I was initially very bummed that there were little to no residents at the hostel who were my age, or at least close to it.

Afterall, to this day, I have a natural tendency to distance myself from people far beyond my age — why bother befriending someone who would unlikely resonate with your age-defined cultural identity? Age has always manifested itself as a checkbox on the top of my make-a-new-friend checklist.

What strikes me the most about my staying at a hostel is the sheer variety of people you meet, many of whom are far (or to be fair still not very far) beyond my age. Afterall I’ve always associated the concept of hostels with “youth hostels”, which is reflected within the names of large hostel establishments, such as the YMCA or YHA.

But I could not be more unprepared for the next person I was about to meet.

The match at the bar ended at around 10. Not much going on at the time, but nowhere near bed time.

Fatigued but bored, I collected a pack of crisps and an apple from my bag, as well as my Kindle, and headed up to the attic chill out room. Even if there weren’t anyone in the chill out room, I decided that I could have my evening snack and take a break after my entire night.

As I took the last flight of steps, I heard nothing but silence (and my footsteps). From what I’ve learnt in the past two evenings, even the quietest conversations in the room would be slightly audible from the stairwell. I wasn’t too surprised.

As I reached the top of the stairs and opened the door to the room, I was immediately greeted by a brief but quickly averting glance from a middle aged man sitting in the couch adjacent to the tea table.

Alright. I was just here to have my evening snack anyways.

So I sat in the couch across him and started chomping my pack of crisps, which, in hindsight, must have been very obnoxious given the silence and the initial averting glances.

Anyways, he was hooded in a plain gray hoodie, wearing a pair of denim jeans and a pair of gray Decathlon sneakers. Nothing too peculiar for a someone his age, in his late forties or fifties I guess. The fact that he was hooded and crossing his arms seemed rather uninviting though. Oddly I was curious enough to break the silence:

“You’re living here in the hostel too?”

After a long moment of silence, so long that I was actually about to dig into my pack of crisps again, he murmured,

“Yes. Kind of.”

“How long are you staying for?”

“3 nights.”

“Ah, me too. But this is gonna be my last night. I arrived on the 27th,” which must have triggered minutes of me recounting all the touristy stuff I had been doing in the past few days. Pause, “What about you?”

Another long pause.

I do not recall how long that pause took. I might had been having my apple by then, or maybe even back to reading on my Kindle. But as the title suggests, this mysterious man suddenly started telling his story about his homelessness.

My preconceived notions of a homeless person?

“Kicking up the papers
With his worn out shoes”

“Dirt in her hair
And her clothes in rags”

“Carrying her home
In two carrier bags”

Yes, this is Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London”. And yes, I’m aware that this song describes stories beyond homelessness — that it is about the lonely, the forgotten, or in general, the alienated. And yes, I’m aware that this is not a story of London.

Let the narrative speak for itself.

Sainsbury’s

Dan, who only revealed his name at the end of the conversation, was staying at the hostel with a subsidy from the local council.

18 months ago, he caught two of his six flatmates having cocaine at home. Not wanting to wrestle with all this mess, he decided to mind his own business and ignore this all together. Except he soon realised he couldn’t, because reptitive night shifts at Sainsbury’s meant that he was home whenever his flatmates were drowsing in, and more annoyingly moaning at, whatever shit they got their hands on.

Disgruntled, he decided to report this to his landlord, who replied him in an ignorant and insensitive fashion — his landlord did not even bother to pay a visit or send someone to inspect the state of his flat.

Many sleepless nights followed.

Which meant taking many leaves away from his job.

Meanwhile, his manager remained “very cold and not very understanding” of his situation, whereas his colleagues distant and treating him “unfairly” and “with inferiority”.

My recounting of this probably does not do any justice to his hardships. In fact, his recounting probably conveys little about his hardships as well, as it was mostly him ranting on his colleagues passing on all the chores to him.

“Dan, why are you late to work.”

“Dan, do the tills.”

