Christmas Eve at Crisis 2008

This Christmas, I decided to volunteer at the Broadway Centre for the homeless with Crisis.

Like starting anything for the first time, it takes a while to find one’s feet. As my two year old boy would say ‘it is a little bit scary.’

The day began with a short induction – 24 volunteers crammed into a smelly room. None of us had met before and with next to no training we were being tasked with running a day centre for 100 guests over Christmas. After some rather poor jokes aimed at breaking the ice, our team leader started allocating tasks.

My first shift was on security. The first guy that walked past told me that he thought I was a sanctimonious middle class do-gooder. He probably had it right.

Anyway, I was kitted up with a radio and told to monitor who was coming in and out. It was freezing. Just when I was beginning to think this was a complete waste of my time, two guests, David and Wayne showed up.

David was a hooded 25 year old who looked like he was in his mid 30s. He had a quiet demeanour although you could tell that, like a volcano, any eruption would be quite dramatic. David told me that he had spent the last three weeks on the streets. In that time he had been assaulted twice – leaving him with stitches in his head which he proudly showed me.

Like most people who end up on the streets, David was heart broken. He had split up with his girlfriend who had disappeared with their 9month old daughter. The council had told him that due to his criminal record, David was a ‘danger to his own daughter’ despite the fact that he had seen his partner hold a knife to his daughter’s throat. He was coming to terms his enforced estrangement from his family – with absolutely no power to address the situation.

David’s friend Wayne was a little more inebriated. Clutching a tin of cider, Wayne was busy confessing his undying love to my security colleague, ‘the beautiful Ellen’. His love was evidenced when he ran off to the shops and used his scant resources to buy Ellen a box of Ferrero Roche. Quite a gesture.

After two hours on the door, I moved inside and listened to a talented musician entertaining the guests with moving covers of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and David Gray’s Babylon. I met two more guests who described themselves as the old gents fo the centre. One was a totally toothless Scottish guy called Gordon (he advised me to look after my teeth while I still had them) and his pal David – another David – who was a former employee of the Bank of England (from 1963 to 1976 he told me). These guys were great company – the kind of individuals who you felt had a much deeper understanding of the way the world worked than I would ever obtain.

I resisted the temptation to grab the mike and entertain the guests with a few tracks of my own and decided instead to help out in the kitchen. The ladies in the kitchen were impressed with my mopping skills. I had to let them know that I wasn’t this good at home and that really I was just a show-pony. So that became my nick-name for the rest of the day. I thought ‘Mark the show-pony’ was rather apt.