Crisis at Christmas: a blurry picture

There are balloon sculptures all over the place.

Sky, with long pink hair, is doing ashtanga yoga: 'Their bodies are brittle. When they lie down they put their hands on their front to protect themselves. And their feet are very hard.'

If someone wants a conversation, you talk. After an hour you might try to move on - recommend an activity or a meal.


'We would flock home for lunch,' he says, talking about his childhood in what was then Ceylon. Flock. His rapid discourse is elegant and precise. Cricket, Shakespeare. He tells me there has been a disproportionately high number of Sri Lankan presidents of the Oxford Union.

A young Eritrean tells me he doesn't understand Kandinsky.

This is my fourth Christmas at Crisis and I feel a wave of concern that so many of the guests are regulars. But how do you fix homelessness when it can slip in through the keyhole and turn everything inside out? How do you fix mental illness and addiction? Amy, a resilient and cheerful activities officer wearing a Christmas pudding costume, reminds me that some guests rely on the annual Crisis reboot.

Guest's drawing

And while I am drawing I am falling, falling and I have a home, somewhere to crawl around in when I'm too ill to stand up. That makes me queen of the world.

He grabs my paper and one of my pens and the pen top flies off somewhere. Ah well, I think, that pen's a write off. Shame. I get them from Japan via the internet. He does this drawing on the right.

He says: 'Bla bla bla! They're all just saying bla bla bla!'

'Did you see my pen top anywhere?'

He goes and retrieves it and hands it back to me.

More pictures if you scroll down.

Supreme Court: Crisis, Shelter, Babylon

'What are you doing for Christmas?' he asked.
'Crisis,' I said.
'Yeah, a friend of mine does that. She spends most of the year blogging about her collection of Louis Vuitton handbags then at Christmas she's with the cool kids.'

By making volunteers feel treasured, Crisis has pulled off the minor miracle of making it cool - or whatever your/my word for that is - to spend Christmas with people who are mainly homeless and single.

I'd been curious about Crisis for years but felt that I couldn't handle scary homeless people. Then I started drawing at the Occupy protest camps and squats. Compared with that, Crisis is a doddle.

Do you want to be a manicurist for a day, drive a van, walk a rough sleeper's dog, act as an interpreter, run a yoga class, play chess, give legal advice, make dinner, coach indoor football, hear all the life stories you can handle from guests and volunteers? The only scary people are the Green Badges - shift leaders wearing reindeer antlers and swearing into walkie-talkies.

By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

That over-exposed Boney M song came on the karaoke and a pale woman took the microphone. We were in the vast communal area of a college: table-tennis, people sleeping on sofas, The Wizard of Oz coming up on TV.  Surely every guest had a better time, a better place to remember than this Christmas Day. Like the young Eastern European girl who pretended to her mother back home that she had a good job and a nice flat. But this isn't the time or place for weeping. Come on, have a Quality Street.

Crisis and Shelter are intervening in today's cases: Hotak v London Borough of Southwark, Johnson v Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, Kanu v London Borough of Southwark. The chilling concept of 'ordinary street homelessness' is explored. Does the Pereira test - to assess a homeless person's priority need - work? You can own a home and still be homeless if, for example, you are the victim of domestic violence.

Dusty:  How about Pereira?
Doris:  What about Pereira? 
            I don’t care. 
Dusty: You don’t care? 
           Who pays the rent?

- Sweeney Agonistes, T. S. Eliot

As it's pointed out in court today, a lot of people are two wage packets away from homelessness. I can remember, as an infant, being told by my mother to hide under a table when the rent man was due to knock at the front door, so that he wouldn't see us through the window. I think it was only two or three times, but the sound of that unanswered knock doesn't leave you.

I wrote about my experiences at Crisis here and here.

More pictures if you scroll down.

Guest and volunteer at Crisis

If it's Christmas, it's Crisis

Let's start with the small print: the guests signed Crisis consent forms to release these pictures.

So. Dickens would have tried to make you weep if he'd seen Crisis in operation.

