Homeless Hikers

How can there be so few individuals who understand the need for people to have a space of their own? Does it take a time of crisis for us to see the plight of the homeless? Must they be escaping a war zone to be in need? As a people, can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid?  If the homeless of our own country were gathered in a refugee camp, or rowed the seas in boats of desperation, would we open our arms to them?  

Our native homeless don’t fit that mould, we prefer to think their plight is self induced and their numbers few, yet over 280 thousand households in the UK claim to have no home and the percentage of those who arrive at that state because of some kind of addiction is small. 

If they, ‘we’ all stood together, men, women, children, we would look very different to one man alone in a shop doorway addicted to anything that gives him a means of escape, how would we be viewed then?  280 thousand, more, less, the true numbers are unknown, refugees from Western civilisation cut adrift from life in a boat that rarely finds a Harbour.


RAYNOR WINN who has a look of Meryl Streep and the above excerpt  from her book - The Salt Path – Raynor’s beautiful, thoughtful, lyrical story of homelessness, human strength and endurance.

Evicted from their house, homeless, bankrupt and fighting a deadly disease, the couple who never gave up and headed for the open countryside instead of the streets of the city. Nature was her safe place, so she set off with her husband Moth on a 630 mile walk. 

She was 50, he was 53. They had a tent bought on eBay, a couple of cheap, thin sleeping bags, £115 in cash and a bankcard with which to draw out the £48 a week they were due in tax credits. They were broke and broken, but the walk gave Moth and Raynor some sense of purpose, and, she says: “We really didn’t have anything better to do.”

Home-less-ness or House-less-ness does not always look the way we think it does, it’s a must read book to find out why.