Just as I'm getting better - the state ensures I get ill again....

Managing MECFS is a tightrope of energy.

I've been doing brilliantly until today.  Exercising nearly everyday, cooking healthily (something I've not been able to do for a number of years now - as I've had to live on £3 Tesco Meal Deals or equivalent if not using food donated to Street Kitchens which in the main is High in sugar & fat).

It's all it takes is for a little thing not to be there for you when YOU need it, to induce an MECFS crash.

I'd planned perfectly what I was going to do today.  It's sunny, you can never miss an opportunity to 

The windows are opaque, which means you can never see out.  This requires the front door to be open constaantly to allow in daylight, but that means the sounds of the construction workers permeates in a way that is unbearbale.

As I type this the drilling is excruciating, that of a dentist's knawing its way through enamel in high pitched tone that resembles the patient screaming. Now it's hammering, thumping a migraine into my head and now both together.

This is nearly everyday since I've been here and unlike being at Heathrow where I could simply walk away from it. I have to either shut out daylight to diminish it or.

The person managing the building is barely able to understand English so, our communications are a stilted version of hand-gestures and me doing a Cleeseesque impersonation of Fawlty speaking to Manuel.

This means the simplest task requires the most energy.

I've been housed in a Hotel Appartment  which would leave you to believe the room and bedding would be cleaned once a week. Again as I'm typing this the Hotel Manager comes over to tell me this is getting done once a fortnight.

He also tells me how poorly things are being organised. People who are ill feted to deal with being indoors are getting violent

I walked three miles at pace, yesterday, as ever, I felt elated proud of myself and energised.  I knew it wouldn't last, but in that moment I savoured it in the best way possible.

Covid-19, The London Lockdown & why I'm busier than ever tapped in Heathrow Airport....

It is strange, the clocks have gone forward an hour this morning and it's thrown me completely.

The reason?  Because I've only had 3 hours sleep instead of what I think is 4.

Prior to clock auto-correction, I would have woken up, looked at my watch (it's 8am now) and it would have said 7am.  I would know I'd only had 3 hours having gone to sleep at 4am (It was freezing in the airport last night, I began in Arrivals lounge on the ground floor but it just became too cold, so ascended to the Departures Lounge on the Concourse and of course, no seats to lie down on).

Instead though I find myself looking at the clock on my laptop and not understanding why I'm so insanely exhausted until, ironically, a Tweet from Heathrow Airport reminds me of the fact that the clocks had changed and I'd lost an hour.

This is day Eight of being "Trapped" at Heathrow. 

Prior to that, I'd just use it as my bedroom.  Coming here simply to get a few hours of rest before heading back into Central London to live as normal a life as possible, other than having to deal with the nonsense of the DWP, 10 years ongoing, Metorpolitan Police (my Son's Trust Fund Theft) 3 years ongoing, Legal Ombudsman (against the failings of the Public Law Project), 6 months ongoing &

What bright spark, decided that free Wifi had to keep logging you out every hour, should, without hesitation, be shot.  When I leave a Wifi area it breaks my signal. That's when you can log me out.  Havig to keep reconnecting breaks concentration and wastes minutes of valuable time. It also causes great stress and frustration, which are totally unneccesary.

The press covergae about me has been prolific over the past couple of weeks begining with Each Other Blog ('I Am Worried': Homless Amid The Corona Virus Pandemic - By Aaron Walawalkar -11th March 2020) then on my Birthday with the Daily Mirror (Big Issue Magazine Facing a Fight For Survival as Sales Crash - by Ros Wynne Jones as Real Britain Ros -20th March 2020), then followed up by Metro Online (Homeless Man Living At Heathrow Still Has Nowhere to Go - by Elisa Menendez - Friday 27th March 2020) & then the Guardian on Saturday  BBC (Coronavirus:Heathrow Airport 'Sheltering 200Homeless People' – BBC News England - Not bylined – Friday 3^rd April 2020) & Finally Tortoise (Isolation: Unheard Voices in Covid19 -  Tortoise Media - Edited by David Taylor, written with Polly Curtis, Imy Harper & Louise Trickle – Monday 6^th April 2020   (Updated articles on 7th April 2020)

Social Distancing in Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 highlights the fundamental stupidity of Health & Safety rules.  The need for electicity plugs &USB Chargers and the lack of them, means peope are always grouped together around the power towers. 

The rows of seats are linked back to back with plastic ties, enusring someone will always sit behind you and be inches away. 

The craziest though has to be in M&S where they're making people queue with 2 metres between them only for people to be taking wooden cutlery from bins open to everyone's hands. Total insanity and a clear demonstration that all of this is for show not safety (just like the Security Theatre coming in and out of Airport customs) and the screens that everybody is forced to touch is never wiped down.

For a few days Josh became my life-line somebody I could share everything with about what was going on and how I was coping. But a 48 hour hiatus seems to imply he's already lost interest.  John Cleese delivers a brilliant line in his bad film Clockwise which is entirely apropos and I paraphrase "It's not the dispair... I can handle the dispair... It's the Hope... it's the hope that kills you..."

Anthony Luvera - Homeless
Mary O'Hara's Book Launch
Tortoise - Thinkin

And now I'm getting reports it's snowing.... ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!

Paul Atherton's Greatest Londoners: A Little Kindness Goes A Long Way When You're Homeless...

