Cold comfort | 31 January 2013

An emergency shelter funded by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has been opened to offer a lifeline to rough sleepers in the capital whenever three consecutive nights of freezing temperature are predicted. Mr Johnson said: ‘This shelter will offer a vital lifeline when temperatures tumble to sub-zero levels and rough sleepers risk losing their lives in the cold.’

Just how and why Dave and his mother, Nancy, came to be sleeping outside, in the corner of a car park, is too complicated and surreal a story to explain. But what you need to know is that there’s no easy solution to their problem, and sleeping rough in itself isn’t alarming or even unusual for them. Like any 77-year-old, Nancy has her troubles: swollen feet, swollen knuckles, and she’s bent like the top of a shepherd’s crook — but she’s a trouper. She never complains, just says: ‘Well dear, it can’t be helped.’ When I ask how she survives at night in the terrible cold, she says: ‘Well, I’ve got gloves you see, dear, puffy ones, and blankets and an umbrella. And I sit in a chair, so it’s not too bad.’

‘Mother looks a right sight,’ says Dave. He wears two hats: one bobble, one baseball; two shirts, three fleeces and a jacket.

I’ve known Dave and Nancy for six years now. Six years’ worth of chats at a weekly soup kitchen, and in that time they’ve slept out in all manner of horrid places. Nancy summers on a bench by the Thames; Dave once spent six months doggo from dusk to dawn on top of a storage unit. For a while last year they camped beside St Paul’s in a tent full of rain and mice, and became the unofficial mascots of the ‘Occupy’ gang. And mostly, they seem OK.