential set — or maybe I just don’t dare to want more.

Wet, scruffy laneway to wake to this morning — twigs, dead leaves and more of the small fallen branches strewn across the lane in soggy clumps. Bushes more ragged than usual too, must have been more wind than I thought last night. But this morning all there is is this sleet. Mostly falling straight down, not slanted by wind. Sleety — that's how I feel too, how I've felt for a long time. Like the sleet splasing down onto the car, something in limbo — caught between the rain it was and the snow it may become, but not becoming either, terrified perhaps — indecision to match my mood. But today, I know how it feels to be sleet.

Going to miss this green light around here, clear glassy-green. Will actually miss the whole kaleidoscopic play of light across woods and sky here. Been thinking recently that this is where I'd live if I could, right here in the middle of the woods. Not in my car, obviously, in a big glass house, full of books and rugs and blazing fires. Floor to ceiling windows in some rooms, with wooden oak shutters I could adjust to pull down over the whole house or across sections depending on my mood and the direction of light — like bamboo blinds on a jungle tree house, I hope I dream of that asleep tonight.

Right now the sky is mountains of pearl-grey light, feel as if you could just walk up and up through it; and in around some of the trees there are still clumps of snowdrops refusing to wilt in the rain — or rather sleet. Pretty sight, so much white and green; calming.

Hospital tap water from my bottle is icy, too cold to drink, hurts teeth and the back of throat, even fingers hurt holding the bottle, feel brittle like they might snap off. Take last of vitamin tablets with it as I wiggle toes into life. Scribble reminder on back page of blue notebook reminding me to get some more on Friday when money comes through. Have to write down everything these days, memory worse and worse. Glance through enormous list of things scribbled there. Head spins start as I think of all the tasks and list of things scribbled. 'Slowly, one thing at a time...' I remind myself, on the back page — scratching it out in green ink along the margin.

Head shoved down into my shoulders, feels like it has a lump of ice lodged in the middle of it, hurts to move, and right nostril is bleeding freely again. Plug it with loo roll and eventually manage to dress the way I’d already rehearsed several times, and drive off to the hospital. By the time I've swung out onto the main road and taken a few deep breaths, I am no longer The Woman Who Lives in the Woods — the car is tidied, all the evidence is hidden, and I might just be someone who has just leapt out of a warm bed, left the house in a hurry and for some reason is parking in the hospital carpark and rushing into the hospital. I could be anyone — there for all sorts of reasons for hurrying along the hospital corridors in an emergency.

Wish there was someone I was going off to meet today. Someone to smile at me with soft, shiney eyes. Someone who would light up when I walked into a room. The world is a different place when there is someone there for you at the other end — a whole lot warmer. Decide to walk through the park later, go look for the Parakeet tree again, see if the parakeets I saw there on Valentine's day are there again and nesting, or whether flown off.

Almost hope Australian girl comes into the showers today, after advice here, feel might be a good thing to start talking to her. Dread the creepy guy being there when I go in to make my tea in the canteen though, his eyes watching me pull teabag from my pocket, and as I brazenly go up and fill a cup with boiling water and come back and make tea with it, out of sight of the staff. That smile slithering across his lips when he sees me, his fingers fiddling with coins in his pocket. Break into a cold sweat as I turn into the hospital carpark and join the queue, feel ice cold shimmying down my spine, and nauseous just thinking about him.

I remind myself that if just thinking of bad stuff can make me feel like that — so physically ill — then thinking of good stuff must have the opposite effect — make me feel well. I remind myself of that and try to focus on good things. My mind not playing ball though, and difficult to even bring any of them to mind. Instead, for some reason, I find myself thinking of the little Philipino cleaner at the hospital instead, how sad he looked yesterday, with his enormous brush pushing invisible dust down the shiney corridors. Not smiling away to himself as he usually does. Suddenly occurred to me as I fell off to sleep last night that he may have family or friends in the village where the mudslide disaster was at the weekend. Kept me awake thinking about it, wish I could say something to him. What though? 'I understand'? 'Can relate'? 'I know what homelessness is like'? 'A friend of a friend of a friend of mine was once homeless...'? Ridiculous, to even think of saying anything. Selfish anyway, because occurs to me that would be for me not him, makes me realise how much I want to tell someone about all this. Don't know what I did before this blog, enormous release to share some of it here.

Queuing for a space in car park, still thinking about it, half-wish I could go over there, to the mudslide village, lend a hand, make myself useful. Couple of thousand people homeless overnight, maybe I could help, now that I'm acclimatised. So many natural disasters last few years, almost complacent, dangerous thing to get used to though. Still don’t know what I think. Shocked almost as much by fact that I didn’t react fully, not deeply anyway, didn’t cry. Maybe Philipine situation didn’t affect me as much though because only heard about it on the radio, without seeing images. Images have far greater impact ......get down off that bed, cover your eyes, don't look, don't look........Bit worried I might have shut down so much that I won't be able to react to anything anymore. Ever. Have to harden to survive, but hopefully is not permanent.

Did make me feel almost privileged to have my car after though. And at least I don’t have grief on top of homelessness as they all did, not immediate grief anyway. Will try to remember that, and to smile at the cleaner if see him along one of the corridors later. Even if he doesn’t know anyone from the village who has died, he is from that country so must be a bit sad anyway; I imagine ties to place can be as strong as family ones sometimes. I feel that about the laneway a bit already, will miss it when I go.

If there are words for this...

...today, I don't know what they are.

.

St Anthony, where has St Christopher gone?

I dread this cold damp. Seeps right into the core of you. As I pulled into my laneway last night felt the cold deepen. Drive half way down it, out of sight of the main road, further into the dark, close to the bushes. Back to a world full of mud and wet and damp; the dank earthy smells of the woods, which I usually love, settling into every pore, and last night sending chills through me. Nothing I can do warms me today. Hungry and nerves are in tatters. Days of endless rain. Sound of rain lashing across laneway and hammering down on car roof last few days almost drove me insane. Kept awake listening to it swishing through the trees. Harder to detect approach of any human sounds up the laneway in the rain, another reason why don't like it.

It makes good curtains though. And it's nice to be shielded off from the world for a change. Have never got used to being constantly exposed, laying in my car, surrounded by all these windows, big plate-glass windowscreen. I try to pretend that, because I can't see out (when I lay down across the front seats in sleeping bags, looking up) then no one can see in. But of course they can. Wish I could clear things from the back seats and go to sleep there, would be much more comfortable. Completely crammed with boxes and bags though, piled high, almost impossible to see over driving. Maybe should drive off to a skip and get rid of it all. Need a good nights sleep on flat surface, much more than need heap of boxes and bags. Books, clothes, knick-knacks, junk...nothing can get any money on. Would make a good, crackling fire.

Lost my St. Christopher necklace somewhere in the hospital on Friday. Must have left it when had shower, or had a loose clasp, and just fell off. A lovely discreet St.Cristopher on a silver chain. Loved the feel of it around my neck. Not sure if it was more religion or superstition, but really felt protected with it on. Asked in security office, they said nobody had handed it in, and that that was the only place any lost property would go to. Not sure I believe them. They think I'm a joke by now, always there on my own, thinking myself invisible as I hurry along the long bright corridors to and from the shower every day, or down in the canteen, sipping tea, huddled by the radiators. If people think you have no one then they treat you really mean. That's why, if you don't have a family you don't have a chance in life really. Well, nobody gets a piggyback through life do they. Still, it must help having a family. Went down into the hospital chapel after and said a prayer to St Anthony. Offered him £2 if he finds it for me. Figured, like everyone else, saints might look out for their own more. Seems not though. Four days and still nobody has handed it in.

Still no email about the Health Club job, or the architect's one. Will give it another day and then phone them making up a local address. Needs must...

Will get it, will get it, will get it...

Trying to Unlove

Wake up stiff and tired, telling myself I cannot do this anymore. Still don't know what to do instead though. Pains in my ribs and neck from laying awkwardly. The pains, like growing pains, in my legs from being shoved up against car door every night, are so constant now I hardly notice them any more. But it takes longer and longer to be able to straighten them and stand in the morning. Stuck up on tiptoes, agony trying to put feet flat on ground, Stiff, geriatric hips. Mouth dry, lips cracked and stinging, but forgot to fill bottles at the hospital last night and so I’m out of water. Parched. Soak cotton wool in milk and wipe it across my face, brush teeth with milk, leaning out of car door, and rinse mouth with some of it quickly before I register worse of the cold. Drink most of the rest of the carton as I scan the laneway, trying to recall what kind of night it was.

Another cold, wet, gusty night. Tipping with rain. Fitful sleep, impossible to get warm — despite all the extra layers and heavy-breathing I do down into the sleeping bags during the night in an effort to keep warm. Tented my jacket up over my head in the end. Think it was probably the anxiety about it falling during the night and smothering me that kept waking me — life is remarkably stubborn that way.

Last night took a much greater effort to get out of the car to go to the loo during the night. Had parked too close to the bank and couldn’t open the door wide enough to squeeze pass. Was about to move the car further out, but in the process found a way to avoid getting out of the car at all — and all that mud — by keeping one foot on the footrest of the car door and one on the bank and just leaning in as far to the bank as I can, and crouching in the dark over the ditch. It meant getting scratched and almost caught on the bushes, but worth it to reduce time in the cold. Why didn’t I think of doing that before? Mostly just on automatic pilot here in the laneway, try not to think too much about what I am doing, just do it and get it over with. Impossible to avoid the cold altogether though, and the constant drizzle. Locked the doors and snuggled quickly back into sleeping bag feeling pleased with myself, damp but smiling at how well I am adapting — who’d have thought it.

But immediately overwhelmed by sadness at exactly that. I keep forgetting that I don’t want to adapt to this situation, I want to get out of it. Have to constantly remind myself of that, must keep scribbling it out. That, and the soggy end of the sleeping bag, make it too uncomfortable to fall back to sleep straight away. Lay there with cramp in calves, listening to the comings and goings of the wind, and through it, what seemed like a car alarm going off somewhere in the distance. Seemed uncomfortably close though. Very restless. Wish I could get up and go for a walk among the trees. Want to feel something different to what I am feeling inside — this muddle of fear and sadness and anxiety, all this lethargy. and hopelessness. And a middle of the night walk in the woods might be thrilling, move me on. But too dangerous to leave the car. Can’t see the moon, lay back down and staring up through window screen search the whole sky for it, until ambushed by memories.

Once, when I was a very young girl, my dad stopped the car to watch the moon, on the way from bringing me back home one night. It must have been somewhere along the Old Kent Road I think, a bright, straight road that seemed to go on forever in a very run down area. We sat in the car for ages, watching a big old ivory moon in a very black sky sail up over the dirty rooftops. Just sat there with the engine turning over, watching it in silence.

Before we drove off he broke the silence by telling me that whenever I looked up and saw the moon he would be there, not far away, and to always think of that. ‘Okay?’ he said. I was already learning to shut myself off by then, and just sat on my hands and shrugged, continuing to stare right through the moon.

I wasn’t usually up late enough to see the moon, and for some reason was transfixed by it. Not sure exactly how old I was, but must have still been that age when you can believe two completely contradictory things at the same time, because, although I must have known the usual stuff about moons (I can’t see how I wouldn’t) somehow at the same time I had thought that every country had their own one. Like with flags. And so was puzzled, wondering how, when he went back to Ireland, he could still see this same moon and be close by. I tried to tell him with my mind how much my aunt and I needed him there. I sat on my clammy hands and turned to the window so that he couldn’t see my mouth twist with emotion and it snag across my face. I knew I wasn’t little anymore, and tried to ignore the hot lump of feeling in my stomach as I swallowed back the words I couldn't say, and tried to keep it from my voice and eyes as I shrugged again and told him that ‘I don’t need someone to be always there.’

The rest of the drive back was mostly silent. But in the wing mirror I kept the big ivory moon that was following us all the way home, in my sight — a bright ball of yellowy light, shrunken to the size of an eyeball in the wing mirror. Somehow it was reassuring having it always there in the mirror following us, whichever way the car turned. After the straight road ended, the car twisted and turned through the almost empty, light-smeared, grey streets all the way home. I’d wait for him to hit the indicator then would squeeze my eyes close and open them again once I’d felt the car straighten out of yet another turn, checking to see that the moon was still there. And it always was, almost close enough to lean over and touch it. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he could walk out into his garden back in Ireland and stare up at that very same moon that I could almost lean over and touch. Seemed incredible. Still does in a way.