The title of this blog (and yes, as ever, I've been trying to write a blog for months) is the title of the show I've just closed at the Gallery@Oxo (why they couldn't call it the Oxo Gallery which is how everyone refers to it, is beyond me, but that's what they insist on calling it, even though using the "at" symbol screws it up across all social media) on Sunday.
https://www.oxotower.co.uk/events/paul-athertons-greatest-londoners/

The event, as usual, was to me a simple thing, a logical thing and an easy thing.

Of course what happened was the very organistaion (Coin Street) we'd approached to assist us, turned it into something extremely complicated, totally illogical and fantastically difficult and ironically, guaranteed its failure. It epitomised perfectly, why I, and others like me, find trying to do anything to either improve our lot or to resolve our issues nigh on impossible to do in this city at the moment (it wasn't always this way).

The story, as it always does, started with an idea.

It had been brought to my attention that the Mayor of London Seed Funding Project may be a revenue source to support my Homelessness community campaigning, it was a piddling £5,000 but it would be nice to pay some of the people who'd offered their time free of charge so often over the years and so I was keen to apply.
https://www.theculturediary.com/stories/mayor-london-culture-seeds-applications-and-roadshows

Initial investigations proved this to be the usual ploy of a funder who is only interested in how you apply not what you deliver. Emails were exchanged to see if the idea of a photorgaphic exhibition to change the media narrative on homelessness was a potential. No! Came the response. It's not got any community involvement.  I countered explaining the Homeless Community is a Community but it doesn't act or behave, as say a local Gardening Club does.  Slight movement, well maybe, but show us how you'd involve the community?  The London public would visit, we'd talk, beliefs would be altered, perception of homelessness in the media would change,then, the end of London Homelessness.

Oh yes we might be interested in that. Do please apply.

People asked me why Wales (my home country) voted to leave the EU because they were one of the places to get the most of EU money. For me, this very problem is why.  Bid writing is an art so only large bureaucracies can afford to pay someone to do it for them. The rest of us throw something together quickly, hoping the grants officer can see past the typos, the incorrect gramma and pull out the idea.  That's not how grant offices think. They want it in their language, their style and under their authority. This is the quickest way to kill good ideas. In the main, Grant officers are such, because they don't have a creative bent in their entire bodies and certainly no "go getting" attitudes Which means grants go to crappy ideas with excellently written bids and the excellent ideas with poorly written bids get lost in the weeds.

In Wales one of the most stupid and expensive EU funded "White Elephant" ideas was the Ebw Vale Garden Festival, the area needed a hospital, a school, a community centre, but what they got was some pretty daffodils (It took five years of laying idle after the festival, another ten as an out of town shopping centre before some bright spark using local money finally got what they should have).

Good creatives don't have time or the inclination to be wasting time with nonsense bureaiucracies that exist purely for process and never for outcome. Good creatives get things done. It was going to take the Mayor's Fund six weeks to make a decision, I needed the show, from idea, photographed, hung in a gallery and completed, in under four.

I have a play taster coming (Fifty Years Of Trying) up I wanted to promote and my exhibiton Displaced, later in the year that I neeeded public support with (a Citywide Art Project using the luxury items stuck in my storage unit for the past decade of my ongoing homelessness, displayed in museum cases on the streets of London in the form of a treasure hunt, again to dispel many the myths of homelessness - I tried last year but the City of London - City Arts Initiative, inertia, even after saying they loved the idea, created pointless blocks which made it stumble).

So, I need a big media spalsh, something to encourage sponsors, audience members, venues etc. to get involved. Believe me, nothing gets done in the 21st Century until some major media publication prints about it.

Just weeks earlier Guardian Journallist Aditya Chakrabortty (It's his Birthday today - so Happy Birthday).had saved my project Displaced from complete devasation by assisting me, playing his role as a journalist, to secure a deal with Access Storage, keeping my possessions there for another seven month, and my last chance of doing something with them not to waste the £24,000 that had been spent keeping them there.

Many people offer to help, in fact around twenty people at the RSA (where I'm a Fellow) offered to help with the project after my talk (What Does It Mean to be Homeless in the 21st Century) there, but not one followed through. Aditya (whom I met on the pannel of Dr. Frances Ryan's London book Launch Crippled: Asuterity and the Demonisation of Disabled People, as I'm the homeless case-study in the Housing Chapter) is one of the few who said he would help and when asked, actually did.

It's the biggest problem in the 21st Century, I think some people call it virture signalling, wanting to be seen to be doing good, without actually doing any good at all.

Many people don't understand the battles Homeless people have with Councils, MPs and the dreaded DWP, and indeed some of the visitors to the Gallery At Oxo were keen to reflect the classic stereotypes back to me and were desperate for me to acknowledge that foreigners jump the queue in housing, that people cheat benefits and that homeless people are alcoholic and drug addicts.

It was these beliefs that the media had perpetuated that of course the show was designed explicitly to challenge. It's not that these things don't happen, but that they happen in such small percentages as to not warrant the media attention they garner.

