Day 9. The Weary Land. (9/1/19)

Last night, on the streets of Liverpool , a thirty year old woman died.

A thirty year old woman died in the city, died in the tent that she had been living in.

Think about that.

It’s 2019. We live in a major European city and we have people living in tents on the streets of our city.

We have people dying in streets of our city.

Think about that. Doesn’t that make you feel simultaneously heartbroken, furious and ashamed?

I didn’t know Aimee Teese. The fact that she was a 30 year old from Netherton, where I’ve lived for 23 years, that the Echo photos show a woman who looks familiar, bring a suggestion of the possibility that I may have passed her in the street at some point. We never know the lives of the people we pass.

I know from the Echo report that she had a daughter.

A child lost her young mother on a Liverpool Street last night.

We don’t know the circumstances that put people out of their homes: health - be it physical or mental, relationships, finances, lifestyles, an accumulation of everything just being too much...

Equally we don’t know why some of those who find themselves homeless aren’t able to take advantage of the services that might help them.

We know there were those who tried to help Aimee over the years. Volunteers  out on the streets taking the place of central organisations unable to offer sufficient social health care.

Ten years of Tory inflicted austerity has seen homelessness become an epidemic. While the news are pointing our attention toward four men in a dinghy struggling to make their way from Calais to England in the hope of a better life and calling it a crisis, the true crisis surrounds us every day.

There are incredible people in this country offering so much help but it can always be more. As a society we owe it to each other to lift up every single person we can. We can all be one or two minutes away from where life turns the wrong way and puts us where we didn’t expect to be.

The horrible truth is Aimee Teese will not be the last person to lose their lives living on a city street.

As a country we need to be better than we currently are. We need to care.

At the moment England is concerned with its imaginary place in the world when it needs to be concerned with gazing into its own soul and asking if it’s good enough. It’s not.

I’m ashamed of it.