Now when I think of that night, I see his eyes shiney with tears when I look up at him, and, embarrassed, feel myself quickly looking away, my face up cold against the cold, black pane. Not sure if that bit ever happened. I never forgot that journey home though, or the intensity of his words. Some things go so deep into you you couldn’t chisel them out, and that time did. Because still, whenever I look up at the night sky and am confronted by the unexpected sight of a big full moon I always think of him and that time, and how much in the end, when his other children found out about me, he let me down. How much hurt he caused, how I should hate him after all that has happened, but how, even though he can’t be my dad, he always will be, even though he can't admit it; he's the only family I've got, and I don’t know how to stop loving him.

What the mind can do is fly...

What the mind can do is fly.

Sat in the car last night absolutely freezing, shivering, wanting to be anywhere else, and after a while I was, just wasn't there. Checked watch and it was just after seven. Checked again, what seemed like a few minutes later, and it was quarter to midnight. Don't know where I had been but 'came to' feeling clearer, lighter, completely calm. Closed my eyes smiling, car suddenly felt snug and warm. Wonderful feeling. Fell asleep smiling — and slept like a log;)

Woke only once. Which is how I know that one of the foxes has injured its foot. There was a full moon in a deep aubergine sky, and watch it come out from behind scarves of black cloud. Stare at it until my eyes water, and feel like I've coaxed it out. Plenty of moonlight to see by. I must have disturbed the fox when I got out to go the loo, and watched it limp down the laneway, up the bank, and disappear into the trees. Slow, laboured journey. Hope it's okay.

Feel much brighter today. Went back into Camden to have my haircut. Several months overdue for one, didn't feel like it, but thought it might make me look more human. Dreading it though, sitting there with everyone else talking about work and babies and holidays. I've excluded myself from all of those. But turned out hairdresser had a cold, so she was almost silent and I didn't have to say a word. Afterwards to library. Applied online for receptionist job at health club about twenty minutes from my laneway. Think I'm in with a good chance...would be perfect — saunas, healthy food, postive attitudes;) Exactly what I need. Fingers crossed... If anyone reads this could they send out good vibes — thoughts or prayer. Much appreciated. Not so cold today...Blue skies... New haircut feels lucky.

Hailstones

This is a war of attrition...Everything I touch goes wrong today...machines hate me.

No energy to say anything at all...All my reserves feel depleted...Long, slow walk to supermarket in Camden Town, longer slower walk back. Everything takes ages...too much coffee...all too much effort...could sleep standing up, standing up walking...Overwhelmed by choice of foodstuffs in shop, everything seemed speeded up in there, too loud and fast and warm, all disorientating, trainers squeaking down neat clean rows, rattling trolleys, screaming children, clinical brightness...feels same as the hospital...people everywhere look sick too...just another ward. Stacks and stacks of things though...too much of everything. Black security guard leaning against customer service desk looks suspiciously like one of the ones from the hospital too...maybe he is. Dark, slanting eyes following me from under peak cap. Walkie-talkies hissing at my back, keys jangling...I'm too tired for this...leave me alone...thick, sweaty hands, need some water...Far too hot in there, too tired to shop, waiting at long snaking queues with too many sick looking people, air clogged with superbugs...Put down half-full basket by door without buying anything, and leave quickly before I pass out...security guards eyes like burrs at my back. Burst out into the grey light and filthy grey chaos of Camden high Street. Feels like I'm walking underground — literally — sucking in lungfuls of stale, gritty air. Can't wait for day to end.

Tall, lanky Indian man, big dusty hands and starey eyes, huge Adam's apple, tries to talk to me in the garage. Don't know what about, words richochet from my head, don't take them in. My head is like a dovecote, his words soft white birds landing on the edge fof it and flapping insanely before flying up, up and away off, none of them make it inside my head. He smiles a dirty-toothed smile, stands slowly scraping the grey bristle on the side of his face as I stare at him blankly. The scratching sets my teeth on edge, I grab my milk and stumble past a stiff queue of people —a blur of luminous yellow jerkins and crossed heavy arms — and back out to the forecourt. Everyone is laughing at me, but can't figure out why. Where have all the Good Guys gone?

Walk back in a brief, exhillerating hailstorm after lunch. Huge hailstones like polystyrene balls, pelting down on everyone, white jumping beans bouncing across the pavements. Can't wait to get back to the trees today.

Peanut butter and photographs...

Found a photograph of Adam this morning. He is only about seven in it, hair still those loose white-blond curls flopping over his eyes; a flushed, tolerant half-smile. Can't bear to look at it for too long. Big scruffy rooks, which rain has turned to black silk, are screeching down at me from the hornbeams opposite. Vicious, all-seeing eyes. Roll up window and slip photograph back inside covers of book before pushing it back in under front seat as I continue looking for missing socks. Discovered unopened jar of peanut butter that didn't know I had under there too. Must have rolled under before Christmas. It's good and salty and I ate huge amounts of it, scooping it out with my fingers like a greedy child — until mouth so clogged up with it can hardly bear it. Drink lots of water to try to rinse mouth. Leaves my stomach feeling like a mixer, full of hardened cement.

Arrived back at the car cold and wet this afternoon. People are bothering me more and more. Not any individual person, just en mass. Everyone seems so threatening, rushing about with tight, angry faces like they are going into combat. Feel constantly guilty as if I have wronged them. Don't know what I've done, but from the looks must be something awful. Me against whole world, not much of a contest. Didn't know where to go, can't sit in cafes, or hospital canteen all day, can hardly breathe with all those eyes on me, so drove back to the laneway to eat lunch in privacy. Beginning to long for the peace of it almost as soon as I'm away from it these days. Speed and screech and chaos of outside world is very intrusive, puts me on edge. Which is dangerous, not a healthy way to be.

Everything is still damp, the sky grey and overcast, with long islands of silver light way over near the road, and the distance covered in mist, but at least it's not raining again. In case it starts, I take loo roll and go off for a long walk through the wet woods. Take black bin liner scrunched into my pocket to use as ground cover, and sit in small clearing, in front of what I have been guessing is a wild cherry tree, to think. Determined to think more about what I can do to get out of this situation. Must be options I am not seeing. Whenever I try to think about it, to focus, just get all light-headed — my mind starts to float off, up, up, and away like a red, helium balloon drifting off across the treetops. For a while I sit there listening to the birds calling out across the wood — loud Babel of afternoon birdsong. Manage to wrestle mind back, and hold it down, but it's like stopping yourself falling asleep, the pull is very strong. Survival requires almost a different state of consciousness. Different type of thinking.

Seems simple: get a job so that I can save enough to rent somewhere to live. Completely stupid that I can't do that. Would be hard to hold down a job when you haven't got an address, but not impossible. Because I could carry on living in car, parking in hospital carpark in mornings and using the showers there to get washed and changed in, until I can save enough to get place of my own. But because haven't worked for almost two years now, no-one will give me a job. Not even the type of job you don't need qualifications for. Suppose there must be too many people wanting those. Have been signed up to three email job search sites since September. Everything from vacancies for basic filing and reception work, to retail, to qualified solicitor comes through my inbox everyday. Fire CV off for all the ones I might have reasonable chance at these days. Try to be focussed and realistic, but always end up sending lots off. Some days feel like I could do anything, other days need to run back and hide in my car - days when I'm totally lost without the comfort of trees. Apply for mostly receptionist or call centre jobs, which would be perfect while I adjust back into things and try to get back on my feet. Have never even got to the interview stage yet though, not with a single one.

Can't go to job centre etc. because they don't know that I am homeless. The same with the Housing Advice people. They won't even switch on their computers or talk to me until I tell them my address. But I obviously can't do that, because they can't know that I don't have one. If they find out, I risk loosing my money, and then it's all over. Because to get benefit money in the first place I am using my old address. I know that is wrong, but if they knew I was living nowhere they would stop it. Immediately. Then I would be left to the wolves — or have to go in and register as 'of no fixed abode' and go queue up with all the other homeless people every week, or get nothing — which, at the moment, feels about the same thing to me. I just can't bring myself to do it. Whenever I think that I might have to, that I've got to the stage where I can't do it on my own anymore and can't put off getting help, and will have to swallow the rest of my pride and go and register as of 'no fixed abode' I just panic. Feels like one trauma too many.

Think my spirit would be crushed, finally and completley, if I had to do that. The fear of that might be irrational, but it is very real to me, and almost overwhelming — the fear of being recognised by all of the other destitute people in the local area, and all the random fears that come from that. I don't feel able to look out for myself enough yet. Just because I can read and write, and have a degree, doesn't mean I can hold my own in situations with other people in these circumstances. I'm no longer the person I was, can't do the things she did anymore. Why don't people understand that...why do they still give me such a hard time? I can barely cope some days, unless I can dissappear for long periods into books — or now that I've discovered this blog then blogging. The added fear of knowing that other vulnerable, distressed people in the area may follow me, or discover where I am, would be too much. Unendurable anxiety. Not condemning all the others, definitely not...humbling, eye-opening journey this past year, so no... we are all vulnerable individuals in same boat; but we differ in our means of escape: huge stereotypes, but mine is through books ( can't allow myself even a drink these days, have to keep wits about me, and don't trust myself to drink alone — mostly don't trust myself to stop) and their's is probably mostly through drink or drugs. Darker more agressive pursuits, more unpredictable results. Which is why I can't be with them, or recognised by them. And which is why I won't go to the authorities and get locked up with all that. Ergo, here I am, still here, still here in this punishing cold. So it's a hell of my own making. I know that. I accept it. But I can only cope with so much at a time, and this way, at least I am still desperately trying to cling to my dignity, and to what's left of my sanity. And I'm hoping that one day I'll be needing them again.

Determined not to let it get me down too much. This is taking all that I have though — know I can't do it indefinitely.
Take mirror out and distract myself with plucking eyebrows. Want to laugh at the vanity of that, the ridiculousness of it in the middle of the woods, and in this kind of existence. But my eyes don't laugh back at me, are dead and flat, and I can't bear looking into them. Don't understand what the look is in them anymore, more of an abscence. Cold, grey light. Harsh. Hands and ears sting with cold. Feel myself on the verge of tears just staring back at the reflection, at how much damage has been done. Stop before tears come. And even though face is stiff, mask-like, try to practise smiling. Distract myself by talking to the trees about my plans for the future, and read aloud from Louis MacNeice's 'Autumn Journal' ( reminding me that '...you cannot make a corner out of life...', and 'a river is not a river that does not flow...'). Sometimes the right words come at the right time: I needed to hear that today — must not try to 'make a corner out of life' — especially here in my car in the woods. I'll have to take the leap soon, adapt...change...move on.

Glance up at a bright, sassy moon coming up over the trees, sucking all the colour from the sky — and suddenly aware of drop in temperature. Decide to spend evening in hospital library to read and use computer in the warm. Walk back to the car still reading MacNeice aloud, trying to project my voice way out into the trees, and to put some energy into it. And also simply to keep my throat open — have felt almost mute these last few months, talking to noone, retreating more and more into my head, even thinking a smile nowdays instead of smiling one — so that if I have to speak to someone one day I'll still be able.

Three, the Magic Number...

This afternoon miserable and lethargic — nobody had replied to the job vacancies I had applied for by email on Monday. Don't want to stay on this up, down, job-search journey. Too traumatic. Ate whole baguette filled with sardines, that I had made in the car when I left hospital this morning, for lunch. Ate it in the park, on a bench next to one of the silver birches, reading book, determined to lose myself for a while in it. But three things happened this afternoon to lift my spirits and take me out of myself for a while.

Firstly, earlier in the day, saw a clump of snowdrops growing under an oak tree and picked myself a bunch. Happy at the sight of the snowdrops, and fact that people probably thought I was bringing them home – home to put into a small glass vase set on a polished table at a window overlooking an ancient tree that stands guarding the house in the middle of the garden — or to give to my other half. Hate that I care so much about what strangers think, feels like regression. Thought I'd long outgrown all that, but when there is nobody else, strangers are all you've got, and their reaction becomes important. They are the only mirror I have these days. Hard to take a step back, most times, and see how cracked it is.