But these comments, are always made as if having criminals amongst a community is unique to the welfare system.  The irony of course, is that the percentage of criminals making fraudulent claims or perpetraiting criminal activity against the department is so low the DWP had to combine the fraud figure with their own errors figure to increase it and even then could only bring it up to 1.3% of the total claimed (between 2006 - 2012 when only Fraud was measured it never peaked higher than 0.8%).
https://fullfact.org/news/benefit-fraud-record-high/

And when you consider that 7% (seven times that of what's lost in fraud) of the total sum rightfully owed by the DWP goes unclaimed you do wonder why the Government is spending more than they would ever save on Fraud investigations. Especially when there's 3,750 Fraud investgators in the DWP to try and prevernt the loss of £1.3 Billion yet only 700 in the HMRC's Wealth team to protect £4.4 Billion of tax-payers money.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2018/11/over-p10-billion-of-benefits-left-unclaimed/
https://fullfact.org/economy/do-benefit-fraud-investigators-outnumber-tax-inspectors-ten-one/

That cry of saving your hard earned "Tax Payers" money with draconian measures the DWP have brought in against Disability Claimants, also doesn't hold water for one second when you realise how much money the department has lost in defending the indefensible, with appeal after appeal being over turned.  My case, simply to get the DWP to email me, took two years, a Royal Courts of Justice, Judgement and near £100,000 of DWP defence team legal fees. If they'd paid me that money instead, I would have never needed to have claimed again.  But still I'm costing the Department as I've already beaten them at two benefit appeals and about to go into a third since then, costing tens of thousands of pound whilst only dealing with £100s of money owed to me (though invariably as each case takes over a year to be heard and all benefits stopped in the meantime, the back-payment of funds amout to £1,000s in the end, one assumes the DWP just hope you die before you win).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/12/disability-benefit-appeals-department-for-work-and-pensions-figures

If of course you believe this ridiculous conceit in the first place.

The Tax Payer against Welfare Claimant argument is as ludicrous as two Green Flag customers arguing about who paid for the receovery of the others car.  Both paid into the insurance scheme only one claimed.  Thus the one who didn't break down is complaining about the one who did, for the very reason of insuring himself against it. It's embarrasing that anyone in Britian would not see the words National Insurance and see it as meaning just that, an insurance scheme.eveyone pays into, but only some claim. If everyone claimed, the entire Insurance industry would collapse over night.

And why doesn't this "us and them" argument extend to the middle-class thefts from supermarkets which amounts to £3.2 Billion a year but seems totally acceptable (three times that of DWP fraud).  Especially when it comes to self-service checkout till fraud with hipsters claiming avocados are carrots to avoid paying for the product. This is shoplifting and is way more damaging.to the economy, the environment & social cohesion, but we don't see strip searches of every customer leaving Waitrose believing everyone to be a criminal so why do we do it when it comes to benefits?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/avocados-carrots-self-service-scam-supermarkets-checkout-stealing-a8370621.html

And of course the biggest part of fraudulent benefit claiming is Housing Benefit and that doesn't even go to the claimant, that goes to the Landlord. So these £1m pound benefit cheat stories are ridiculous, as the money that's paid out in the main has made someone rich, richer, Yet, when convicted and the money's claimed back, it's from the claimant and not the Landlord.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/landlords-making-millions-from-fraud-1346840.html

The reason is of course is how the meida present things about the DWP claimants to the public, it's their narrative that enshirine what people think about a subject and that too is true of the homeless.

Nearly without excpetion any media news story about homelessness will  run with the classic tropes of drug addicition, alcoholism, cardboard boxes and a begging bowl. My favourite media organisation, Tortoise Media, where I'm a member, only did it a week ago to my huge disappointment. Esepcially as that image was attached to a story written by Peter Hoskin, whom I was developing a story about the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on DWP claimants with and had discussed this very perception problem with him.
https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/01/29/homelessness-taking-action/content.html

And this is why I approach Sarah Witt (events manager at Coin Street for Gallery At Oxo) with an email pitch with the idea of running a Quick & Dirty (the name of my production company abbrevaited to Q&D Productions, to avoid porn associations) of the Mayors Funding idea should she have space in the gallery and could donate to the project in late Ferbuary as it looked from the schedule on the website that they had.

This was Monday 20th January, when I'd received no response by the 23rd I chased again and was given the surprising response that the gallery was free from the 4th - 11th February if we could get the exhibition together in time.. It was less than ten days away but after discussion with my collaborator  & friend paparaazzi photogrpaher Chris Harvey, we decided if we could cut the scale of the project down to just ten subjects shot over two half days, we could indeed put everything in place in time.

On Friday 24th January we'd submitted all our proposals and confirmed that Sarah herself will be doing our PR and liaising with JC Decaux for access to their Billboard on Waterloo Bridge (though she later refers to a comms teams in later communications, though it's never actually established what, who or if they actually exist) and requested that she send all other documents required, so I can get them sorted over the weeked, which sadly she doesn't do.

However, over the weekend I draft a press release which with just over a week to go clearly needs to go out that day, reach out to Tabish Khan the Art Critic at the Londonist.  I still had it in my head that Gallery@Oxo was an art gallery, rather than a venue space.

I'd concluded it had its own staff member to man it (not the case, I did the entire run on my own in the end at huge detriment to my health and my MECFS), had good relations with the press and listings (nope, nothing there either) and as they had their non-descript advertisitng running on the JC Decaux Billboard that it would be merely a change of image (which also didn't happen).

Monday, I was all set we'd got our ten subjects, I'd scheduled four to be photographed that afternoon, all the documentation that I'd had been provided had been filled in and the draft press release had been sent to all involved by 08:20 Monday morning.  I had a meeting with Sarah at 10am.

At that meeting I was somewhat floored when she informed she had yet to get the final sign off from her board. This didn't happen until the next morning Tuesday, but suddenly the focus, rather than being on the promotion of the event (ensuring listings etc.which could always be retracted later) the focus began to go on the nonsensical. They were concerned about Risk Assessment Forms (a useless device for anybody with the smallest iota of common sense).