“Dan, the three of us are gonna have a break now, reshelf shelf 15.”

In a nutshell, the disturbances at home, coupled with an “unfriendly working environment”, had affected Dan’s ability to work (or go to work, as a matter of fact). He felt that he should have been acknowledged and compensated for his absences at work, so the fact that his colleagues and managers were not understanding of his situation further annoyed him.

Anyhow, while he remained a Sainsbury’s employee, he was gradually given less assignments, until several weeks later when he was no longer given any assignments at all. For the uninformed (i.e. me at the time), the assignment amount is proportional to his salary. Hence, he was trapped in a position which prevented him from applying to another job at a new location.

More complications

“Every now and then, this guy comes at my door and pounds on it, loudly yelling my name — Dan, Dan…….,” he recounted in a slightly trembled voice. It might had been due to the fact that they knew that he reported them to the landlord.

“The day” came.

Not wanting to tolerate this anymore, he decided to report this to the police. The police came and did a thorough inspection of all the articles in the house. While they did not find anything suspicious in any of the rooms, they found a highly hazardous knife in Dan’s room, behind his bedframe. So he was then taken into interrogation, where he spent hours arguing that he had been falsely accused and that someone in his flat was intentionally framing him into this convoluted situation.

“It was not mine. I have no idea who placed it behind the bedframe. I was starting to suspect whether the cleaning people, who came once fortnightly, were involved in all this,” he explained.

That said, he was released and no charges were pressed on him.

When he returned home however, he found the door to him room broken into — drawers pulled from their compartments, undergarments spreaded all over the place, curtains teared apart, shattered glass and porcelain pieces from what must have been a violent toss of his mug into the glass window……..

Long story short, while the landlord did eventually evict his two drug-addicted flatmates, he never went back to his place anymore.

More than homeless?

Because of his dignity he never seeks for help from his father.

Because he is homeless, he wanders around Bath as well as a couple other towns in Southwest England and Wales, asking for subsidised stays at hostel.

Because of his gradually diminishing savings, he has begun selling many of his valuable possessions, like his mobile phone or his car which he used to sleep in.

Because of never getting his colleagues and manager to understand him, he never bothered to quit his job and get a new one. So besides seeking for a bed for each night, he spends his days indulging in his grief and preparing for (thinking about) his arbitrations, because he believes he should be compensated for the the work he did not perform as a result of recovering from this trauma.

Which brings us back to his endlessly swirling rants.

At this point though, I honestly think that this is just him grieving on petty things. Sadly, it’s probably the reason he remains homeless and jobless for two years.

And now that I look at what I’ve written, I can’t help but notice my apathetic tone. Gulp.

Fix my iPad

Even though Dan was holding on too his iPad mini this whole time, he does not have a mobile phone, which he had sold a couple months ago. Funnily enough, he asked,

“Do you know how to fix my iPad? It doesn’t seem to boot or even light up.”

I actually laughed, though this was awkward because he was not even close to smiling at all.

“No.”

I’m an engineering student, not an engineer. More importantly I’m not a “genuis” at an Apple Store maintenance bar, which honestly seems like a somewhat mundane occupation.

And so he went back into swirling rants about Sainsbury’s failing to understand his needs to this day. That was how the entire night (entire hour) manifested itself, and it was only at the end of the conversation did I get to know his name — Dan.

He did not ask for my name.

A quick note on the photos

All photos (besides the last one) are of artworks at the Victoria Art Gallery.

I was lucky enough to catch a conversation with Pete, the attendant at the gallery. As a museum attendant he seems to know quite a bit about all the artworks at the museum. When asked about the seemingly arbitrary “theme” of the artworks at the museum, he simply explained that the artworks are either of stories in the area, or donated from artists in the area. This seems to be true, considering that there is a considerable collection of paints of Bath and its surrounding landscapes. But when asked about the stories behind some of the artworks I’ve seen above, he simply told me to “imagine”.

Modern art never seems to touch me. Not that I’m allowed to touch the artwork anyways.