Then got caught in a shower this afternoon. I quite like walking in the rain, fewer people to notice you in the rain, everybody hurrying about their business. Would have been quite happy to walk through it and get soaked. But ran instead, not far, but across the grass, with jacket umbrelled over head, listening to trainers squeeking across the wet grass. Once started running didn't want to stop. Wanted to run and run and run... run from all the inside things; run everything out of myself. Could have as well, suddenly light and full of energy. Rain had cleared the air and felt I could breathe freely for the first time in a very long time. Shower stopped just as suddenly and when I turned the corner there was a double rainbow across the sky, thick and bright, all the colours visible. Glorious sight. Double rainbows are lucky.

Carried on walking back to the car and the third thing to cheer me up was looking up and seeing a family of long-tailed parakeets, lime green with bright red beaks, perched in the branches of a beech tree. Very exotic. Amazing sight. There were five of them, screeching loudly, drawing attention to themselves. Three flew off — stunning, swerving flight across the winter treetops; the other two stayed in the tree, where it looks like they are preparing to nest in a hollow in the trunk. Felt very fortunate seeing them there. Must remember to come back to the tree and watch out for them.

Three fabulous sights. Strode back to the car with snowdrops in my pocket feeling extremely lucky. Tomorrow feels like it will be a very good day. I'll be out of this laneway before I know it.

Hair wash day

Stayed in the car for couple of hours this morning, doing mostly nothing, breathing, staring at heavy, grey sky — wondering who Saint Valentine was. Had the rest of last night's Hummous for breakfast with carrots and an apple. Craved bread so much it made me wonder if I have an allergy. But had run out, so ate some of the ricecakes instead, thick with butter. Would kill for hot cup of tea. Which is often only thing that gets me to drive off in the mornings. Otherwise. If it wasn't for tea would just sit and sit some days, until food ran out. Better than crack or heroin I suppose.

Parked car in hospital carpark and hurried the long way round, around the back, into the toilets, where had a long, hot shower and hairwash. Been going there to wash for months now. Most days it's easy to slip in unseen among all the patients and visitors and doctors and nurses hurrying urgently about up and down the corridors. It's like a small city, with its own laws and rules, all those smells and sounds. In my head I try to imagine I am rushing in there to visit someone who has just been rushed in — which could account for my just-jumped-out-of-the-wrong-side-of-bed look. People seem to make allowances for that in a hospital, don't stare so much, or judge.

I weave in and out among all the moving trolleys and wheelchairs and stunned-looking patients in dressing gowns shuffling about attached to drips. Make my way, fox-like, down to the toilets with the showers in — threading my way through the crowd, head down, the way I see the foxes do at night, slinking in wet through the trees. Some mornings it is busier than others, often it's like walking into an episode of Casualty. Would be easy to imagine myself as an extra, part of the crowd scene. But don't allow myself to think like that, slipping off into fantasies — dangerous thinking.

Though it's getting more and more difficult to merge into the crowd unnoticed these days. Lots of the staff seem to recognise me now, and must know I'm not working or visiting — walking in there creased and unwashed first thing in the morning — or at least every other morning — dishevelled, disorientated, more and more down at hill. Nowadays they give me very hostile, cold looks, or the two black security men who tower above most of the others follow me with cold, suspicious eyes, which makes me want to break down and cry. Which is what everybody seems to want to do, break me down, get me into a loony bin. But I won't be broken, I am not mad, and I will not be made to go mad.

Tough though. Harder and harder... Always had friends, but never been great at making them. They have always found me rather than the other way round. So not sure I'll ever be able to change that. Gets worse not easier as you get older. Sometimes I wonder if I'm austistic, locked up here in my head. Think you can probably die from loneliness. Nobody smiles at me — except the small Phillipino cleaner who sweeps the corridors and smiles at everybody — though even he looks me up and down these days, seeing me go back and forth into the showers looking such a mess each morning with my tatty carrier bag of wash things, looking at me as if I've committed some kind of crime, cold disapproval in his stare. Must look much worse than I think. More and more ashamed of myself.

The shower is just an untiled, concrete space at the back of the toilets, with a vented window that, with the stone walls and stone floor, make it extremely cold. But amazing finding a place to shower at all, so no complaints. Went for a whole fortnight without showering when first drove back to London — trying to wash in hotel toilets or wait for pubs to open to use theirs. Can only do so much washing in public toilets though. Felt incredibly grimy and degraded, sour, unclean smell from hair and clothes. Impossible to get rid of. Unbearable. Out of my mind with it — and it was that that almost brought me to my knees and knocking on the doors of a homeless persons hostel. Until a few days later, rushing to use facilities in hospital, turned down corridor I had never been down before, to avoid facing security guard who was coming towards me, and discovered this place. Felt almost miraculous. The water is very hot, scalding at first after cold from outside, but once I have braved the cold to get undressed and stand under it, can't bear getting out. Thaw out completely. Feel my muscles try to lengthen. Though all muscles are stiff and shortened by now, especially in neck, which is cramped up against car door night after night with draft from windows coming in, completely contracted, can hardly swivel it these days. Keep telling myself I'll do lots of yoga once I get some warm floor space to use, but probably deluding myself, neck probably more or less permanent by now.

Someone rattles the door and knocks several times saying they want to come in to use the shower, and briefly I panic. There aren't any curtains or dividing walls, but there are two showerheads in there, so others can use it at the same time. Hate sharing it. Embarrassed at people seeing me come out and dress in my drab clothes and dirty boots, instead of into clean, neatly ironed work clothes as they all do. I unlock the door and then rush back under the steaming water while she undresses — staying in the corner bit where she can't see me. It's the Australian girl, tall and blonde and athletic, who is the only other person I have ever met in there.

Forgot to smile at her. But she chats away, through the wall to the changing area, as if she knows me — like I am a normal human being. I try to think what to say back - try to remember what girls talk about, small talk. If she asks me if I got any Valentine cards I planned to say that I haven't been home yet. Not too far from the truth. She doesn't ask, nice girl. Though she must have done, looks very loved, radiant. I strain, under the gush of water, to hear the stages of her undressing, so that I can time it, like the other times I've seen her in there, so that as she steps in I step out. There's a wall that comes half the length of the shower area, dividing it off from the changing area that has a slatted wood seat and hooks above to hang clothes. If I stand there, as close to the wall as the pegs allow she can't see me, even if she goes across to use the other showerhead.

She's never seen me in my old, creased clothes, and I don't want her to. My timings out and she gets in quickly, shivering, as I'm turning off the taps. But somehow it seems easier to talk to her naked, feels more equal. So I take time gathering shampoo and wash things incase she wants to say anything else. Funny being more self-conscious being dressed than naked, but these days I am. She steps in with her blonde hair pinned on top of her head and just a small pink hand towel, which she leans across me to hang up. I'm embarrassed at my dry pale skin next to her smooth tan, and my feet, which after being in the same pair of boots through a whole summer and now winter, and doing all this walking everywhere to save money on transport, are really suffering; my nails all yellowed, overgrown. Hobo feet. I try to curl my toes under and hurry out before she can ask any more questions.

It's later than I've seen her in there before, almost mid-morning; she must be doing shifts or on flexitime. She tells me she lives nearby and cycles into work late, which is why she showers at work, and asks me if I do too. She thinks I work there. She has a soft, kind face, looks sympathetic, and her voice is so warm and relaxed I'm afraid I might tell her the truth. I bite down on my lip and face the wall forcing myself not to weaken. The steam of her apple shampoo makes me hungry again and I force myself to ignore her and retune into food: what I'm going to do about lunch and dinner, and where I'll eat it.

I don't have a towel, so try to put a laugh into my voice and shout out that I've left my towel at home — like it's a one-off — incase she wonders why I'm patting myself dry with tissue. I like her thinking I have a home to go back to somewhere. 'I'm always doing that,' she says, and offers me hers. I feel like I've just made a new friend, but then remind myself that I'm not in a postion to make friends with anyone right now, so say 'it's okay, I'll manage,' in a haughty kind of voice, and crawl back into myself. I pat myself dry as quickly as I can with lots of folded loo roll, layer some inside my boots and dress quickly, still damp. I smother the dry skin on my face in lots of moisturizer, brush my teeth, tidy everything away in my rucksack, snap it shut, and leave before she gets out. I don't even say goodbye, just rush out into the empty corridor.

Feel terrible, she's so friendly. But once she found out the truth about where I am living, and why I am showering there she'd be different, wouldn't want to know. Attack is best form of defence, quickly learning that. As I hurry off down the corridor though, following the blue line out through A&E, I find myself imagining having her as a friend, and indulge myself for a while — all the things we could do, meeting for coffee, sharing lunch, pouring over women's magazines and holiday brochures, shop for shoes and clothes for girl's night's out. Austrailian's are used to sharing houses, sleeping on people's floors. I wonder if I could do that, just tell her I'm in between places at the moment, that accommodation fell through and I just need a few nights somewhere until I get things together; ask if she knows anywhere. Maybe she'd invite me to stay, give me a sofa or floospace. Maybe it'll give me time to breathe again, to think things through, maybe she'd sit me down and help me think straight, make a list, a plan, put my feet back on less rocky ground. She has such a kind, untroubled face, seems so confident, completely unbowed by life. Just being around someone like that would help. Make me remember what ordinary people are like, how life doesn't have to be like this, walking around terrified, bent over, eyes downcast, keeping to the shadows; you don't have to live under rubble of your collapsed world, you can start again, keep you dignity. Ridiculous thoughts, I could never be friends with someone like her anymore. Feel eyes hot with the start of tears, so turn back on myself and burst out noisily through fire door at the end of corridor and back out into my world.

Desperate for hot drink. But didn't feel like sitting around on my own in the canteen in there today — one of the great unloved. Feel like I have a sign on my back saying it. Well, always, but today being Valentine's Day more people are on the look out for it, all the people going by with sparks of light in their eyes, swinging bags, looking me up and down as I pass —unable to hide their love but unwilling to share it. Tried to tell myself that they are smug, stupid people, with something so lacking in their own lives that they have to make other people feel bad in order to feel good about themselves. But difficult to convince myself today.

Walked into the library instead, across the park. Walk fast, working up some warmth, and trying to forget about making friends with the Australian girl from the shower — about cracking myself open again and asking for help. We are in different worlds now. I lower my eyes and keep them down, don't want to see any of the loners who walk the park today. Dread being indentified with them. Feel bad that I can't give them the kind of smile that I feel so in need of myself today, but I'm sorry, I just can't. They seem to be in hiding themsleves today anyway, everywhere I look people are in pairs, bundled up against the cold. In the distance, up on the hill, two pink and purple kites roll over each other against a flat, gunmetal-grey sky. The sun tries to come out, cold, weak sun, but it drips silver through the trees a few times and sight of it lifts my spirits.

Get to library. Drank tea, drank more tea, looked at an almanac and a book on Saints. Check blog and emails.

Raindrop symphony

Surely someone's done one? Rain isn't the constant, depressing sound I always thought it was. Never knew there were so many weights and textures of it as I've experienced here in the woods, especially in the last couple of days. After I had got out to go to the loo last night lay listening to it for ages, unable to get back to sleep. Windows steamed up with furious breathing as tried to get back to sleep. But drops came splashing and pelting against different surfaces and at different heights from all around me.

At first all I could hear was the drumming down on car roof. Drove me demented as usual. But then began to single out other places it was falling, onto leaves, branches, fallen twigs, the ruts of laneway, splashing softly against grass. Sounds which were at first, with tiredness, and at best, irritating, became quite beautiful after a while. A whole symphony going on around me. Quite liked it in the end (except for drizzle blowing in through tops of windows). fell asleep trying to tell myself that everything has its upside. Think I'm just deluding myself though. All my energy is going into surviving this, when it should be going into getting out of it. Seem incapable of doing both at moment. Need to focus more, and make sure I do that.