The ONLY objective of this event was press and I'm now being embroiled with them getting upset about Public Liability Insurance document addresses (secured through as I obvioulsy didn't have one and was using a C/O deposit payments as they refused to take cash my only means of payment and suddenly my days rather than talking to journalsists and writing the copy for the show was being spent correcting ludicrous contracts and teaching people law.

Then on Wednesday having broken our necks to get this all organised, I get an email saying they were cancelling as they couldn't give it the focus they flet the exhibition needed. As you can imagine, I went ballastic, crashed with an MECFS relapse caused by the stress and lost an entire day from our already rapidly ticking down clock. I managed to shoot across their bow that I'd consider pursuing legal action against them,

Thursday we were all back on with another afternoon of shoots and the same Friday. Requiring us to run from one side of London to the other encompasing Abbey Road Studios, the Museum of London archives, Lock & Co Hatters and Fortnum and Masons before conlcluding in the RSA the CEO Matthew Taylor.

Chirs is a working paparazzi and was fitting this around his own work schedule and would often be shooting until 4am in the morning with celebrities like Madonna before grabbing a few hours sleep and out with me again.  The delays meant an ever important break inside with friends would have to go out the window as now I'd be writing all weekend before the show opening two days later.

Friday I'm alerted that the so called "comms" team don't even have a press distribution list (a database of journalists to whom you can distribute press releases).

We managed to secure photographic printers on Monday, Majestics in Covent Garden rallied to the rescue with a booze delivery (the gallery forcing us to pay £144 for a licencee who didn't even wash the drink glasses) and on Tuesday with 20 minutes to spare we get the text up on all the walls.

The foot fall past the gallery ensured we had over 300 visitors without promotion, press, advertising or listings. But the sole point of the exhibition, getting the press there to talk about the issue, nowhere to be seen.

So for the entire run, I'm now stuck in the gallery, desperately trying to pull in favours from all and sundry.  Tabish can't make it, but gives the show a retweet, Toby Young's twitter post citing "My Friend Paul Atherton (@LondonersLondon) has been homeless for ten years..." gets a good upsurge but not a single journalist even finds that mildly interesting.
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1225168912221986817

And so we breakdown the show on Sunday. I immediately and predicably have an MECFS crash on Monday.

Laid up the following day I discover through my social media, the independent Mayorial candidate Rory Stewart is running a campiagn entitled #ComeKipWithMe asking Londoners to offer a place for him to sleep and explain their London to him.  I reach out immediately. It taps straight into the message I was trying to portray with the exhibition so an invitation to bed down with me at Heathrow Airport for the night is offered.

Social media algorithms are not being my friend when I do anything social campaigning.  An inconsequential post about Valentines nearly 40 engagements anything to do with the show 2 or 3.

So as one last ditch attemtpt to achieve my aim of changing the media narrative on Homelessness, I set up a 38 Degrees Petition to persaude Rory to select me for his campaign, at least this wouldn't have been an entire waste of time then.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/rory-stewart-should-kip-with-homeless-paul-atherton

We'll just have to see if it will get some momentum... as ever fingers crossed.

The constant struggle..... if I only I could market myself like the homeless stereotype the media wants....

As you'll have read in my previous post.  A lovely lady who brought me hope and happiness slipped through my fingers for seemingly no reason a few months ago. It hurt... a lot.

It's not an uncommon experience though being let down by those people closest to you. As I get older it's something that has happened more than it ever did when I was young. That's not an age thing but a period one.  Commuity and friendship used to be key to survival in our society. but we've stopped thinking of ourselves in those terms in the 21st Century, instead we've become isolated and money serving.

Being let down by someone you care for, that's the worst, but being let down by everybody makes the process of living nigh on impossible.

I am yet again, being wongly deprived funds from the DWP in respect to my DLA (Disability Living Allowace) & IB (Incapacity Benefit) which are paid due to my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  This means I'm now utterly destitute.Being penniless in the UK, unblievable, is actually an illegal offence.

That is becasue we still have the Georgian (not Victorian law folks, it poredates even that) Vagrancy Act on our statute and the police still use it (Liberty are campaigning to get it repealed). If you cannot prove you have the means to feed yourself you can go to prison.  The irony of a state that doesn't want to give someone their legally entitled welfare of £200 per week but happy to pay a £1,000 in housing that same individual in prison, is not lost on me, especially, as our PM says aursterity has ended.

I personally wouldn't last a week if my freedoms were taken away from me, so it's not really an option for me, but I do see those choosing prison over survivnig on the streets as its a better alternative, as being reasoned and rational.

People often ask me, "how can this be happening?" it's a good question, but it isn't actually what they mean. They are not asking how can we live in a society that allows this to happen, or how are civil servants permitted to get away with this behavipur or why isn't our government doing anything to prevent these travesties?

No, they are asking me, how I've let this happen to me.

This question really pisses me off.

Not least, becasue I would have done a hundred things they wouldn't even have thought of doing to imrpove my siutation. Attempted a myriad of solutions from the blindingly obvious to the insanely obscure.

But the most galling is because they think, if their life is "normal" then clearly I must have done something to make mine "abnormal". They don't understand, as a society that we don't live in a bubble,  Our actions aren't necessarily our own as we live in a country with enforecable laws, that sometimes work against us.

For example I have in the past reached out to the Cinema & Television Benevolent Fund (CTBF now renamed The Film & Television Charity) when things had got like this in the past and had been greatly assisted, especially when it came to supporting my son after the DWP removed my mens to live the first few times.  But the CTBF hated the fact that I could maintain a social life in London and be homeless and peniless and therefore simply stopped beleiving me.  Thus my persistence not to be crushed by my situation, instead preferring to use my initiative, skill and knowledge to continue my lifestyle without money, becomes the very reason I wasn't getting support for money I simply couldn't survive without.

