h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As a 17-year-old, homelessness would be my biggest nightmare. Once you have no fixed address, you can't easily get employed, so you get stuck at the bottom. It's the charities who currently have to pull people back onto the ladder, often with a temporary solution. Surely there's a better way to solve this problem?

Worse still, with no house and no money, there'd be no h2g2!


Whoami?

The very last item to give up on must be the portable laptop with a cellphone connection... Nah, just kidding.

You're right, it would be a nightmare. All of it!

AC

Dunno when I was 19 I was officialy classed as homeless, now this was not as bad as it sounds.

Basically my parents ran a business that went bust, we lived on the premises of that business. The kind people at the council provided my parents with a house, however it had two bedrooms as both my brother and I were over 18 we were not legally allowed to share a room (adults living at the same address, unless married, must have a separate room in council accommodation) in the flat at the same time, therefore that made me homeless.

Now this wasn't to bad as I was at uni, thing is I couldnt go home at summer (as offically I could not live at home)and my expensive uni flat was difficult to maintain and I eventually got kicked out. So I went to the council in my uni town for help, but as I was a student, I got no benifit and was right down the housing list (2-3 years!) as technically I'd made myself homeless.

So I struggled, got a summer job and depended on the kindness of friends, I always had a roof over my head but was homeless. Eventually due to my parents new status I qualified for Grants so had a less arduous time the next year.

So there you go just to show that homelessness is not just kipping on the street or B+Bs it can also affect those of us who inhabit the middle classes. And if you get organised you can beat it!

Ali

That's a great story - thanks for sharing it with us.

in deed!

There but for the grace of god go any of us.

I am feisty and confident. In 1999 I was married, running a business, living in a lovely house with my then husband and two cats. So far, so idyllic. In a short space of time I was on the road to divorce, the business was insolvent, and I had debts of significant tens of thousands of pounds through the business.

This is not a sad story. It isn't even a survivors story. I talked my way into an IT contract (the business sold networking hardware and web work was easier to get in those days when a website meant html). I moved to the other end of the country for a while. I cleared the debts through a mix of hard work, fast talking and a divorce settlement (in roughly that order of importance), and now here I am, in a hotel in south Sweden.

But the lesson to me then was we are all of us a rizla-paper away from disaster. If the divorce had been nasty, or I had at any time been ill for more than a month, then I could still be up to my neck in it and beyond. As it is, I could have 'got' more from the divorce, but I decided that the money was not worth the hatred and pain.

I used to be afraid of beggars. Pathetic, isn't it? But I was kissed rather slobbily by a beggar when I was 12, and was pavovianly unnerved by the event and by beggars for a couple of decades afterwards.

The events of '99 cured me of that, and I give money to street people, and I buy and read the Big Issue. I also regularly give money to the Refugee Council.

I also have arguments with warm well-fed people about these subjects on a fairly regular basis.

There but for the grace of god go any of us.

Ben

I like your point. Thanks for sharing it.

AC