Swarovski Crystal

Another long Sunday out of the way. A weekend full of rain and damp and troubled spirits. Grim, unsettling. Waking later and later. A few months ago when I first parked up in the woods I’d be shocked if I wasn’t up and pulling on day clothes by seven o’clock. Nowadays not unusual to be still in sleeping bag at nine. Wriggle to sitting position in driver's seat with bag pulled around shoulders and just sit there staring out, slowly breathing myself into the day — always something to distract me: the underside of squirrels making impressive leaps across the branches tangled across the sky, or across at the birds flitting delicately from branch to branch beside me, or today one falling noisily through the bushes. Anyone could come along and see me, my hair all mussed, sleep still crusted in my eyes, toothbrush in one hand, Evian bottle in the other, but not moving, almost catatonic, just sitting there staring out. Becoming too blasé. Maybe I want people to see me, maybe my laying there longer and longer is my way of saying help me. Hardly care what a mess I must look, or how messy the car is getting first thing in the morning, clothes draped over seats, my jacket, boots and scarves in a heap on the backseat, ready to quickly pull back on. Weird how you adapt to circumstances. This time last year could never have imagined myself staying in a car overnight — not even for a single night — and now here I am feeling almost at home living in one. Insane.

Have even found myself wondering a few times recently if I’ll ever be able to live inside four walls ever again, without feeling trapped — whether I’ll still be able to breathe, still hold onto my sanity back in some centrally heated magnolia-coloured world. Mostly I long for that of course. But occasionally, recently, I alternate between longing for it and dreading it…Worrying. I’d exchange the cold and pain and this wretched damp with almost anything, long to be warm and safe and away from all this. But the freshness and freedom I wake up to, surrounded by all this beauty and peace, this deep silence I merge into day after day is addictive. Will be much more difficult to give up, impossible to replace.

I’ll miss trees so much; feel so guarded by them these past months…allies and guardians. I’ll miss the sky too. That is my new love. Recently have been utterly dazzled by sky, and the beauty of light. Even at its dullest the sky is mesmerizing. Laying across the car seats, staring up through the window screen, it's all I can see. Last night reminded me of laying in Pete’s bath all those years ago on the Finchley Road, staring up through the glass domed ceiling of the bathroom in his newly renovated attic flat, straight up at the sky; soaping each other, laughing, making outrageous plans, me certain we'd have a love that would outlast us both. At a time when I only knew what love wasn't. Bessie Smith or Ella Fitzgerald on low in the background, taking us through it. Laying back against his chest, water up to my chin, both staring up hard into the sky, me embarrassed by our naked reflections against it, but staring past them, further into the sky, until we spotted dull stars splattered across it. Naming our own constellations. Seems like someone else's life, now...Incarnations ago.

The car seats are so low down, that staring up through a slope of plate glass it’s easy to forget that I am laying in a car, seeing from the other side of a glass screen. Clear enough and cold enough to feel like I’m laying outside. Lay there more and more these days, in a stupor, doing nothing, shut down, not happy not sad not even cold, not anything, just staring up, watching heavy clouds drift or hurry past, the bright or dull sun, bits of the moon, families of birds coming and going; time passing. Until you see past them into nothing at all, up up through the sky, into the depths of yourself. Difficult to remember from down here looking up that if anyone walks by they can see in at me. All I can see is sky, and at the edge of the glass a few bare, overhanging branches. People do come by sometimes — often double back on themselves and stop and stare, standing there huge against the sky, looking down, frowning or sneering. They often have maps in their hands, walking boots on, perhaps my car's on an ordinance survey map by now: The Old Green Car, a new landmark by the woods. I’ve learnt not to show fear anymore, to control my expression and breathing, and stare right back at them. Except I'm not staring at them, I'm staring through them. I see blank faces, or heads full of cloudy blue sky; I'm looking at Dali prints. But I don’t think they know what I'm smiling back at.

I woke this morning to a mackerel sky, cold and hard looking like crushed, dirty ice. It was before nine, and not as cold this morning — slept deeply, but woke several times sweating in my layers during the night — but the bag was damp and uncomfortable to wake up in, cold rain spitting in through tops of windows most of the night. Lay motionless for ages, peering up at the pale sky through slit eyes, trying to recoil back into the tail end of a dream. Not sure if it was a nice one about Adam or one about Ellen and Mum, all three were in it, and me swimming in a hot swimming pool with a gold tiled floor. Trying to remember, trying to forget...

Slowly realise I have another nosebleed. It is only from the right nostril, have had it on and off for the past few weeks, just the cold I think, could be worse. Dab it with loo roll and search under the seat for breakfast. Pull out rice cakes and bananas and a plastic container of dried fruit. The milk as usual is cold as could be, like it like that, but today my teeth feel on edge and cold hurts. Dress quickly — an adept — pulling things on and down without exposing flesh to the cold, my hands doing all the work as I search the branches for a bird which sounds like gunfire going off in the trees. Can’t find it, but see a handful of tiny green and yellow ones — impossibly small, almost mistake them for buds. No longer raining, but everything is still wet, last night’s rain dripping from the ends of branches. Sleeping bag all damp at the bottom, rain got into my boots which I'd left up on a pile of boxes on the back seat. Everything is probably mildewed inside. Am out-growing my old life so quickly though probably won’t need all the things in bags and boxes much longer. Seems excessive, indulgent to have so many things, even just a carfull. Complicated reminders of another life. Useless remnants.

Just as I think back to the life I once had and my spirits sink further, the sun breaks through — briefly — lighting up all the dripping rain through the tangled branches, and for a moment the whole wood, everywhere I lay my eyes, is hung with Swarovski crystal. Spectacular sight, dazzling; wherever I look the light is bursting through raindrops along all the branches and hanging from the tips — trees sparkling, hung with all that jewelled light. Then the sun goes in again, just as quickly, and there is just damp greenish-brown bark and drips of old rain at the ends of the branches again, and I’m left smiling but puzzled, wondering if it was a moment I'd imagined. Finish dressing, and nibble on bits of dried fruit. The apricots, which were flat and wrinkled last week, are plumping up, which means the container is no longer airtight. Must remember to get another one.

Car looking very shabby. I keep it clean and tidy, but such a cramped space, and after a week of food crumbs and mud and bits of paper and packaging and what not, it soon gets untidy. Beginning to smell of Hampster with all this rain. Mondays I clean it out, shake out sleeping bags, stay a bit longer before I drive off to the car park with windows and doors open, to air everything. Needs it today, after all this mizzling rain. Try to rouse myself, remembering that it's important to stick to routine. Difficult not to let standards slip though. You don't see it happening, who you once were is no longer there to judge. Determined not to let myself go completely though. Will make an effort this week.

WanderingScribe said...

WanderingScribe said...

(Ender, this is my reply to the comment you left in my last post. I have also emailed you, but I had trouble putting comment on, not actually sure if it went on in the end — didn't go on first time, had to type it all over again...Maybe given what it is about, best to put it as its own entry here anyway. Hope so...)

'WanderingScribe said...

Ender, thank you. I'm not sure exactly what to say about anything right now, but particularly about help...my head is full to the brim with words, but also somehow strangely empty. Thank you for reading though — and all the way from America too, wow! amazing — I really appreciate it. But as for help, I am at a loss as to know what to say. There was me saying how fearless I had now become in the last few months...and I have in a many ways...but in the last couple of days I have felt myself curling up again. And I suddenly don't know how to respond to kindness.

Because people have been so kind — and I hate more than anything to think that that hasn't been genuine, because I have had so many supportive emails from people, and it has been such a boost to be supported in this way. I feel connected all of a sudden, suddenly feel less alone, running back and forth to check and type my blog! Sad, but feel I have purpose again. Almost giddy with buzz from people's response in the first few days. But I arranged to meet someone, yesterday evening, who had read my original blog on ODM's site. She was almost the first to get in touch, and we have been emailing over the last few days. She was apparently quite local to where I am parked here, was very kind and very supportive. And she really liked reading it too, and suggested we meet for a coffee somewhere.

I've been on such a high the last few days, have felt really good about typing in this blog, and particularly the variety and speed of people's response to it, and she sounded so nice, and I...well, I suppose, am so desperate to get out of this situation, that maybe I don't even want to look at the consequences.
I have been quite cautious in my response so far, but she was kind of local to where I am — or so she said — and a woman, and seemed so nice that I arranged to meet up for a coffee in a place quite near here. And I know this sounds silly, but I was really looking forward to it — simply to sitting down to drink coffee with another female, and just even maybe to be seen with another person really, after so long of being on my own wandering about the place, sitting alone in all the local cafes for the warmth, making cups of teas last, trying to block out all the sad songs blaring from the radio and the lonelinesses of others, becoming uncomfortably visible. So I was looking forward to coffee with another woman, a chat, but yesterday 'she' let me down. And I really don't need my trust messed around with like this.

We were supposed to meet last night, but the fifth email I got from her, was sent, by mistake I assume, from what seemed like a man's email addres. And in the automatic signature at the end of the email there was website address. Took me a while to figure out what it all was, and who 'Carl' was, but when checked website in cafe yesterday there was very disturbing and unsavoury images and stuff. Confused and then shocked me. Of course I didn't go and meet, but emailed 'her' again several times yesterday afternoon about it, but she hasn't replied. Has upset and freaked me quite a bit.

Know lightening doesn't usually strike twice, and that majority of people wouldn't ever be like that, but the last thing I need right now is to have my trust messed about with. Feel too fragile, a bit too vulnerable still, to use my own judgement to stop me jumping straight into the proverbial frying pan. Yes I am desperate to get out of this situation, yes I hate the cold and laying cramped up in my car, almost more than I have hated any one single thing, but I've come through enough to know — know most of the time — that there are worse situations out there than being on your own in a car. And I don't want to run straight into one.

Am determined though not to let it stop me getting out of this situation, or to let just one person make me doubt all the others who have kindly emailed me. Didn't write it in here yesterday, wasn't sure whether to mention it or just to give up the blog, maybe start again, with another one under a different blog name. But I mentioned it to someone else who had got in touch with me after the last post and they talked me out of it — thank you;-) There really are some good people out there, so I am not going to let this darken anything, or stop me seeing the good which is obviously there. I will uncurl again..like a new leaf does in spring — which as you said is coming soon — but I think I do need to exercise a bit more caution.

Is a monstrous dilemma: More cold...? Some help...? More cold...? Some help...? More cold...? But I need to be careful about rushing into anything — I feel like I have several skins missing at the moment, and need to look out for myself. Though obviously at some stage I will have to take a leap of faith — can't stay dangling on the edge here tapping away into a blog forever. Feel a little bit uneasy right now though, but like I said I WILL NOT LET THIS STOP ME! Everyone else who has replied has been so kind, and I refuse to be made to think differently.

And although it has only been a few days I have enjoyed writing in this blog, and in knowing that there are people out there hearing me. Feel like I am beginning to reach out — it's a bit like prayer really, talking to you all this way across the ether — but with answers almost immediately... feel very buoyed up by that.

Difficult to explain exactly how much that means to me after all this time...but it really does — and even in a few days has made a difference. So I am determined not to let one person and thing spoil that. I will keep typing here, and I will get out of this situation...and aint nobody gonna stop me...Thanks again, Ender. Will email you very soon.

The Unbearable Heaviness...

...of being cold — all the time. Cold has got into my teeth, into my eyebrows, into my chin, my hair, my sternum, the curve of my waist...It is circling my tonsils, stiffening my eyeballs, hanging from my lashes. The cold is in my car seat, on my dashboard, in my pen...It is in the branches of the trees, the brightness of the moon, here on my tongue, underneath my fingernails. Today I have the cold in my soul.

It doesn't get easier. The radio forecast said it wasn't going to be as cold last night, and seemed about right because yesterday was quite mild. Mild enough to wear fewer layers, so I didn't expect it to be quite so cold at night. But it was. Must just be feeling it more. Maybe I need to eat more. Though had lots of hot food and drinks yesterday, always do at the start of the week, and still have some of my vitamin tablets left, which I remembered to take before I went to sleep. Had to get up to go to the loo several times, and once to put on an extra layer, because lay there freezing when I got back into the car. Lay staring up through the charcoal light at the moon. Too dull to see any stars, but the moon was so beautiful it would have trumped them last night anyway. Grabbed all my attention anyway. It must be only a day or two off fullness, a big squashed ball of brightness, right up at the edge of the sky, cocooned in bands of oily light. Tried to blow warm air down into the sleeping bag, but didn't help warming extremities. Eventually had to get out of sleeping bag and reach back, rummaging about in bags on back seat to find another layer to put on.

