One of the most brutal, intense and generally intrusive forms of homelessness is rough sleeping – or street homelessness, as some prefer to call it.

The average “normal” 9-to-5 person will wake up to their alarm to get ready for work, that first yawn and stretch of the day followed swiftly by a trip to the toilet. After which a nice hot shadow or wash follows. After they’ve freshened up ready to tackle the day, it’s time for breakfast and a nice Nescafe Gold Blend, or Kenco if you’re well off financially.

These small seemingly mundane everyday tasks are things we as humans have come to take for granted.

Let’s compare life to the flip of a coin, for example, heads you win/tails you lose. The reason I use this analogy is because it really is that easy to lose everything and become homeless. One bad decision, one wrong move, or even the loss of a family member whose name is the main tenancy holder of your household, can all lead to sleeping in a shop doorway.

So, here’s a question for you. It’s not a trick question and there’s no right or wrong answer, it’s more to do with perception. When you stand in a shop doorway what do you see? Straight away 95% of you reading this will say, “it’s obvious, it’s the entrance to a shop.” And quite rightly so as it really is the entrance to a retail premises. Having said this my answer at this stage in my life would be, “a doorway to a dark place.” In my experience a shop doorway is the home of invisibility, pain, suffering and longing.

To a small but ever increasing number of us, a shop doorway has become our humble abode. It’s become a home where there’s a complete lack of privacy, a home where that first yawn and stretch of the day is witnessed by every passer-by; a home where that shower or wash of the 9-to-5 person becomes a baby wipe, wash and wipe, for all to see; and the morning toilet stop takes place behind a wall in an alleyway or back passage somewhere which is degrading and demoralising in itself; and, as for the breakfast and morning Kenco, you’re lucky if you can beg enough by midday to go to McDonalds. Living this life you become almost like a live 24 hour episode of Big Brother, even though your life is so public you become withdrawn from reality and it’s such a lonely feeling of emptiness.

Where a 9-to-5 person who sleeps in a nice comfortable warm bed and doesn’t want to get up in the morning, the average doorway sleeper is up and active by first light because sleeping on a few folded out cardboard boxes with a sleeping bag, if they’re lucky, really does no favours to the back. So the 9-to-5 person has a job to wake up for, or maybe a family to wake up for to get ready for school, but what has the doorway sleeper got to wake up for? The short answer is nothing purposeful. The in depth answer is a long, labourious and repetitive day of struggling, being ridiculed, ignored and laughed at and even spat at. It’s even been known, and seen by my own eyes, that people urinate on people in shop doorways when they are leaving pubs and clubs at 3am, half cut when all the morals and values they live by in their 9-to-5 lives have diminished into an alcohol induced ego.

I hope from reading this you can see now why I say a shop doorway isn’t just a shop doorway anymore, it’s a doorway to a very dark place.