But there's no time for Mr Popular Sentiment. If you drop your guard and glimpse the enormity, the appalling insolubility of the underlying problem, or if the red rage coshes you from behind, do something constructive. Be a manicurist, make up the numbers for ping pong, unload food supplies, look after a rough sleeper's dog, give someone your undivided attention, sing.

Don't get dehydrated, don't let your blood sugar sink. Here, have a Quality Street. No, I don't know what flavour it is. Forget choice. The only reality is here, where any stray sparks of discord are quickly dampened by firm kindness and tolerance.

I'm at the West London Day Centre, the Downton Abbey of Crisis. There are tougher gigs.

We all know the chorus. There's no room for cynicism. You'll find camaraderie, instant life stories, jokes, hope.

'Put the date on this picture please. I don't intend to be here next year.'

'How long do you sleep at night? For me it's five foot ten.'

'Do you draw before you go to bed? I do. I draw the curtains.'

'Oh, don't do his picture. He thinks he's good looking enough already. He'll stick it on the wall and pray to it.'

A softly spoken guest, courteous and deferential, has a personality change at karaoke time. He knocks out I like the way you move by the Body Rockers. Cue tumultuous applause. Then he goes quietly off to the canteen on his own.

Make sure guests know what services are on offer. Would you like a shower? Game of football? Language tuition? Advice on housing or addiction? Sewing repairs to your clothes or bags? Do you just want to spend the afternoon asleep, safe, warm, dry, fed? Surrounded by scruffy and unfussy volunteers? 

I said unfussy. At this time of year I park all the crap outside - it's a relief, frankly.

The drawings here show yoga, exercise classes, the art and craft room, the hair and nail salon, karaoke. I give each drawing to the sitter as a rule, but I've kept some of the group pictures.

It's The Wizard of Oz on TV.

A guest grabs the mike and sings that Boney M song.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

She goes around showing the drawing to people. 'Look at this.'

It is herself.

Please scroll down for more images.

Crisis. Christmas.

Faery (with wings) bingo-calling, helped by Diego

'What are you doing for Christmas?'
'Going to Crisis.'

She thought I meant a nightclub. But it is a club of sorts. It has people who are guests year after year. Mostly single and homeless.

Volunteering for Crisis gives you a rare example - not found in corporate life - of people working together with a default position of kindness, because that's all we have. The centres are teeming with volunteers wresting happiness for themselves and others from the nation's distress/disgrace.

For years I heard the siren song of Crisis but thought no, I can't cope with all those scary people. But in 2011 I started to draw the scary people attracted to the Occupy protest camps. It was a doddle. This is my second year at Crisis.



Barbara, volunteer hairdresser
(in mirror, left)

The scariest person I meet is a Green Badge (Crisis High Command).

'Who are you and what are you doing here?' she barks, existentially.

A drawing is an experiment, a what-if. Most drawings should be thrown away. But when you're drawing the face of a guest at Crisis you have to do the best you can, every time, and you sweat on the result, because it matters to someone who has never been drawn, who is faceless, who sees the drawing which you will give them as validation.

Cate (top) and Faery

There are extraordinary volunteers. Inspirational Faery, aka Charlotte, makes up her own agenda - pop-up salsa, anyone?

Cate (of cyoga.co.uk) teaches yoga. A couple of men challenge her strength. She idly supports herself on her arms for a while, levering herself up and down.

Men gaze and sigh at women, with courtesy. I sketch a shaggy ex-punk/glam-rocker in a buttercup yellow suit.

'Do you believe in free speech?' he asks.
'Yes.'
'Give me your phone. Why do moths fly with their legs open?'

Two beautiful young couples in love ask me to draw their double portraits. I can't show you these, or any other pictures of guests, as their identities are shielded.

Cate

Boxing Day: Transport for London tweets that traffic is sluggish or stationary around shopping centres in east and west London.

At the Crisis day centre, the idea of using a holiday to drive to a traffic jam to buy stuff is...

Volunteer barber

I go home via Sainsbury's for a small bottle of wine and a large bar of chocolate. Serving at the tills are young men, strong and handsome like many of the guests at Crisis. Lucky bastards to have jobs, I think.



Cate teaching yoga