Even turning is not a simple thing to do when you're cocooned in several layers: including a big old mohair scarf wrapped around your shoulders, and all bundled up in a sleeping bag, with another one over you, but getting up during the night is a nightmare in itself. But at least I had clean 'layer' clothes to take from the bag last night — really miss the smell of clean stuff. I have two carrier bags at the front of the back seat, concealed under the black sheet which is thrown over the rest of the stuff piled up on the back seat and in the rest of the car. One of the bags has my two 'good' outfits in, which I wear on alternate days. The other has lots of extra 'layer' clothes in, which I wear underneath during the day, and at night.

It would be too difficult to start putting together different outfits, while still trying to keep everything neat and easily accessible in the car. So although I wear different layers underneath, I only have two (sometimes three) outfits for the outer layers, which is all anybody ever sees me in. So though I manage to shower and keep myself clean, I must seem an oddity wearing these same two outfits day in day out since August last year. Becoming too easily identifiable now too... Notice all the other homeless, marganalised people milling about during the day, on the benches, lurking in doorways, sitting about restlessly in teh libraries, so they must be noticing me too. Worrying. Be great to know, at times, what people think of you, most of the time you wouldn't want to know, but on occassions... Not sure it's the kind of reality check I need right now, but still...

Anyway, most of my clothes were dirty by yesterday, as they always are by the end of the fortnight. So when I got money and went to the laundry with the laundry bag from the boot, I took one of the sleeping bags too. Put it in the dryer and it still had some of the heat in it when I got into it last night. Though was still cold, couldn't stop shivering...Even had on an extra clean, warm layer, but couldn't think for the cold. Forehead feels like a lump of ice. Constant ache. Like that pain you get from eating icecream too fast. Press my palm on it to ease it, but still it's there, squeezing my eyes half-close, darkening my thougths. My eyeballs feel stiff. Constant frown, expression frozen into mixture of horror and despair most times.

Can't bear to look at myself in the mirror these days, not sure who it is staring back at me. Difficult to watch myself age daily too, so rapidly. Complexion grey. Hair is still dark but sat outside a pub last night, which I'd gone into to brush my teeth and hair etc before I went back to the car for the night, and just as I was about to drive off, noticed in the rearview mirror lots of grey hairs coming through. Sat there trying to pluck them out. Still there trying to do it half an hour later at closing time as everyone burst out noisily onto the street. Can't beleive still have all these small vanities left after all this time. Probably my salvation.

Wish I could blowdry my hair. Got a hairdryer in one of the bags somewhere in the boot, just can't find a place anywhere to plug it in. Difficult to blend in and be 'invisible' with hair like this - thick and wild, stubborn hair, full of electricity from cheap, nylon material of sleeping bag — and probably all the electricity leaking from nerve endings shot to pieces, by now. See lots of other people like me all around the place now, more and more visible to me, and seems me to them. Some of them break your heart - looks like my feathers are changing whether I want them to or not.

If I had a hairdryer and somewhere to plug in my iron so I could make myself more respectable would make all the difference. But there is nowhere. Before Christmas had my one and only job interview. Of all the applications this was the only one that came through, and I was determined not to mess it up. The interview was in the afternoon, I washed clothes early next morning but I had to iron them, there was no way I woudl get the job turning up with creased clothes. I have an iron somewhere in the boot, and when I went in for my shower in the hospital, I brought it in with me, sure that there would be some corner of the hospital that I could plug it in. I ran around for almost half an hour getting more and more frantic, running from place to place, floor to floor but couldn't find a socket where there was no one around and I could use it discreetly. Down on your hands and knees ironing on the floor of one of the hospital corridors is not soemthing you can easily do. In the end I drove to one of the churches I hadn't yet been to, knocked on the presbetery door, told the the eldery, stooped priest who looked like a saint that I had just come from the laudrette and had lost my door key and had to iron something in an emergency, and he let me in to use his. That was before Christmas, I was still respectable looking enough to get away with things then, not sure I would now been too long sleeping in my car slipped into a different world. This is not easy, no help out of it once you sink to this level, not really, probably bits of charity somewhere to keep you treading water, but nothing to get you back where you were. I understand why people do drink or drugs or crime to blot it all out now. Hellishly difficult.

Hungry for company, for someone to smile back at me. Can hardly remember the sound of my own voice. Drove off back to the laneway thinking of the owl, wondering if I would hear it tonight. As I turned into the laneway was for some reason overwhelmed with emotion — a sudden dread. Maybe that is cause of all this cold.

Fell asleep thinking of the girl I used to be, the one who used to laugh, and dance — the one who wouldn't believe all this was possible, not in a million years.

Thank God It's This Friday...

...because every other Friday is the day benefit money comes through, and boy do I need it today. Had run out of food early yesterday and was hallucinating it by the time I went to sleep. Bought packet of fruit shortcake biscuits from the hospital shop (71p), with the last of the money, when went in yesterday to shower. They were supposed to last me all day, but never manage to make them last. Had 12p left. Too frustrating being so hungry and having 12p left in your pocket, better to have none. Put it into the Marie Curie box hanging from the counter and went in to fill large, empty Evian bottles with water from the water font in the canteen.

Spotted the tiny Phillipino manageress at one of the coffee machines in the middle of the canteen, emptying it of tokens, into the pocket of her white overall. Tried to think myself invisible, weave in and out through the crowds, but know she spotted me. Couldn't avoid her. She has cropped black silk hair and wears bright red lipstick and noisy yellow-gold bangles that announce her arrival, and a tiny button up white overall which is always immaculate and which must be made for her it's so petite. She was the one who lent me money for a meal a few weeks ago. I didn't want her to, but she insisted, and looked at me in a way that let me know she knew how difficult things were for me, can't bear that, even her smile feels like charity now, find it hard to face her since.

I didn't have my purse on me, and got to the till with a bowl of soup and portion of baked beans without realising I didn't have it. And it was her on duty, perched up, tiny and fragile-looking on the high stool, and after searching frantically for my purse I explained that I must have left it at home. I did have money that day, and really had left my purse behind - in the car - it was just a mistake, not a lie. But I'd left it the car of course, not 'at home'. But then my car is home at the moment, so it was hardly telling a lie, but she made me feel as if it was a lie, and her offering to lend me the money, her covering over the lie for me. I felt so humiliated, sure everyone else in the queue thought that too. It felt surprisingly good saying it out loud, though, saying something as ordinary as that, that I'd left my purse 'at home' — even though both of us blushed and our eyes skidded across each others. Because somehow she knows. maybe she's seen my car in teh car park, loaded up with all my stuff, seen me go in and out of the showers, seen the same clothes on me week after week. I don't know, but she just somehow knows.

I heard myself say 'at home' too loudly, almost savouring the sound of it, and half hoping that all the others in the queue would hear and realise I had a home to go back to. It was proof... I was telling them as much as her. I insisted on going back 'home' to get it (ie. out to my car in the carpark) but she insisted that the food would go cold and that it was okay and gave me money straight from her own pocket to cover it until the next day. It was kind, but she was acknowledging my state too and I wasn't ready to have anyone know that yet. I felt hugely embarrassed, but didn't want to make a scene. Felt proud too, though, as I walked over to my regular table by the far radiator, proud that so many regulars who I see in there all the time had overheard me. Now they would at least know I had a home, and because I was willing to walk back to get the money, that it was somewhere nearby.

Went to the car park straight after had eaten and came straight back in with her money, but still I feel embarrassed seeing her. Felt fantastic at the time though, saying I'd go back home for it. For a split second even I believed me, and images of all types of homes loomed up and then collapsed down before me as reality and fantasy collided. It felt extremely good to have fooled the others in the queue into thinking I lived locally. Hope the fat, grey-haired guy with the red-check shirt was there, I almost shudder when I see him in there these days, always hanging about, a smile slithering across his lips, he is giving me the creeps more and more.

Know I didn't fool her though. Even yesterday, weeks after, felt her eyes on me the whole way across the canteen. My back burning with shame as I made my way across. I've been going in there for months now, sitting in the canteen for warmth night after night, sipping on cups of tea — which, since I bring my own teabags in, and they have big urns of boiling water at either end of the canteen which you are allowed to refill from freely, I don't have to pay for! All of the staff obviously suspect something odd about me at this stage, sitting there on my own, day after day, evening after evening. They know I am not a patient or a visitor at this stage, and even though most of them give me staff discount now they obviously know I am not staff either. They don't tell me, they just ring it up and I stand there trying to think myself out of my body and to keep my dignity, until I can hurry away with my tray. I only found out they were doing it when there was a new waitress on teh till one evening, she asked me if I was staff or visitor. I was about to say visitor, but the other manager, the man, came past and siad in a low voice' 'yes, she's staff,' and then just walked off with a small nod to me. I could have died. That nod let me know that he knew how difficult things were for me, and that he was giving me staff discount. I walked off choked with tears that he knew, that they all knew, that my circumstances that I foolishly thought I was still managing to conceal was an open secret in there.

But I don't think they actually know that I am living in my car, just that I am going through a bad time and don't eat in there because I don't have money to. But I feel like she actually knows. Knows that I am in there in the evenings only because I don't have a home to go back to. Don't know why I think that, of her in particular, she just has this very knowing look about her. She makes me feel like glass. She didn't say anything when she gave me the money, she never has, just watches, knowingly, as I fill up my water bottles and take teabags out of my pockets to make tea. I don't know what would be worse, her saying soemthing, or keeping this silence — letting me know that she knows I am living a lie, but not saying anything. Pity is one of the sharpest weapons there is, can't bear it. So yesterday when I felt her eyes on me and felt the clatter of her bangles behind me I rushed through the double doors at the end and across into the medical student's refectory where I took out the other Evian bottle from my rucksack and filled that one up too.

I intended to rush out again, the sun was still out and what was left of the morning was so beautiful that I was looking forward to walking for a change. But the place was empty, so I flopped down on one of the leathery sofas for a while and since noone was there stretched out as far as I could. Mixture of pleasure and agony. Realise I am almost crippling myself cramped up in the car night after night, and much as I long to lay in a bed again not sure I'll be able to lay down flat ever again at this stage. Read through some of the papers, did as much of the Telegraph quick crossword as I could and scoffed at least a quarter of the packet of buiscuits. Made the rest last as long as I could, but the big Nigerian security guard walked through clanking his keys and although there is nothing he probably would say I felt guilty for some reason and so brushed the crumbs off and ignoring the aches and pains that soft sofa had drawn out of me, got up and walked out into the bright sunshine and off to the library eager to get emails and blog!

Buiscuits were supposed to last me until this morning, but despite sunshine it was still not exactly warm and you eat for fuel in the cold, so its hard to stop yourself nibbling. By the evening and back in the car had only the two fogotten ones left, which I had put in my pocket to eat at my desk in the library. Bit on them slowly, trying to make them last the length of a meal, sucking juice out of the currants that I had picked out with my teeth, as I listened to the Archers and tired to keep my mind off food. Hunger slows down time no end. It's a great alarm clock though...

The man in the woods

In November I read, in an article in The Observer, about someone else living in the woods. A man…somewhere in Oxfordshire. He is doing it for a year, to raise money for charity. And at the same time he continues his daily commute to work in London. A guy called Hugh (DM), who also has a blog. Because I was stunned that someone else was 'choosing' to be homeless for a year, and intrigued, I emailed him. We met and kept in contact by email and although he is not supporting homelessness issues as such, this week he allowed me to post in his blog (DM). I posted a very long post, which, now that I have my own blog off the ground I will post here as well. It is very long, so apologies for that, but it has some details in it which will save me from feeling I have to repeat here — and give anyone reading more of an idea who I am and what this blog will be about. Maybe you'll want to go over and take a look at his blog too. Here is the entry which he allowed me to post on it a few days ago...


DM has left the building...

