This blog is about a guy I met last night called Scott. I’m not
in a spectacularly political mood, and even if I was I don’t think I’d have
that many answers to suggest; but I just want to tell you about Scott because I
am really glad that I met him. I can’t vouch for the guy obviously, so I can’t
promise everything he told me is true, but he seemed a deeply honest,
straightforward guy. So here’s what happened.
I was about to walk past him on the street and he very
politely started to ask if I could spare him any change – I started to say “I’m
really sorry mate” as I walked past, and he immediately stopped asking, and
said “No don’t worry at all mate, have a good night.” As he started to walk off
I thought – ‘Mike. You have nothing you need to do right now. Jesus loves that
guy just like he loves you, and he wants you to be with him and show him some
love. Don’t be a
coward. He’s not big or scary. And don’t be lazy or selfish. Get him a coffee.’
So I turned round and said, “Actually, I’d be up for coming
with you and getting a hot drink or something?” And he said he would really
love that. So I grabbed my bike and we walked across to MacDonalds on the basis
that it’s always open. We chatted along the way, and he mentioned that he’d
been living in a tent for a year. I asked him how he’d become homeless. He said
that he used to live with his mum, but that the bedroom tax thing had come in
and it was a 3 bed house, and she couldn’t afford it, so she’d had to move in
with her brother, in his 2 room maisonette. So Scott had nowhere to stay. At
the time he had a good job managing a garage on the edge of Cambridge, but
after a while of him turning up unshaven or unwashed every few mornings (he was
couch surfing with friends when he could, but he says with a lot of them he
ended up crossing the line of overstaying his welcome) they asked him to take a
break, and come back when he’d got his life back on track. He said you can’t
receive benefits with no fixed abode. He’s on the waiting list for the council
to get him housing, but he says there are too many people with a more urgent
need, so he’s hoping for a letter to arrive at his mum’s house soon, but he’s
not too optimistic. The homeless shelters in Cambridge are all full or
specifically for people who are mentally ill as well, except Jimmy’s Night
Shelter, which might have space, but it doesn’t have any more spaces for people
with dogs, and Scott has a dog who he loves, called Slinky – after the dog from Toy Story.
So at the moment he lives in a tent. He’s been moved on six
times in just over a year by the council, and now he’s in a place so isolated
that no one’s likely to report him, but no one’s likely to befriend him either.
If the council find his stuff they are allowed to just take it, and he would have to
pay to get it back.
He asked me what I do, I said I was studying English. He
asked what I wanted to do with that, and I told him that maybe I wanted to work
telling people about Jesus, so we talked about that for a bit. He said his mum
was a Christian but his Dad wasn’t, and he’d gone to Sunday school a bit but he’d
never owned a bible, never really knew what it was all about. I wished I had a
bible with me to give to him, but I didn’t, and so I suggested that we could
meet again, get a MacDonalds and read some of the accounts of Jesus life and
chat about it, using this thing called ‘UNCOVER’ that my brother had told me
about. He said he’d be really keen for that, and it turned out he still has a
phone, so we exchanged numbers, and I’ll call him sometime this week.
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