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stella41b -> RE: I love it when..... (4/24/2010 5:23:36 PM)
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I love the fact that Timmy has turned up after going missing for well over 2 years. I first met Timmy the day before the end of the CRISIS Open Christmas for the homeless just after Christmas 2005. We were both guests and street homeless. Timmy looks a lot like Joe Cocker, has a dicky leg, ex-postman, Irish descent - a bit like Spike Milligan, he's an artist/cartoonist and like Spike Milligan, he's one of the funniest people I know. We went through the Extension Shelter together and ended up in the same hostel for the homeless in East London.
Thing is he suffers from depression, has a drink problem, but isn't a raging alcoholic or aggressive or anti-social, he just likes a drink. People make fun of him because of his leg and the fact that he walks a bit funny. But he's a brilliant artist, very good at coming up with funny cartoons and caricatures and when we moved into the hostel and had to wait for our benefits to come through there was about seven or eight of us who made friends, and Timmy was one of them. We lent each other money to get through, spent time together supported each other the way that homeless people do.
The end of 2006 and early 2007 we got split up as a group but stayed in touch, half of us being given apartments, two others being moved to other hostels and Timmy dropped into a depression early in 2007 and attempted suicide twice. He started hitting the bottle again and just when he started to recover and agreed to go for counselling and help again the hostel manager decided that he was pretending to be depressed just so as he could drink and she evicted him from the hostel back onto the streets.
We went to look for him in all his old drinking haunts in East London and I was one of the ones who agreed to give him a room and a place to stay if he ever turned up but he didn't. We asked around other homeless people, me and a couple of others even volunteered to work with the homeless just so we might find him. Graham, another one of us who we met at the Extension Shelter was a 50 year old guy who had never worked in his life and just spent his life hitchhiking and busking around Europe to raise money for drink, then he'd pawn his guitar, cymbals and mouth organ (he was a one man band) go on a binge for a week or two, then borrow money and get his instruments back, and go busking again. He quit the hostel in the summer of 2006, bought a one way bus ticket to the South of France, started busking on the streets, making his way to Belgrade where he met and fell in love with an Indian lady lawyer, got married, she bought a flat, and he bought a boat on the Danube setting up a language school and music venue. He put up a cash reward paid by Western Union to anyone who could find Timmy.
The last year has been really hard searching for Timmy, because the police and local authorities have both been working to try and clear rough sleepers from the streets in Central London. Street cleaners come with special vehicles which hose down pavements which has effectively removed the street homeless from sleeping in shop doorways and the police tend to break up groups of rough sleepers by harrassing them or arresting them which makes it much harder for CAT teams and outreach workers to find them as they all tend to sleep in hidden locations away from the police and street cleaners.
But Timmy turned up last week and is back in the same hostel in East London. When he was evicted he was picked up by a night shelter in a different part of East London who sectioned him for six months in a secure psychiatric ward and then they relocated him to Liverpool, where he had to go through another hostel and they helped him to recover from drink and he stayed sober. They then rehoused him in a bedsit above an off-licence (or liquor store) and sure enough he started drinking again then they stopped his benefits and he was caught shoplifting...for food and sent to prison. They released him back onto the streets and it took him a while to get back on benefits and in the end he returned to London.
I couldn't believe it when I got the call to say that he's back in the hostel in East London. He's stopped drinking (or as he put it, he's 'off the sauce') seems to be better in himself and it's also his return which got most of us all back in touch with each other and we've agreed to keep in touch more, which is more important now that we're Timmy's support network. He's turned to the church and is spending time with Hazel (a close friend who is currently training to be a preacher) who is trying to get him involved in her local church
Not sure of this means much to anyone but I just thought I would share.
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