How to start…? How to start…? Okay, got it… first off introductions… Well, I am not DM — nor a tree — so what, you might ask, am I doing typing in his blog? More’s to the point what are you doing wasting time reading it when you checked in simply to be updated about Hugh’s year in the woods and the work of the charity he is supporting? Lemme see if I can explain…

True, I’m not DM — though since early November I have come to know him (top guy), and what’s more I know, more than most, what he is going through out there night after glacial night alone in the woods. How? Because I too am living alone in the woods — homeless and jobless and until now almost totally without connections or hope.

Obviously, I’m not proud of that, of loosing the reins of my life and being in this situation, but it’s frightening how easy it was to slide into it, and how seemingly impossible it is to get out. Homelessness becomes a Gordian knot (to run with the Classics theme of DM’s last entry;)), especially when you haven’t worked for a couple of years and so don’t have current job references (that’s the real prison — having no job, to get out of this myself with dignity). The road just comes to an abrupt end. And that’s where I’ve been for almost a year and a half now, sliding rapidly down the biggest snake you ever saw, and for the last six months of it finding myself right at the bottom, in Homelessness proper — with all my bridges burnt, and all my dreams up in smoke.

It’s the kind of thing, like most of life’s extremes, that you never think will ever happen to you, so you never give any thought to what you’d do if it did. But knowing how I was, I would have thought I was the kind of person who would bounce back from more or less anything. Pick myself up, dust myself off, and throw myself back into life, stronger and wiser and resolved never to let anything like that happen to me again. But the shock of something like this leaves you in a stupor that it is hard to rouse yourself out of; you do what animals do when winter arrives, you shut down. It’s a process, painful mostly, beginning with the kind of fear that gnaws away at your nerve endings and at times causes reality to flap away like a sheet in a high wind. Your Reason is eaten into, and almost at the first hurdle your courage slinks away with its tail between its legs leaving you with a tremble inside that fills you with self loathing. Then comes the shock and horror, then a long almost catatonic-like coma of being in denial and an inert time of deep sadness and loneliness. Confusion and desperation follow. Then, if you’re lucky, the determination and fight to get out comes. I suppose I am one of the lucky ones, because that is where I am now — hopefully out of the other end of all that, determined now to get the hell out of this situation and back to the land of the living.

So, I started a blog…seems ridiculous now, homeless and jobless and without almost any resources to start a blog as the first step, but it is my way of reaching out I suppose, which is what I haven’t been able to do so far. And it’s easier to start that kind of thing from a distance, anonymously. So I start with a blog. And hope people will read and maybe even respond and support me in it, and ridiculous as it might sound, just as importantly that it might give a structure to my day — cos there is nothing else I have to do, nothing else anyone relies on me for… And that, I have come to see more clearly during this time of disconnection, is a human need just as great as any of the others — life is symbiotic, I just never appreciated that so much before. I thought I was an island — the exception to the rule. Only I’m not… Which is why DM has given over this space to me today — so that you can read a different perspective on life lived outside in the woods, but also so that I can simply invite you over to my own blog, which I am just starting. I hope some of you trek on over once in a while and say hello.

So, here I am living in the woods — not the same woods as DM’s — mine are closer to London — and not under quite the same conditions: I am living at the edge of the woods, on a laneway through, and whatsmore I have a car. Which, in comparison, makes it seem not exactly a soft option, but not as bad as it could be either.

Though it’s not always easy to call that to mind. Not when you are sleeping across the front seats of a car loaded with all your worldly possessions, in a sleeping bag with your knees jammed in under the steering wheel and the handbrake digging into your stomach or spine night after night. A car in which the heater has never worked, and even if it did you couldn’t afford the petrol it takes to run the engine to use it. Nor the attention, in a quiet, dark laneway, a revving car with a lone woman sitting in it might draw. So there is nothing to do but sit wrapped in layers in the dark, and at times ice-cube cold, waiting for sleep to transport you into another morning and the prospect of a steaming hot drink to wrap frozen hands around and somewhere to shower, a warm place somewhere for your brain to defrost.

Some nights it’s easier than others to see that things could be worse. But nights when icy, relentless rain blows in through windows that do not close properly, or I am kept awake by the whole car shaking from side to side with sudden winds that threaten any moment to hurl boughs and branches in through the window screen; or when, every so often, the headlights of another car swing into my isolated laneway and wake me at night and I lay terrified, trying not to move a muscle, rigid, my mind caught between the flight or fight response as I cautiously raise my head and squint into the bright glare, praying furiously that whoever it is will leave without realizing I am there. But sure it’s the endgame, the windows clouded with tell-tale panicked breathing, my whole body like an ear as I wait, listening to an engine idling in the darkness somewhere nearby. Sometimes voices, sometimes bursts of drum and bass from a rolled down window, the strike of a match followed by a quick rasping in-breath, hurried footsteps, the snap and rustle of undergrowth: lovers perhaps, off into the woods? Burglars stashing loot? Happy slappers? Until eventually car doors slamming again before whoever it is slowly reverses back out and my panting and the loud hammering of my heart against my ribcage dive out to fill the spaces in the empty laneway that their sounds had left.

Not easy at all to see that things could be worse then. Nor, when the cold that has found its way into my kidneys wakes me almost hourly and so, being a woman (did I mention that before?) I am forced out from under my, by then warm, layers into a brutally cold, pitch black night in order to go to the toilet.

Then — those times — having the ‘luxury’ of a car to sleep in doesn’t seem so much of a soft option at all; and even when I sometimes glance over my shoulder as I hurry back into the car and for a moment pause, distracted — once by a pair of foxes with ruby red eyes, slinking in behind the tall, charcoal-like trunks of the trees, or follow the sound trajectory of an owl-call billowing up into the frozen green-black air, and for a moment I pause, shivering, waiting for a response to call back from way across the woods and as I wait peer off through the tall trees and the various layers of darknesses deeper into the wood, and think of other homeless people sleeping rough outside on the streets, or of DM totally exposed out there somewhere in his own woods in Oxfordshire, without the relative protection of a car to hop back into, it does not always make my own situation seem less bleak, or at least not any more bearable. Probably because it is more often than not 3:00am by then, and loneliness lays in wait and intensifies into something overwhelmingly terrifying at 3:00am and the spirit is held trapped in an aspic of self-pity that it is almost impossible, before the first faint light of morning arrives, to think yourself out of.

But when I am back in the car, shivering my way back down into the sleeping bag and settling the other, thinner one, over me, I do sometimes think of DM again, and am grateful… Because DM does not only save trees he saves lives as well. Or rather he did mine — almost certainly.

Because a couple of months ago, when I read about him in an article in the Observer, I got in touch and he came to meet me. It was just about the time the weather was on the turn and the first of those first really cold nights arrived like school bullies out of nowhere. I was stunned by the cold and amazed when I read just then about Hugh and what he was doing. Stunned that someone so ‘safe’ and ‘sorted’ was choosing to live in similar circumstances to the ones I was desperate to get out of. I had been living a life of almost total isolation by then, jobless and homeless and through mostly pride and fear almost totally friendless I suppose, and had barely spoken to another human being at all in the longest time. So the prospect of meeting someone who could understand part of what I was going through — someone who was living a ‘normal’ ‘respectable’ life during the day (as, even though I wasn’t working, I was trying to do, or increasingly keen to be seen to be doing) was kind of thrilling. And my hunger for someone to share some of the experience with, or maybe just to share… share anything with, after so long being isolated, was almost as startling to me as reading the article about DM in the first place. I have been in, or close to, so many hairy situations in the last few months and gone through such an emotional journey that I am almost beyond fear at this stage, and so without too much thought or qualms I arranged to meet him. I was about to tell the first person, a total stranger, about my circumstances and how I ended up living alone in my car in the woods and it wasn’t frightening at all. It was exciting in a way — in fact a complete relief to be telling anyone, after all this time, especially someone who I assumed wouldn’t judge or condemn.

Instead of going back to Oxfordshire he was meant to sleep in my woods, or close by, and go to work from there the next morning — it seemed right and safe — he is doing all this for charity I reasoned, not because he is mad or dangerous — and I know where he works, for God’s sake, I told myself, everybody does — as if the company he worked for was a badge of sanity or respectability;-) — he is hardly going to attack or murder me. It’s just a sleep-over, in the woods, nothing odd about that!

On the day though fears started to seep back in and my feet got colder and colder (metaphorically cold this time;-)) and I chickened out. (Now I know there wouldn’t have been any danger, but I didn’t know him then). We still met up though, at the arranged tube station, and he bought me a meal(and the kind of desert that sent us both into profound silence) and treated me for the first time in a long time like a human being, leaving me with some hope…but just, or even more, importantly at the time a sleeping bag — which is the way he may have saved my life…

He brought along one of his own ones for me, a purple, dreamily thick, feathery bag that I swear a few nights later, when the first of the cold nights finally arrived and my blood felt like it had slithers of ice floating around in it — and ever since — has kept me from hyperthermia, and probably alive. I really am not exaggerating. Until then I hadn’t realised how cold cold could get. Winter/Schminter, I can out-survive a British winter if I have to, I thought. But until you are laying out in it at night you never really get acquainted with its ferocity. Winter isn’t really winter until you are sleeping out in it at 2:am in a dark, damp wood. Then it is a different beast altogether.

For a sleeping bag, I had been using one of the cheapo green and blue jobs from Argos until then — which I went without a few meals to get in the first place. But by the time I first heard about DM it had already become very flimsy and I found myself having to wear more and more layers inside it to get warm, and then to sweat profusely during the night as the temperature in the loaded-up car rose. But I was just about managing to feed myself, I couldn’t afford another bag, so my meeting with DM was very timely.

In fact, it was very timely indeed. And it still seems strange to me, that I, a homeless person living totally alone in my car in the woods (okay not deep in them exactly, at the edge of…) should end up reading a blog about someone else doing precisely that. Because I don’t read blogs. I’ve never read one. Haven’t kept up with technology this past year, and barely knew what one was until I read about DM’s in a newspaper which I found, and googled it. It turned out that DM was about the same age as me as well. There are two more coincidences that surprised me: one, DM started his ‘year’ just about the time I leaned over in my car from sheer exhaustion one night at the start of last summer, lay across my front seats and slept out for the very first time at the seafront in Brighton. I’ve slept every night, bar one, in my car since. And, coincidence number two: DM has a law degree. So do I.

Sometimes, during my time of homelessness, there have been moments of real clarity. Moments when you can scan back over your life and see patterns, loci, where only seemingly random events were before. Similar to staring up at a star-filled sky night after night, until eventually some of those bright specks jump out at you and your mind joins the dots and you suddenly see constellations shaping themselves among the seemingly random points of light. Certain events and people in my life seem like that, and occasionally there are moments when I feel like I have glimpses of them being similarly linked, of some reality behind the reality, some pattern to my life I am not usually aware of, of all those people and experiences linked and forming something greater than themselves.

Reading that article about DM felt a bit like that, at the time. Seems almost ridiculous to even think of providence these days, but yes, felt a bit like that, and the article about him sleeping out in the woods, at a time when I was close to despair and finding it more and more difficult to see that I could ever find my way back from where I was — that I was kidding myself, that there was no way that I could work while I was still living in my car — so that I could save for the first month’s rent — that nobody who lives in the woods can survive and go on to live a ‘respectable’ life. But he was doing exactly that, living in the woods (without even a car to keep his belongings in) and managing to hold down a good job in the City at the same time. The article telling all that seemed so relevant at that moment in my life that it seemed like it was something I was meant to read, at that particular time. Maybe I should blame Hollywood — or the length of time I had been homeless and isolated — but on that particular morning it almost seemed like it was an article which had been left out for me to come across, and read.

Because I found the article in a newspaper which had been left in a hospital canteen, one morning when I went in to have breakfast. (I quite early discovered that in a nearby hospital, whose free car park I often use during the day, there are showers in two of their public toilets, so I can at least shower and wash my hair and keep reasonably respectable looking – which has its downside too, because it may be that pretence at respectability which is keeping me in this situation longer than I should be. Respectability, or ‘fitting in’ has never been a particular aim of mine, but now that I am homeless, and so far down there doesn’t seem any further to go, I am suddenly very anxious to blend in. And so ‘fitting in’, and going to extraordinary lengths not to have anyone guess that I am homeless, have perversely become almost my raison d’etre. Whereas, I have been through so many changes during this ‘journey’ that internally nothing could be further from the truth, or in a way more repugnant to me, than pretense, and falseness.

