When
I was at primary school, we used to play a game of shimmying up the toilet wall
in an L shape - back flat on one side, legs out straight, feet flat on the
other. The real art was to get over the
other side and walk down the next. You
could lock all the cubicles from the inside, then crawl under the door of the
last. I’m very sorry to the teachers at Applecroft Primary School, Welwyn Garden City –
from 1977 to 1981 that was me.
A
well documented incident in hospital dramas is one in which someone very
unwell, or under the influence, is trapped behind a cubicle door and requires
urgent rescue. A few days ago we had something
similar happen here at Providence Row.
We
hadn’t seen Rich for nine months. In
fact we had even been phoned by a partner service asking us “did we have
details of his next of kin?” Rich had
apparently been found dead sleeping on the streets. He had a history of rough sleeping in London
for about the last five years – never engaging in any service long enough to
start to get the help he needed. In a
recent presentation from Alex Bax from London Pathway, we found out that the
average age at death from a sample of 131 homeless patients was 40.5 years[1].
Imagine
our surprise when he turned up at Providence Row alive and very, very
drunk. Rich asked if he could use our
toilets which - of course – he could.
After about 20 minutes, one of the staff realised that he hadn’t
re-emerged. Without wishing to intrude,
the staff member went into our toilets to carefully investigate whether Rich
was OK and was greeted by the sound of loud snoring and a locked door. Rich had fallen asleep in his cubicle of
choice with the three pairs of trousers he was wearing still crumpled down at
his feet.
I’ll
spare you the technical detail of our toilet door locking system – but the only
way in was over the top. One of our more
lithe and adventurous staff members climbed in from an adjacent cubicle. He and a colleague respectfully helped an
almost asleep Rich tidy himself up and make himself presentable. He was brought back to life for the second
time that day. Eventually he left the
centre, once again unable or unwilling to tell us more about how he was, where
he’d been for the last nine months and why he was drinking so much.
Our
experience with Rich is bitter sweet. We
were very pleased to see he was still alive, but sorry and frustrated that we
weren’t able to really find out why he is still sleeping on the streets after five
years. The whole incident was sad, awful
and quite dramatic, as well as quirky and at times, quite funny – it has
certainly been a talking point since.
Next
time Rich comes in, we will try to engage him in our Activity Programme. We want to know more about who he is, what
went wrong for him and how we can work with him to start to make things go a
bit better again. He might find our art
workshop a useful way to express himself and tell us his story in his own way.
Have a look on our Facebook page for pictures of work exhibited by art workshop
participants.
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