My mother always instilled in me the notion that people will help others who help themselves.  That's no longer a mantra that holds ture in today's society.

In the UK's current climate, you're either a waster or a cheat if you have the tumerity to claim, should you get sick or infirmed, the insurance you've probably paid into for years. British society doesn't see National Insurance as the same as any other type of insurance and therefore if you make claim on it in respect to Social Security payments then you're a failure, a loser or a bum.

Ironically though it would be the same as saying to someone who'd had an accident in their car that they shouldn't claim car insurance, because of all those who've paid their insurance and haven't had an accident. The system would obviously collapse, but it is of course exactly the same thinking.

Legally, I've beaten the DWP in appeals court over tweny times over the years. 

I've even attended the Royal Courts of Justice as a litigant in person (representing myself) when they refused to communicate with me by email against their own policy, government legislation and my Human Rights, which the judge in that case stated had been breached for nearly a decade (Paul Atherton V Secreatry of State for Work and Pensions).

How many people can say they argued against the State on their own in one of the highest courts in the land and changed case-law?  I suspect very few.

But still people ask "How haven't you sorted this yet?"

My current appeals process has taken since November 2018 and I've still yet to hear if I have a date for the hearing.  I'm lucky, having worked for the DHSS as was in the mid eighties, I understand the law in respect to benefits, so can represent myself.  Others aren't so lucky and they've had the removal of Legal Aid to add to their woes, so can't get pay for legal assistance, even if they found someone who'd take their case.

But how can I speed up the legal process, how do I fix that?

I'm trying to get an art project off the ground as you may have read elsewhere called Displaced (My speech on the project at the RSA can be found here).  The idea was simple, put 50 of my luxury objects, that had been trapped in my sotrage unit for the past ten years, in Museum Cases on the streets of London in the style of a treasure hunt. The prupose? To highlight the changing face of homelessness currently evolving in the United Kingdon and dispell many of the myths assocaited with it and in so doing bring about a change of tone in the media.

If I'd been attempting do this a decade ago I would have completed it by now. As it is, I've bee trying to get this off the ground for three years and am pretty much exaclty where I started.

I'd been working with the Museum of Homelessness but they got intimidated by the scale of the project even though for me it was primarily to raise funds for them and dropped out with really no explanation.

Access Storage who have been phenomenal in their assistance over the years, have had a change of store management and are now no longer being accomodating with my storage fees and they've also had a change of Marketing Manager so the promise of PR from them has suddenly dematerialised too.

The City of London's City Art Initiative (CAI) apparently loved the idea, but then made no assistance in making it happen, as fake block after fake block was put in my way. First it was an advertising problem, that miraculously vanished when I requested upon which legislation they were making this decision, then it was Highways problem until Highways said no problem and so it went.

I spoke at the Royal Society of Arts as a Fellow to garner support from the Fellowship, but none came forward. The RSA is supposed to be the heart of groundbreaking thinking in the UK but nobody out of the 40,000 fellowship actually came forward with assistance. NOBODY!

I reached out to my alma mater Cardiff Business School in the hope of getting support from the Alumni & provide work placements for students. Carbs is the only school that makes claim to being A Public Value Business School but their response reflected small minded thinking and a knee jerk reaction to something that should have prompted a discussion at the very least. They bother me every week, have written about me and I'm one of the few Alumni with a Wikipedia page.

I've spoken at the House of Commons about my plight to engender a clearly understanding of the problem when Bob Blackman was drafting his Homelessness Reduction Bill, but the key to my contirbution was how do you enforce legislation when Councils are refusing to abide by them was lost and remains to be the biggest problem today.

I've been invited in to City Hall to speak to the heads of No Second Night Out when I was stuck in their hub on Goldhawk road only to be ignored, because the people I was speaking to, although in charge, had no undestanding of the problem. Prefering a piece of reseach that was so flawed wouldn't have got through a first year business course

I've been written about as a Homeless case--study in a book. spoken at Tate Modern on DWP & The Digital Lie and given a lecture at the British Academy Representing Homelessness Conference but have achieved precisely nothing.

And I'm not asking for Charity.  I'm asking for something that I'm legally entitled too.  I'm asking for my insurance to pay out and to have the legal protections to allow me to live a decent life within the framework of legal Human Rights which of course ironically, is a law that the UK created (The European Convention on Human RIghts).

I don't want sympathy or other people's money.  I want my money, the money that I paid additonal voluntary contributions for into my National Insurance, when I was running my own business in my twenties.

Am I to blame for contracting Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at 20? Am I to blame for having a Credit agency make an error on my credifile and have no legal recourse to correct it (which is what prompted my homelessness in the first place over a decade ago)?

Is it my fault that Local Authroittes lied to me, got me to sign a contract with an agency that removed my right to social housing, not that that mattered because it would still take a ten year wait before I got one.

How about the wrongful impounding of the car that I was living in when the DVLA screwed up and the Metropolitan police took it away - my fault?

I think not.  But still, I don't want to complain or gripe I just want to change the situation for myself and others who find themsleves in this plight.


I've been interviewed by Buzzfeed (1 hour interview), the Mail on Sunday (3 hour interview followed by a 3 hour photo shoot), Channel 4 news (2 hour interview) and been offered to write a piece for the Huffington Post but all came to naught. Invariably not getting past the editor or making it past the last cut.

