Two Homeless Guyz - Fergal & Anthony. By Max Pemberton, M.D.

Two Homeless Guyz -

Fergal & Anthony.

By Max Pemberton, M.D.

Edited By Uncle Monty.

Photos & Caption Graphic

By Alex Albion.
.

As a (medical) doctor, I have become accustomed to making

judgements based on evidence. On a rudimentary level, much of

(today's) medicine appears to operate on the premise that what

is observed in one individual can be extrapolated and applied

wholesale. But the more I see and hear in the course of my job,

the more I realise that this does not always do the patient

justice. The exciting thing about working with people is their

ability constantly to surprise, so that even in the bleakest

of human terrains there is hope.

.
When I (first) met them, Fergal and Anthony had been living on

the streets, sleeping in a disused shed on an allotment, for more

than a year. Fergal had been homeless for longer. He used to be

a waiter but had begun drinking heavily after his mother died.

He was fired from the restaurant where he worked, and was

eventually evicted from his flat. He started going to local parks

during the day to drink until, one day, sitting with a group of

fellow alcoholics and worrying about where he was going to

sleep that night, someone offered him something to smoke.

He smoked it and for the next half an hour nothing seemed

to matter. It was heroin. After a few weeks of smoking it

everyday he was addicted. He had also started injecting it.
.

Since working in an outreach project for homeless people, I

have met many drug addicts and many have started inject-

ing heroin this way. They begin by smoking it, then as the

addiction takes hold, and they need more to achieve the same

effect, they progress to injecting. It was certainly easier and

cheaper for Fergal to get wasted on heroin than alcohol.

But the success rate for getting people in treatment off

heroin is about five per cent a year. That's pretty poor.
There are numerous factors that make people more likely to

succeed: good family support networks, stable accommodation,

using only one substance, motivation and drive. Fergal and

Anthony didn't tick any of these boxes.

.
In fact, both he (Fergal) and Anthony were injecting two

packets heroin a day, and occasionally using crack. Neither

of them had been in treatment for their addiction before,

and both of them seemed rather indifferent to the idea.

They had only come to see me because they had been

arrested for possession of heroin. "The courts said we had

to come, so we did," said Fergal, shrugging his shoulders.

I sighed.

.
But something about their story did make them stand out.

Fergal had met Anthony a year ago, while sitting on a park

bench, and they struck up a friendship. Life on the streets is

harsh and brutal. There is no honour among thieves, or drug

addicts, and allegiances that are formed on the streets are

fragile and transient, only existing as long as they serve

the interest of the individual. But Fergal and Anthony

were different; they were like brothers.
.

They were inseparable, looking after and protecting each

other, sharing their food and money. They funded their

addiction by stealing things, mainly copper wiring but also

tools and sheet-metal from building sites, and selling it to

scrap merchants. Despite operating outside of the law,

they had their own strict moral code of conduct, which in-

volved no burglary from people's homes, no mugging and

no begging. They reasoned that stealing from businesses

was all right because they were wasteful, and

they had insurance anyway.

.
While I couldn't condone this, in an environment where the

only currency given any importance is drugs, it was heart-

ening to see two people place value on their friendship.
But this didn't take away from the fact that they had not

attended under their own volition, and to date, no one who

had come to the clinic under a court order had returned for

a follow-up appointment. Instead, they vanished back into

the seedy underworld of life as a drug addict. I knew that

they would never return, all the evidence pointed towards it.

I signed the form, prescribed them both the starting dose

of methadone and they left.

.

Then, to my great surprise, Fergal and Anthony did return.

While many of the patients I had thought would be able to kick

the habit relapsed, they stuck with it. In fact, a year on, they

are now no longer dependent on drugs, and both have jobs.

However uncertain the world may seem at times, one of the

things you learn in medicine is that people really do have the

capacity to change. Because of this there is always hope.

...

British Dr. Max Pemberton writes a regular column for

The Daily Telegraph called "Finger On The Pulse," to which

this story of his about Fergal and Anthony is taken.

...

Just A Few Comments and

Photos of This Week’s People.
By Uncle Monty.

-=-

A Gentleman's Gentleman: Cheviot's Paul
Martin-Davis. He's an assets consultant of the

first order. Paul has been very kind and generous

to me. We usually see each other at my Big Issue

pitch at London's Long Acre. The gentleman is

always immaculately dressed with impeccable

good English manners and becoming taste.

-=-
If there was ever a local scumbag, then

the Westminister Council's Traffic Warden
shown below is No. 1 among the many such

scumbags that helps Westminster rake in

£55 million (yep: over $110 million U.S.

dollars) annually by their profit-based

traffic enforcement Gestapo of which

the London scumbags belong ...

-=-"No chickenshit, please," hollered Dan
to girlfriend Kes as they freely acted out
for my cameras outside "The George."
-=- Cathy is the first European Union candidate I have met. She is The Christian Party's EU
candidate for SW England. With their red double decker bus parked on Old Kent Road near Tesco's, Cathy and her friends campaigned happily to the many shoppers coming and going on the street. Their primary goal, of course, is to get elected at the June 4th, 2oo9, EU Election. Another goal of their's is to stop the British National Party (BNP) from winning a EU seat instead of The Christian Party. If that's all they're doing to get elected by being anti-BNP, then that shouldn't be their only platform and only qualification to get elected. It's easy to knock the BNP since it costs nothing and is popular among British mainline political parties and left-wing demagogues to condemn with engendered indignation. Let the voters themselves decide if they do or do not want such parties as The Christian Party, or BNP, or The Independence Party or aka UKIP, to play some role in today's British political life. I don't want a candidate telling me who and what I should vote for. I make up my own mind, not those who have a vested interest in knocking whoever and/or whatever it is they don't like in the hope it will get them elected. I want to know what they believe, not what they don't believe ...

-=-

Murphy's construction worker Craig, 21, (shown above) is a new mates of mine that I have gotten to know since he and his work mates have been diligently working on replacing those old Victorian waterpipes near my Big Issue pitch and all over central London. Craig's big boss just died last week at near 100 years of age called John Murphy, who first came to London in the 1930's from his poor native Irish town of Kerry. A Requiem Mass is set at The Brompton Oratory for Monday and old John Murphy's body will then arrive later by his own private jet back to Ireland for his solemn family burial.

He started out hitchhiking to England as poor Irish lad did John Murphy to then anti-Irish Britain, but ended up as a multi-millionaire several times over. He employed the Irish homeless and destitute of the "Irish Navvy Era" in the UK. He not only prospered himself, but also his fellow Irish. Today, 70 years later, John Murphy Civil Engineering Company still hires more Irish than any other nationality. He was a very private man and spoke little about himself or his life. And, Craig is also a classic young Irishman who does himself, John Murphy, and Old Eirean mighty proud ...
-=-

They were in the news at The Big Issue when
they came unexpectedly and bought 10 copies of
current issue from me. Before buying the 10, they
checked to be sure that they were indeed featured
inside the BI. They surely was on pages 8 and 9.

So I made a small profit of 8 quid from the two

young NU Magazine women shown above.
=-=
At The BBC Bush House.

-=-
That's all for now. Hope you liked the
images and my brief comments ... Along
with Max Pemberton's piece on Fergal &
Anthony. It's a positive story for a change
about the homeless, instead of the usual
negative stuff one reads all too often about
the people who happen to be on the streets
of the world's meanest streets from
Almighty America to Zymotic Zimbabwe.
.
G' day, Uncle Monty.
+Rogation Day, 2oo9.
...
{Click on any image to enlarge)
.

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By Aaron Glantz.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46803

...