Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

About fourteen years ago I started living the life of a homeless person on Hampstead Heath. Looking back I think it was inevitable. I no longer wanted to pay rent, council tax, utility bills and the monies owing on various credit cards. I had this misguided idea that life would be better without the constraints and burdens of living a 'normal' life. During the summer months it was just about bearable, but as winter hit, I had to come into  Central London. That was my first experience of St Mungo's (Mare Street 1997).

During my time on the Heath I kept three small notebooks, which I still have today. In these I wrote mainly poems and anecdotes of happenings on the Heath. I washed daily in the ponds and ate at the Hari Krishna stall in Kentish Town. On days when it rained continually, and there were many, I would sit and read in Hampstead Library, blaming everyone except poor old me.

For changes of clothes and a hot shower, I would walk from Hampstead into Central London once a week and queue up at the Passage in Victoria or the day shelter in Waterloo Road. I knew in my heart of hearts that this couldn't go on for long. I was used to certain amounts of 'normality'. However within two years I had become a daily fixture at soup kitchens and day centres.

What had started out as 'it's a tramp's life for me' syndrome soon became a nightmare. Sleeping rough at the back of the Army and Navy in Victoria; keeping your money in your socks, and for the first time begging for the price of a litre of cheap cider.

The one and only reason for my sudden departure from living a reasonable life was down to my addiction to alcohol. From a social drinker with a house, mortgage, senior position in teaching, I became a heavy non-social drinker who was for the first time experiencing DT's and hospital detoxes. With this occurring more and more it wasn't long before my marriage and career came to a grinding halt. How I got out of all that is a long story, but I did with the help of a few good people who saw something in me, and not the hobo I had become.

It has taken nearly twenty years to get where I am now. Living happily outside of London, writing poetry and walking the highways and byways of the countryside around where I live.