The feedback, if any comes at all, is invariably the same, I don't fit the sterotype. I'm trying to change the narrative but that's not what the news audience wants to hear.

To be homelesss in the media, you have to look and smell what they consider a homeless person should be. The arcehtypal Guardian image of man in doorway covered with newspapers.

No way should you find yourself at the Opera, vsiting a Gallery or dining, as the DWP put it, when they spotted a tweet on my feed when a friend had taken me out for a meal, at an upmarket restaurant (even more ironically we wouldn't have considered the establishment remotely so).

The sex sells angle wins too.  When I was being asked to discuss things in respect to Dr. Frances Ryan's book, it was the female who had to turn to sexwork to survive that seemed to garner most interest, in that uncomfortable juxtaposition between wanting to see the book publicised but not wishing the exploitaiton of someone who'd made a diffiuclt choice in hard-times.

In the 21st Century you'd think our media would be far better than this. Our intelligence improving not, as Mike Judge (he of Beavis & Butthead Fame & King of The Hill) in his brilliantly prophetic, live action movie Idiocracy, predicted all but disappeared.

So I find myself in no-mans land (something I found myself with my skin colour when I was growing up in the Welsh Valleys - not Black nor White but mistrusted by both) wanting a platform to make change, but with a media utterly insistent on not sharing my voice.

It was telling when I went to the StopTheCoup demonstration, that as someone who had voted to leave the European Union, that I knew so much more about the EU than those who were campaigning to stay in it.

It's the media that has created this divide between Remainers & Leavers, because the media are not reporting the facts.  They are no longer a service (well that's been true for a while) that delivers news, but a content entertainment service.

As a film-maker I'm all too aware of this.

From Citizen Kanes "What will the people think?... "they'll think what I tell them to think", to Networks "I'm not going to take this anymore" to Broadcast News "fake tear reporting" we've commercialised our news.

The birth of the "clash" interview in the documentary amd it all to obvious that divisive was the only way to entertain.

So, if you're ever wondering what I've done to try and improve my lot, I've taken the state to court, spoken at the House of Commons, appeared in a best-selling book on austerity, created an art project to highlight my plight, put my life bare on the internet for anyone to see and undertaken a myriad of press interviews to change public opinion as well as supporting others through court battles and making films to highlight social injustice.

All of this of course whilst in the main, living on £70 per week social security benefits and sleeping at night on plastic chairs at Heathrow Aiport Terminal Five, now ask yourself, what would you have done in the same circumstances to improve your lot?

And then please, let's never hear the question "what have you done to sort this out? again".

Joyce Ademasa - Make Up Artist (MUA) broke my heart...

It's hard to believe that someone I've been so committed too with so much for so long would be so cruel.

But sadly it's the nature of relationships, even when seemingly they end ammicably.

I met Joyce through a mutual friend whom she was supporting him as a Make-Up artist in his show last December.

I pursued her for a date, which took over a month to secure and upon doing so, let her enter my world, of eating at chef's tables, trips to Amsterdam for Valentines, invitations to the Highlands at a stately home,  the most romantic dates in London, my birthday adventures and a whole plethora of experiences that money simply couldn't buy.

Which is fortunate, as, as you know, money is not my forte.

Her looks belay her 53 years on the planet but sadly so does her maturity too.

We parted company just over nine days ago.  She did this at a stage in my life where I'd reached out to her for help. She knew I was struggling to the point of being almost suicidal, her response was one of repulsion, that I couldn't handle the stresses of having no money, struggling with my ME/CFS, being Homeless, having my project Displaced pushed back, not hearing from my 19 year old son and our own crumbling relationship.

She was seemingly more concerned about how things looked to others than what it meant to each of us.

This whole situation was huge for me, as when we started seeing each other she was keen to know if this was a long-term thing leading to marriage.  I'd spent 30 years avoiding such relationships and the notion of monagomy was always such a problem for me. (Read my interview in Advantages of Age here for the full picture https://advantagesofage.com/work/people/4172-2/) but I genuinely thought we could see our final years out together and fully committed to working towards a married relationship.

My homelessness became an issue for her. Even though she had her own home, and suffered the experience of not having somewhere to live herself, unbelievably she didn't once offer a night indoors.

We shared personal time in friends holiday homes or hotels.

So in our four months of dating, her getting me to say I loved her, I had never once visited her home.

I've never met anyone ele who has had experience of Homelessness not to relate to the condition.  It could be because it was so far in her past that she forgot how important it was for the odd night inside to survive, but she said even after four months, knowing everything about me and saying she wanted me to conisder marrying her, she didn't feel comfortable inviting me home.

Our relationship ended without even a break-up kiss, let alone break-up sex.  The problem seemingly bolied down to a few moments of miscommunication. She declined to spare five minutes to book a hotel room, which resulted in me not getting inside, that then turned into days of her silence.  A poem that refelcted my feelings in an instance that she took to relflect our relationship as a whole

She was averse to publishing anything online about our relationship, even though she's happy to share her personal feelings, visits with family or going out.  Without this blog, there would in fact be no record of our time togehter whatsoever online.

It's horrific for me, because she lured me into a world where I actually believed in marraige and a life-time relationship was possible.  Something anybody who knows you will tell you is something I've managed to keep at bay for the past twenty years.

