'Discharged to the streets': one homeless man's struggle in freezing London

You have to be fast to survive on the streets, they say. That’s one thing Richard Curtis is not. Panting and stopping every 10 metres to catch his breath, Curtis drags his suitcase through the brown slush in Covent Garden on Wednesday night on his way to a weekly street handout.

With an air temperature of -4C, for Curtis it was like trying to breathe soup. The 66-year-old suffers from lung disease – stage IV chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – which cold air and large changes in temperature can badly aggravate. For a rough sleeper on the coldest week of winter, it is a major handicap.

“The cold makes life very difficult for me,” he croaks, in a toothless high-pitched whisper. “Because with this lifestyle – if it is a lifestyle – you need to be very active. There’s certain places where there’s the street handouts, there’s certain places where things happen at a certain time of day, so you need to move around. And if you’re slow you’ll just miss it.”

The “beast from the east”, which brought snow and a deep freeze this week, has caused chaos across Britain. But few will have felt its impact more than the thousands of homeless people on the streets.


Source : theguardian