Anyway, back to meeting DM…It was a Monday morning when I found the newspaper in the hospital canteen — it had been left behind by someone, was half-wedged behind the water font on the wall beside the table where I sat against a radiator to defrost, sipping tea with my usual breakfast of an orange and a mashed banana roll. It must have just fallen behind the day before when someone bent to drink water, and been overlooked by the cleaners. Because it shouldn’t have been there on a Monday morning — it was the Observer, from Sunday, the day before. Obviously I can’t afford newspapers, especially the Sunday ones and hadn’t read one in the longest time, so I pulled it out and read it greedily from cover to cover as my fingers and toes tingled back into life.

It wasn’t the whole paper, just the one section, but it was the section with the article about Hugh living in the woods in it, and of course I was fascinated. It gave me hope that I could come out of this — that other people had lived in similar circumstances, for all sorts of reasons. And here was a respectable one. And whatsmore he was working at the same time. Although, when the writer hinted at a book and the film possibly following, I must admit my fascination threatened to congeal into an ugly jealous anger. Not that I wanted that publicity and outcome for myself — well I didn’t expect it, not in reality (though I have always been a scribbler and found writing the easiest way to express myself, always have — even at times of despair in the woods these past months (especially those times, perhaps…) I have found myself scribbling out a poem or diary or scenes or notes for a story, to keep myself occupied, and maybe sane too, and doing it — scribbling away at poetry, or in a journal or the unfinished novel I have in a box in the boot — is when I feel happiest, when I feel most alive and most myself. So of course I had dreamt in the past of getting a book published — maybe, one day.

And after those first balmy August nights of homelessness in Brighton (which had seemed almost like an adventure once I knew I could survive it) had worn off, and I began dreading the approach of night — yet another night when I could no longer delay the time when I had to lay my, by then quite painful, body across those cramped seats yet again — then yes, sometimes, then, I quite willingly left reality behind completely and dreamed of maybe writing my way out of a situation that there seemed by then no other way out of. It wasn’t realistic (but then dreams tend not to be;-)) and I wasn’t thinking of writing my own story, about my own period of homelessness and life in the woods, or how it came about. At those times, when I fled reality with a sheaf of paper and pen and dreamt of one day writing a book, I thought more of finishing a novel and having that published (a fab novel by the way — literary fiction, beautifully written and constructed — even ·though not yet quite finished — a kind of supernatural love story set on a Scottish island — incase any blog-trawling literary agents just happen to be reading this;-)) (Well, can but dream eh...;-)) Writing was just a dream, something to dive into when reality became a little too brutal. One of the many, and necessary, distractions of homelessness (show me a homeless person who isn’t a dreamer — if it isn’t that which gets them there in the first place — and it often is — it is the thing which makes it more bearable once they are there.) So yes I continued scribbling and, when life got a little too draughty, continued dreaming…

But that was fiction, I wasn’t going to write about my own story. I was homeless, living in the woods, felt a huge personal failure, not exactly something I wanted to admit. Besides, it was hardly a riveting story. Or so I thought. But once I was back out in the cold, in the car, preparing to settle down for the night, I thought about the Observer article I had read about DM, and his being a poster boy for some kind of media-created movement. And the more I thought, the more it seemed likely that this person, whose number one dream in life had probably not always been to be a writer, and who was also not technically homeless as such, might actually be getting a book deal out of this, the more angry I became. Wrongly! But I thought then that he was pulling a stunt and playing along with the non-materialistic image that the article was portraying of him — when all the time he worked in the City at a good job — so how could he be. I was wrong, there was no book or film deal and he quickly and publicly rejected the image they were trying to foist onto him. And he also wasn’t claiming to be homeless, and not, as I at first thought, implicitly laughing in the face of the very real and often inescapable hardship that homeless people have to endure, by making it all look so easy.

As I said, that was my first reaction (and it has clearly changed since). All I could focus on was the impossibility, with no money for the standard deposit and months rent in advance, of me ever getting out of the situation I was in. And the despair I frequently came close to over it all. And here was someone living rough by choice. I couldn’t get my head around it. I thought it was wrong that he was getting publicity for that, when others who were unintentionally, and in many cases inescapably, homeless, even in the run up to Christmas as it soon would have been, weren’t even mentioned. I was wrong in that. We are all adults, all responsible for our own lives, and we all make choices about the issues we want to support too. Hugh chose to put his energy into supporting the charity he did, to actively support that, and simpler, more environmentally friendly lifestyles, not homelessness issues. Which is much more than most people do. So my initial outburst of anger at him was wrong. I too have always loved trees, and living here at the woods among them since October my kinship with them has grown considerably, and I am now totally in love with them. So I completely take my hat off to Hugh (and no I am not asking you to pass it around;-))

But at least back then, before I knew him and before I thought through what he was doing, I was actually stirred into emotion. I'm grateful for that. Because I had numbed myself off almost completely by then. I had been living in my car for most of the summer by the time I got in touch with DM, through this blog, and later met him. I was parked up in Brighton at first, my money had run out and things I had been relying on fell through one by one, quickly, like dominoes: accommodation which I thought I had secured; a job interview I was sure I had got; and mostly a very large sum of money that someone owed me and that I had gone into quite serious debt waiting for. The latter was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Calls from the bank started coming in about letters they had sent me, which were unanswered (because I was already homeless by then and so not there to get post, or anywhere else to have it forwarded on to.) Court proceedings on a debt were threatened and because I didn’t respond and had no address to give them, details were sent to a solicitor to start proceedings, and I was as frightened and angry and near to despair as I have ever been. And somewhere along the line I probably broke down. Though it’s hard to be certain when it happened, or if it is over.

Long story, but I eventually ended up relying on money coming fortnightly and eventually in dribs and drabs from the person that owed it to me, until one day it stopped abruptly, without warning just stopped. I should have seen it coming, but didn’t — not really. So there I was still waiting, my whole life on hold because of it, in serious debt, getting more and more exhausted, more and more depressed. I was in Brighton at the time, waiting, in B&B’s still, unable to restart my life. When the news came through, and everything, including me, tumbled, I calculated I had enough money left for almost a week in a B&B, but after that nothing. I was sitting in the car at the time, at the Hove end of Brighton seafront staring out at a pink and grey sea, tears pouring down as I watched a blurred red sun slip down behind the horizon, wondering what I could do, who I could call. After a disastrous relationship with someone who turned out to be quite ill, things had been falling apart at the seams for ages, and I had been pulling myself away from people one by one. I felt betrayed by so many people and too proud to phone anyone else who might be left, frightened of their reaction I suppose, maybe even frightened that they might turn out to be fair-weather friends. Some things you don’t want to know. Illusions have a purpose sometimes and I needed to hang on to mine for a bit longer. I was feeling too fragile to put things and people to the test. I’d get in touch later…when it was all over…and I was back on my feet again… (When I had some money and could afford to be friends with them again!) No one need ever know for now. Not what friendship is, I know, but... in some circles personal failure is your ticket out.

So rather than go to a phone box and get in touch with someone and ask for help I just sat and sat until finally the last of the light faded and most of the surrounding cars must have pulled away without my noticing, and when I next looked up the sea was black and silver and the sky was a midnight-blue and looked like glitter from a tube had been shaken across it. I just sat and sat staring up at the stars totally despondent, not knowing what I was going to do. Too stubborn even to pray. Until all thoughts stopped and I just sat. Before I knew it, it was past midnight. It wasn’t cold – at least not the kind of cold I have come to know since — but the temperature had dropped so I pulled a fleece across my shoulders, and exhausted, just bundled another one up as a pillow and tipped over, laying my head on the front seat to rest. I hadn’t planned it – I hadn’t planned anything, which was the trouble — isn’t that how most slippery slopes are slid down? And why it was so easy — and also why it happened in the first place. My head and eyelids were pounding, but there was no fear, because I had intended, if anything, simply to close my eyes for a moment and take a few deep breaths before I wiped my eyes and went to find a hotel further along the seafront, that I could check in late to.

So, I closed my eyes, and next thing I knew I was waking up to bright sunshine, clear blue sea and sky, and the cacophony of huge screeching seagulls wheeling and swooping overhead. I had slept through the whole night, and late into the morning. I had a crick in my neck, and ached like mad, but I hadn’t died or been mugged, and just as importantly I hadn’t spent a penny of the little money I had left! And it was easy, not sleeping in a bed. Easier than I could ever have imagined. Until then, I had never even been camping in my life, and never could have imagined myself ending up sleeping in a car, but I was almost proud of myself that first morning. It was my first night of homelessness proper (I had been traveling around the country with my possessions packed into the back of my car for almost a year by then, waiting for the money that was owed to me to come through, living from week to week, riding out all the delays and the excuses I was being given about when the money would be here.

I tidied myself up in the car, put some coins in the meter and ran across to the Brighton Hotel on the corner with my wash bag to wash and brush my teeth in their toilets. Like most women I spend as much time as is available to me in the bathroom in the morning, half an hour is not unusual, and though I've never worn much make-up, hate being seen before I've creamed and lotioned myself into a more human form. So being able to run across the road and through the lobby of a hotel in the clothes I had slept in, and after only running a brush through my hair was very surprising. And the freedom that gave me was exhillerating. My first night of homelessness and I was almost on a high as I ran across to the food hut on the beach for breakfast. I treated myself to a bacon sandwich with my cup of tea, which I ate at a picnic table on the sand smiling out at the sparks of light across a bright blue sea.

Nobody would have guessed that I was homeless, and that alone made me smile. I was almost proud of myself. I'd done it, got by without spending a single penny. And I washed and made myself look very respectable in no time in a hotel bathroom without anyone noticing. I felt like I had the freedom of the City, and in a way I did, I could go anywhere, sleep in any street, use the public facilities of any of the posh hotels along the seafront to wash and change in, had to answer to no one. I was free. And could hardly wait for night to fall so that I could see if I could do it all again. That was back at the beginning of August, and though the initial adventure wore off after a few nights, and a few hairy situations, I have been sleeping in my car ever since. Feeling at this stage totally trapped.

I have always been very self-sufficient, like my own company, had pretensions of wanting to be a writer anyway when I was younger, so to begin with homelessness and wandering was hardly a hardship at all. It was summer, I was by the sea: warm nights, chip-suppers up on the seawall, magnificent sunsets, long cliff top walks, clear, star-filled skies, and sublime moments like waking in the middle of the night in the silence of Palmiera Square once (I’ve lived at all the best addresses don’t you know! Or rather parked outside them!) And looking up through the window screen at the still deep-blue sky at almost 2:00 am. A high blue, star-studded dome. I'd never seen the sky like that before, like a funnel way high up in it, as if the lid had secretly been lifted off the 'flat' sky during the night to reveal this other space way high above it. A space which was distinctly domed. Just exactly like the blue-ceilinged cupola of a church, painted with stars — and across it, and at that hour, a handful of seagulls gliding silently and languorously back and forth, back and forth, way way high up through it. Pure and white and silent; their slow flight almost a roll across the deep-blue parabola glittering with stars, and seemingly almost choreographed. Divine. Like doves, sent out on some secret heavenly mission. Or a sign — a silent, wondrous scene — for my eyes only.

The silence of that moment was amazing, even the sea seemed quietened, and it remains a sight whose beauty still haunts me at nights. So when people wonder, as they might, at my bravery out in the woods on my own at nights it is memories of that and other nights and sights like it (waking once at the edge of the woods and looking through the mist-hung trees through the treacly first light of dawn, the edge of the wood singed with golden light, and some way into it, at one particular spot, the last of the moonlight still falling down through tangled branches and illuminating one small area of ground. A bright, white, funnel of light among the darkness of the rest of the woods, and an aura of mystery and the supernatural that the light gave to the rest of the still dark wood, the intimations of other realities, of worlds beyond — 'my wood' (as I had come to think of it as) transformed by that one narrow wash of light, into something mysterious and spiritual, like waking up into a Rembrandt painting. The kind of beauty that despite circumstances is internalized and restores the spirit. It is experiences like that, and the bright silent seagulls like doves flying high up in the cupola of that deep blue, star-strewn sky that I most often associate with the coming of the night. And why I no longer fear it.