Our last meeting in the Reunion Bar at Victoria Station, was a result of her ignoring all attempts from me to communicate. Requests to answers of why we'd split-up were met with silence, whether she wanted to hear from me again. She'd asked that I fight for our relationship, something I'd lattelry agreed to do (against it must be said, my better judgement).  The thing abut our relationship was that we were always looking for it to be balanced.  Two people working to the betterment of each other, not one looking after the other.

It was an amazing relationship built on honesty and communication.  Until the proverbial hit the fan when it was apparent that what Joyce was actually wanting was exactly the opposite of what she said she wanted.  Something very strange happened bewteen seeing each other, that caused her to create amazing pain and discomfort for me.

Open honesty was replaced with secrecy. care and emotion wsa replaced with her being obtuse and antagonistic.

I have no idea if this break-up is causing her any discomfort whatsoever.  She closed me out.

My life has been placed in complete meltdown and all because we couldn't sustain our communications, which was never explained.

It was the worst thing I've endured.  I invested everything into this relationship, money, time, emotion and commitment, in a way I've never done before. The fact she was unable to express her feelings makes the situation even worse, because she felt cold, I felt duped and cheated.

I'm back at Heathrow and haven't slept in 24 hours  Her insistence on ignoring communications without explanantion was the most evil thing anyone has ever done to me. Modern ghosting. The fact that we got to sit down, demonstrated that she was looking for the negative in everything. Made more annoying about the suprfiiciality of the guise of her forever being positive.

The entire situation could have been resolved if she'd done a few little things and hadn't misinterpreted my actions.  It was thrown in with some bad timing and bad luck (messages got lost and voicemails not heard), but fundamentally, it was one five minute hotel transaction that derailed us - and that's ridiculous.

I'm gutted and dissapointed and would love to get another bite of the cherry to putting things right - but without communication nothing can be done.

She needs to me to "Man-Up" as she put it, but ironically, it's her insistence to not support at present that's created my biggest obstacle to do that.

Whislt this may sound angry and bitter, it isn't.  I'm disappointed and lost and unsure what to do next.

Next move is mine now I guess.... I'm hoping the book Crippled (written by the Guardian Journalist Dr. Francis Ryan and in which I am a case-study https://www.waterstones.com/book/crippled/frances-ryan/9781786637888) which comes out next week, will open the door to me getting some accomodation. And maybe then we can look at rebuilding....

But if she'd simply been honest about what she wanted and how to accomplish it, I thnk we could be both together and extremely happy.

Looking for purpose....

It's 9 a.m. 

I am sitting in Caffe Nero in the arrivals lounge of Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, typing this blog on a beer encrusted keyboard having had just 3 hours of sleep.

This is now becoming common place and the continual circle of get beaten down, struggle back, be given hope and then crushed to nothing again, is coming to an end.

If we are to believe it, Einstien is alleged to have said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result".

Well that's been my life for the last ten years and maybe it's time to acknwoledge life has won.

This year was supposed to be the year, that I conquered, not that I started the cycle all over again. 

Displaced had been an idea that I'd been trying to get off the ground in truth for seven years.  It's inception was based on the fact that I've paid £20,000 to keep my possessions in storage for the last ten years and rather than thinking of that in terms of money, I saw it as a way of telling my story in perpetuity. They'd gone into storage for what I'd thought would be a maximum of three months, when I first became homeless.  But as time went on, the DWP failures compounded, Local authorities lied and cheated, homeless charities failed, the police confiscated my car etc. it became apparent it would go on forever.

The initial idea was that I would donate the possessions to a Museum, this didn't work out as planned as the Geffrey Museum were too full to take anymore, the V&A liked the evolution of my jeans from Levi's to Edwin to Brioni, but it never got off the ground and so many institutions liked the idea, were either too slow in making decisons or simply had no more space to take anything but my reaching out did finally lead to my video diary being taken into the Museum of London's permanent collection.

But the discovery of the Museum of Failure through Social Media, prompted that idea to morph into a London Citywide Street art installation. MoF never came to London as envisaged but then like a miracle Museum of Homelessness came across my bow.

And as of last year the project actually came into sight and seemed to becoming together at a rate of knots. 

I discover that the founder of the MoH Jess Tuttle and I had lived in the same homeless community which her mother ran, when I was 17 she was 6, one of the participants on the course had assisted in trying help save the Kensington Odeon when we tried to break-in, a friend's boyfriend, introduced me to Museum Exhibition consultant Bob Deakin, who became the lynchpin for the event.  I'd met sponsorship consultant Tom Meggle at a French Institute screening, Sam Bompass had put me in touch with his Lighting Designer, Helen Marriage had introduced me to her Production Manager, Access Storage's PR team were keen to assist with promotion.

As you know, I suffer with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  Laughingly the medical advice is always to avoid stress. Try avoiding stress, when you don't get paid the money you're entitled too from the state, because of some civil servants whim, even when the courts are on your side every single time, even in the highest in the land (see prevoius blog)

So now I have decaying teeth, because my borther who has been my dentist for thirty years has retired and I can't afford the treatment (especially because until my circumstances change, there seems little point, becasue I can't look after them properly in my current situation).

My doctors at Riverside Medical Centre all left, first the brillaint and kind Dr. Murray Ellender, who was the most supportive and understanding of Doctors I've ever had, ended up running the entire group of practices and doing some amazing work for patients at a management level especially in respect to technology.  Then Dr. Dyer-Smith who remained my doctor for 5 years and again who eventually fell foul of the draw of a management position was replaced with 

I started this blog by saying I was typing on a beer encrusted keyboard. Why?  Well this is the continual problem.  You are homeless, so you don't get much sleep, therefore you're tired, therefore you lose concentration and make mistakes.  In this instance it involved me moving a pint and not placing it properly splashing beer all over my keyboard.

