On Pages 16 and 17, Is She. By Uncle Monty.

On Pages 16 and 17, Is She.
Story By Uncle Monty.
Photos By Alex Albion.
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She is but one speck among the millions of
specks that exist in the anonymity of the urban
jungle. She also talks and walks and lives and sleeps
on the forgotten city streets of one of the world’s

biggest and most expensive cities that is

more than a thousand years old.
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Yet, just for one little moment last week, she

was no longer a faceless or unseen or voiceless

or an unheard of speck as she was publicly and

photographically-spread on pages 16 and 17 of

the UK nationwide street paper called The Big

Issue. There she was for all to see in the Judith
Erwes photograph that showed her all
wrapped up against the bitter cold snap and

street squalor that makes London a fearsome

experience when you’re a rough sleeper and

homeless like she is at her age of almost

half-a-century old.
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To then first meet Anne Marie Hodgson is

like coming face-to-face with the harsh and
grinding reality of all that’s wrong with being

marginalized and ostracized like she is in to-

day's modern socialistic and recession state

of the ever impersonal and morally

dying England of old.
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She spoke to me softly while her crutches stood
as oblique testimony to her poor health and physical
deterioration as she spends her life to freely drown,

and ultimately die, in quiet silence on the cold streets

of which she has bedded down of long years ago now.
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With only a day or two after the photospread, she

by chance stopped by to ask me for a quid to help

her out. I more than happily obliged by giving her

more than what she asked for of me. What was I

suppose to do? Just ignore her or say “no” to her

like the daily London masses regularly do?

Of course not, stupid …

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Anne Marie Hodgson’s old tattooes

on her hands, arms and neck.

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Old tattooes are her personal identification

(shown above) that marks her weathered neck

and her ageing arms and her ringless, rough hands.

Her courseness is oddly not course. And, her lack

of physical beauty is strangely attractive. Im-

prisoned, too, at London's infamous women's

prison of Holloway for a past stretch or two has

also been part of Anna Marie Hodgson's rather

luckless life from what she told me of herself.

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Our public face and our private face oftentimes

contradicts each other. But not the face of Anne

Marie Hodgson for her face is always a public

one with no place to take her private face to a

place called home like do most of us daily do.

Her "home" is simply the cold streets of London.

It is a choice she has made more through circum-

stances of her own life that leaves little for her to

freely choose from until she is forced off the streets

by perhaps medical mishap or sheer old age or

stupefied tiredness. By that time, she may indeed

have already withered away with yet another

rough sleeper to fill her wornout place and her

free Salvation Army shoes.
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Asked if The Big Issue photospread, along with

the few lines written about her by Daisy Green-

well, had helped her in anyway or improved her

circumstances by its publicity of her Covent

Garden rough existence on the streets, she

bluntedly expressed her complete negativity

of seeing no results from her 15 seconds of

very limited fame or public recognition, if

in fact, the story about her even came

close to that.

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Fame is fleeting, especially today from what

was once called 15 minutes of fame that's

down now to 15 seconds in the world of the

mass media. So here today in print and gone

by tomorrow's edition and then completely

and absolutely forgotten. That's what has

happen to Anne Marie Hodgson already,

despite her being on pages 16 and 17 of

The Big Issue, that she was just last

week ... But that's now old wash and

a long time ago ... Sorry, baaaaby.

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So it seems best for her to gather happy

dreams that life will be better one day for

her and for all of those who dwell and

ache on the city streets of anonymity.

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Good luck Anne Marie, Uncle Monty.

+Royal Winsdor Day, 2oo9.

...
:: Skeleton Skater ::

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