That was last summer, and I haven’t slept in a bed since. But summer soon ended, and with it the last of my money. I stayed in a convent for a few nights after that. Was even open to the possibility that poverty and despair may have given me a vocation;-) But long as I sat in the little pinewood-clad chapel, staring into the huge painted crucifix hanging over the altar, and hard as I prayed, God never spoke to me, and I was never saved from homelessness by a vocation. Instead, a very serene and petite French nun on vacation gave me twenty pounds to help me on my way; and with that and the last of the petrol, and hopefully the best part of my sanity still intact, I drove to London.

I was still determined not to tell anyone — more determined as it went on — the worse I got, the more determined I was not to be seen like that, not to, as I saw it, demean myself, by going for help. I planned to choose a safe place to park, carry on sleeping in the car for the time being, but get any job I could until I’d saved enough for a month’s deposit and a month’s rent in advance to get out of this situation. After nights of sleeping in various different streets and dodging traffic wardens during the day, I found the place to park here in the woods, not far from where I used to live, so an area I knew. But the job never happened. Though I am still trying. Maybe I’m doing it all wrong — I’m doing something wrong definitely. My background is almost an obstacle now, having a law degree almost a handicap, at least for the kind of jobs you can get without references and while living in a car. I feel able to do much more than that, to do anything right now, in fact I feel stronger now than I ever have, but it’s not easy.

Not easy to be alone and homeless without a job or a purpose. Not easy at all to be all those things and a woman. But I am, and at this stage I have no one to turn to for help, and no way out of this.
I'm in a corner. I know it’s my fault: I won't go to a homeless person’s hostel, and there is no way I can get the money together for a deposit and the month in advance I need to rent somewhere privately. Every day, from getting up in the cold and damp to going to sleep in the same, is almost totally taken up with trying to keep up standards — trying to make myself look
respectable: finding somewhere to dress and wash in
some privacy; keeping the car neat and tidy, everything easily accessible and separated in bags — food in glove department and under front seat, washbag and library books under driver’s seat; butter, milk and cutlery, toothbrush and hairbrush in car door; bag of clothes along with the other bags on the back seat, dirty laundry squeezed into boot — waiting for money for the launderette so I can wash my bag of clothes every fortnight. And then
numbing myself off enough to get on with the business of sorting out enough food for the day and where to eat it. And to not alerting anyone to my situation — particularly other street people — because of the danger I perceive that
would put me in as a woman. And just trying to keep
myself balanced. That is it. That is what life reduces itself to, what survival is…
The only solution seems to be to go to the authorities and go to a hostel and live there until I come up on the list for a council property. I don't trust myself to survive all that. So I am stuck where
I am - in the woods on my own not knowing how to stop.

In amongst all the hardship there are moments of
sublime beauty too. Never a day without it really -
which is what makes it bearable. All the small miracles that are easily overlooked. And the paradox that sometimes when you
have literally nothing it feels like you have almost
everything - there is the seduction of that kind of
thinking anyway — the tug of madness perhaps - of thinking that you are close to the source. That
finally seeing all that beauty every day, absorbing it, is opening you up to
love, and that love is turning everything into itself.
Usually you think like that towards the end of the
second week when food money has run out completely and
it is the second day of hunger and you are demented by the smells of food everywhere and
nothing eases the clutching pains in your stomach, and the sky is the colour of mushroom soup, and even the leaves look edible by then.

Anyway, enough… now I realize that I am just waffling, taking up too much of your time and of DM’s blog space. So I’ll stop. But maybe some of you will come over and read my own blog some time, where I can wander freely. And maybe your interest will be the
chink of light I need to get me doing something regularly as a step out of this situation. I hope so.

But finally, since I am being DM for the day, I feel I should add a recipe to his Hunter’s and Gatherer’s Guide to Haute Cuisine. Haven’t cooked in a while, only foodstuff around here are a few brown, withered but tenacious oak leaves still spinning at the ends of a few branches. No good leaf recipes come to mind;-) only thing I can think of is vinaigrette…

So, here is recipe for a lovely, tangy vinaigrette. If you like dark, use balsamic vinegar, if you prefer light use wine vinegar.
Pour the dressing into a jar with a screw cap and store it in a cool dark place — a hole in the ground, buried under mounds of wet leaves, or at the bottom of a rucksack will do nicely. Alternatively, you can use a fridge or larder, where it will keep for weeks. Leave about a third of the jar empty so that there is space for it to be shaken thoroughly before use.
Mix 2 tblsp of Dijon mustard with 4 tables of water and 4 fl oz of the vinegar. Season well with salt and pepper and whisk in 13 fl oz/325 ml of extra virgin olive oil. (NB - If you have them available, add a loose wrist action and an open heart, so feeling can flow freely, down through your arm into your hand and into jar — always the most important ingredient, and why your viniagrette will always taste like yours...
This is an all-purpose salad dressing that will perk up mixed salad leaves (though I wouldn’t recommend sycamore or turkey oak this time of year!) Enjoy!

Inviting you over to my blog which is…

Homeless...ness

...less..am...am...home...I am...less...am...homeless...Why is it so difficult to admit that. Even anonymously to this blog, or to myself come to that. But it is...probably the hardest thing I have ever admitted, the sense of failure and shame I feel about it makes me physically ill. So I pretend — even to myself. Though I know that bringing about change and getting out of any situation requires an honest assessment and admission of the situation first so I need to come out of denial and accept, take with humility whatever the next step needs to be. And besides, I'll have to define this blog at some stage — let anyone who might come across it know what they are reading, so that they can decide whether to stay and read or move on to another blog.

And so I decided to start by giving a bit of background — of how I became homeless at the beginning of last year, how I have been living in my car since August, and write about the process as I try to get out of this situation. But it is incredibly difficult to start opening up. I love writing, I'm not exactly mute, but I feel like a child at the top of a hill with the wind at my back when I've got a pen in my hand, and have the opportunity to express myself in writing with silent words. But blogging feels a bit different, a hybrid between talking and writing, that sometimes makes me nervy — there are people there behind this screen reading this...comments appear...it is not just me and a sheet of white paper that ends crumpled in a wastepaper basket. This is the first time I have blogged, but it already feels most of the time like talking rather than writing (and on a good day I touch type so am not even aware of my hands, just think a thing and it appears on the screen, feels scarily like telepathy if I let it — so I won't! ) Anyway, this is one of those times when it feels more intimate than writing ordinarily does, feels like I am whispering my vulnerability into the ear of a newfound friend. And I have been clammed shut for so long that I don't know where, or how, to begin.

The main difficulty is in admitting what has happened to me — that I am homeless and alone —and justifying my response to that — which has been retreat — both physically and emotionally — to withdraw and isolate myself. Until here I am, almost a year later, living in my car on a laneway at the edge of the woods.

But why am I here? Still? Why didn't I go somewhere else? Swallow my pride and get in touch with someone from my past? Or get in touch with the authorities, go to a hostel or a hospital if that is what I need? (though I absolutely, despite what I have put myself through, don't need a hospital) What is it that keeps me in such an isolated and precarious situation, putting my life and my health at risk? How can the past be worse than this? And what kind of awful person must I be to be without friends to turn to — or them to me — in a situation like this? Where is my safety net? Why am I not on missing persons lists, and people all over the place desperately looking for me? Why didn't my picture appear on the back of your milk carton this morning? How could someone just step out of a life unnoticed? And why did I let my money run out? Why didn't I do something constructive before it did? Why did I run? From what? And what has it been like to be totally alone and with nothing for so long? How have I adapted? What's my strategy for getting out, and how will I live life differently when I do — how has it changed me — and my dreams? That's what I intended to write when I opened this blog in mid January, and here I am second week in February still struggling with the first entry. Not easy...prising yourself open after so long...

I have done a lot of thinking over these past months — dark by 4:pm (and now just after 5:00pm) sitting back in the car in the dark waiting to fall asleep there is not a whole lot else to do. But I'm not sure I know all the answers to why I am still here sleeping in my car, and what exactly got me here in the first place. Most of my time goes into trying to conceal my situation from the world — keeping up appearances, keeping up with news etc — using the showers in the toilets of a local hospital to shower and dress, keeping myself neat, eating as healthily as I can (though I am sick to death of car food — of force-feeding myself yet another tin sardine sandwich, or digestive biscuit, which being only 69p a packet are one of the staples of my diet — are breakfast, lunch and dinner often, on the last day (or 2) at the end of a fortnight, before next two weeks money comes). Keeping up appearances has become so important that I cannot admit even to myself even that I am living in a car. Sounds impossibly foolish — dangerous. I suppose I must get some kind of pleasure or satisfaction out of people not guessing what my circumstances are, some sense of triumph, because I am going to greater and greater lengths to try to conceal them. So admitting even here that I am homeless, is tough. Feel like I am standing naked in front of a panel here, testifying to my sanity. Or — though there is no one here to applaud and cheer me on, no one to 'buddy' me — as if I am taking the first of my twelve steps out of here — this rut I am in, in my car in the laneway. Which in a way I am, I suppose.

Maybe, instead of trying to fill in all that background here in a first post, I'll just thread it in gradually, as and when it naturally occurs. That way I won't keep breaking out in cold sweats whenever I think of having to face typing in this little white box. There is no ryhme or reason to these posts, just a new found way of keeping in touch with the world, though hopefully not yet another way of avoiding reality. Though I must admit, tapping away at great speed here, am feeling a bit like Kate Adie with a deadline to meet...

It was a dark and stormy night...

Well, it's always dark, but last night was a bit stormy — rain lashing, branches thrashing, feeling quite unsafe in my laneway. Stuck my head right down in the sleeping bags, the top one zipped right up so could hardly breathe, and the car windows steamed up in no time from very laboured breathing.

Tried to recite poetry to induce sleep — often helps. Head like a seive though, all this wandering the country in the last year under such extreme conditions seems to have emptied my head of past knowledge. As if survival demands a new skill set, and the brain clearing space for new information. What you used to know no longer necessary, the past overwritten. Although can't quite believe that of poetry, poetry is always necessary. Recalled fragments in the end, but whole poems I used to know well eluded me. And that saddened me as much as anything else has recently. Tried really hard to take the focus off my freezing nose and growing stiffness and despondency and remember Yeat's 'Song of Wandering Angus', which is my favourite Yeat's poem — seemed apt too, given title of my blog, and living here in a car in the woods, and the content of the poem.

Remembered opening lines: 'I went down to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head...pulled a branch from a tree(?) tied a berry to a thread...' (??) which I love. Heard it told in my dad's voice, which is strange, because don't remember him ever reciting that one (though he recited poetry lots, mostly the Irish poets: Yeats, Kavanagh, Heaney...) Felt myself falling down into deeper sadness, walking into it slowly, shut down, the way people must wade out into a roiling ocean, to their death.

Must have fallen asleep trying to remember the song of Wandering Angus because woke up thinking of it again. Hopefully I dreamt of the 'golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon', and the running girl with apple blossom in her hair. Though rarely remember dreams, which is possibly a good thing on the whole these past months of being homeless and living in my car in the woods, probably another survival techniqe.

And that is one of the things that has continued to amaze me these past few months, the way life fights for itself. The way I continually adapt to survive, despite myself often, but it happens. You get up to fight another day. And sometimes what saddens me most is knowing that I always will...that no matter what happens, I will be here to face it. Get exhausted sometimes just considering the mountain I have to scale to get out of this situation, but know that somehow I will.

Woke to a clear, bright day, all rinsed clean by the rain. Beautiful, dank, complicated smell of the woods first thing in the morning is something I have come to love. There's so much infact I'll miss about being here, in ways I feel very fortunate, though not easy to make others see that. No milk or fruit left for breakfast, so sipped on bottle of tap water and decided to walk in to the library to see if I could find that Yeat's poem, and get a book on starting up a small business. Thinking a lot recently that I should perhaps do that. Employ myself, why not! Not sure that the fire in my belly is for that though, and you'd definitely need it for venture like that. Will think more.

In library doing this and time running out, so this has to be it for my first entry. Not what I intended to write — intended to write about my life, how I got into this homeless postion, how I am surviving in it and hopefully charting my route out of it — but it's a start. Nice to know there are people out there who might be reading this. Feel like I'm smashing down a wall into the outside world... Fab feeling.