Previously it had been lost devices, broken power cables, dropped tablets in St. Katharine's Docks. Now it's even the simple ability to write.

You see surviving daily in this state would be a masive impact on my health if I was heathy, but trying to do it when I'm suffering with ME/CFS is nigh on impossible, throw in the fact that I'm then trying to achieve a massive citywide art project then, would seem insane.

But it wasn't, it just required a little help. and as I said for a week or two it all seemed to be coming into place, but then just as quickly it vanished.

Growing up I wa taught by my parents that people help those who help themselves. That's no longer true.  The DWP have used my accomplishmnets as a stick to prevent me from getting benefits, people only offer to help, if they see a way of making money for themselves and the fun of doing something just for the sake of doing somethnig just simply doesn't exsit in public consciousness anymore.

The most crushing of all these has been the Museum of Homelessness. Their catalyst programme had been a wondrful experience and the bonds that I made there empowering, but rather than being the assisting platform I had hoped, it turned into the same bureaucratic nightmare of all these institutions.

The things that they were supposed to bring to the table like contacts and a mentor, just didn't materialise. I secured my own Mentor in the amazing Helen Marriage (and her efficiency just further highlighted how easy this whole thing could have been if everyone took her approach, email's answered within 24 hours with a resolution, always looking for ways to say yes, never no and always there for me). 

So with this gone, I've really given up on life.  Everytime I think of ending my life, I think of my son Charles, but even here I feel like a complete failure. Like your average 19 year old, he doesn't stay in touch.  I wonder what impact my departure would have on him.  I often wonder what my homeless situaiton has on him.  Since he was 9 years old I haven't had a house. 

Thankfully, friends, hotel owners and other location site owners have all facilitated in me housing him on visits to London and giving him the most amazing times when he came to visit me in London but things are now on their last ebb.

I've been typing this for the past two hours.... fatigue is creeping in,,,, brain fog has probably mean I've missed things as I can now no longer look back on this to check....  Suicide beckons once again.

I'm aamzed I've not had a stroke or a heart attack, my diet is abysmal £3 meal deals do not constitue a balanced food source, exercise is non-existant, I'm sedantry for 14 - 18 hours at a time, with the excpetion of two to three visits to the toilet I can sometimes, endure an entire day without moving from a single position.  DVT something my biolgical mother suffered with must be just waiting to kick down the door.  Alcohol consumptoin has gone back to Whisky for breakfast.

Do I continue to fight and thus kick-start the whole cycle all over again and as Einstein stated demonstrate my insanity because I expect a different outcome (a stark contrast to the Try, Try and Try again mantra, because everything I do is with a different appraoch) or do I quit, end my life, just simply by letting go of the fight and giving up....

I'm leaving Heathrow to go and do something cultural and free... It's the reason I fight to stay in London, endure impossible odds and want to enshrine myself in it's history... London has always been kind to me, sadly the people who now inhabit are not... and maybe it is indeed to take my final bow... time will tell.



   

Chip... Chip....Chip....

As ever, I'm not finding the time to write my Blogs.

This year has been a whirlwind of eroding failure indespersed with little wnis.  And it's the little wins that are the worst for me these days.

You see the wins give hope and energise me to keep fighting and actually what's needed now, is for me to simply quit.  To lie down somewhere and simply give-up. It's the only rational and sane approach to the situation.

For ten years, I've been fighting.

I've been fighting the DWP, on an almost monthly basis since 2009, my money is removed, I fight and a year later having had no funds, the money is back-dated and then the fight begins all over again with the DWP stopping my funding for the exact same reason.

In February of this year, I found myself, standing in the Royal Courts of Justice, representing myself against a team of lawyers for the The Secretary of State for work and pensions.

As ever, I'd been let down by the people who were being paid to support me.  It's hard to ensvision a worse scenario, where I'm struggling to find money to eat, worrying about where I'm going to sleep each night, trying to fend off my Chronic Fatugue Syndrome, so when someone offers to suppot to take a little of pressure off my life, I grab it with both hands.

The Public Law Project, have done me an appalling disservice. Not only did they take my case with full knowledge. I warned them that the DWP would use my Social Media but (I'm still trying to write this - but my sight is diminishing due to my ME/CFS and brainfog....)

Paul Atherton V Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.



So right now, I'm fighting the following battles:

1. The Metropolitan Police to pursue the £25,000 stolen from mt Son's Trust Fund by one of the Trustees, a case that has been ongoing for 2 years.  The Crown Prosecution Service has required twelve months just to make a decision if they will prosecute even though they have all the indisputable evidence to do so. Still ongoing.

2.  The DWP - Email.  Even thuogh the Royal Courts of Justice agreed that the DWP had breached my Human Rigths by refusing

3.  The DWP - Appeals for Incapacity Benefit & Disability Living Alloawnce

4.  DISPLACED
Bob Deakin - let me down
Tom Meggle - let me down
CDI Complaint - CDI found themselve in
Jonathan - no lonfer able to support
Magnetta Brightly - unable to support in her role as an intern (totally essential to me)
Museum of Homelessness - not delivered on a sinle objective they offered to support with.
Campaign Magazine
CIty of London - Holding things up

5.  The Public Law Project - Taking the lawyers through the complaint service and putting together a case againts them for professional negligence.

6.  The RSA

7.  CFS

8.  Teeth

9.   General Health

10.  Diet