Welcome to (homeless) Tory Britain

So here's my first ever blog post.

'How do we even know your children exist?' he sneers at me from behind his bulletproof glass screen.
'I mean, they might not even be yours.'
You gotta hand it to the Tories: (preferably in a dog-shit-smeared package):
homelessness is the new fob-off.

It's been a good (should I re-phrase that?) week and a bit now; not long at all by British homelessness standards. And to tell a woman with two young kids that they can't register her as homeless because she hasn't got all the papers they need or an address is Britain's never ending dirt grey path to cardboard box shitty. The homelessness trap.

The man behind the counter has narrow, loveless eyes and a layer of pepper-grey stubble. It brings back childhood memories, watching flames lick over fields fogged in wheat fumes. He shows me an A4 printout of buildings squared and blurred with bad-copy ink. There must be about forty or so of them.
'Three thousand or more we have on the list, and these are all the properties available. It's the government. We're at crisis point. We don't have enough housing. The associations don't have enough housing.'
'But I need to get on the list. I need registering yesterday, last week'
He's seen it all before: tears won't wash: not even if they're genuine, and these ones are, but I hold them back. Tears won't penetrate the stone-cold walls of beaurocracy: rules are rules are rules and people, even kids, mean nothing.
'I have to wait two weeks for my papers to come through to my friend's house, but please please, please, can you just register me?'
'Not until we have the papers.'
I've shown him the kids' birth certificates. I've shown them that I have income support coming in: with proof it's also for the kids. Oh, but it's not enough: they want a letter that will take two weeks to arrive.
Is it just me, or are they deliberately not registering me because the government has asked them to fob people off to keep the truth about the homelessness crisis quiet?
How many more of 'me' are there, living hand to mouth from sofa to sofa.
My friend called it sofa surfing.
Well, I've checked the weather report, and low pressure's on the cards. Swell? Certainly is for those in the HP sauce chambers. Champagne Sir? Oh, why not, I'm not driving; my driver's waiting in the merc.
And in the mean (an apt word, eh?) time, how many kids are homeless in this cuntry?
No way of knowing: they refuse to even register us.


I'm a writer, artist and full time mom, homeless and waiting for rehousing. The above is non-fiction, but I'll be posting some short stories soon