We’re all only two pay cheques away from homelessness

That’s the sobering statistic from the charity Beam who crowdfund to help get homeless people into work and learn new skills. It’s frightening, isn’t it? To think about how quickly that could happen to someone, and yet, we as a society still lack empathy with people who are already in that situation.

Even after I started writing The Signs Are Coming, I was working a little bit on campaigns for a homeless charity, and researching more into it and learning more about homelessness made me realise how neglectful we are to people who live on the streets. As a society, we don’t even look at them, we avoid eye contact and we try to pretend they don’t exist. Is that because we’re trying to make them go away or is it because we’re ashamed at ourselves for how we treat other human beings?

Thats why The Signs Are Coming, as a book, is unique in its plot, but also in its storytelling and narrators. It’s not specialist detectives trying to solve a mystery, it’s from the perspective of two homeless youths, Dark and Paul, who’ve been living on the streets together for around year before the book begins. They’re so young and yet this is how they are forced to live their lives because society has let them down. No young person, no person should have to like like that. And even though their experience of homelessness doesn’t necessarily mirror every person on the streets (and Dark’s so street-savvy that he’s managed to make surviving on the streets work for him), their experience of London and London’s destruction through their eyes is so thought provoking.

Because the big question in the book isn’t ‘can they save London.’ The real question is should they save London?

Think of the Avengers. If they were treated the same way we treated the homeless, would you really expect them to save the world? Would you blame them if they didn’t?

That’s the question when it comes to The Signs Are Coming and I really hope that once you read it you’ll be able to understand that perspective. Because your heroes could be anyone, they could even be homeless. And if they were, have you done enough to give them a reason to save you?

I know it’s tough to figure out what to do or explain why we act this way. Sometimes, it’s classism, sometimes it’s prejudice but in most cases, it’s just unawareness. We don’t know how to help, we don’t know what to do, and I get it wrong just as much as everyone else. So it’s on us to educate ourselves to understand more about the situation, to figure out what really can help and how we can tackle this head on. Especially in the time of COVID when homeless people are suffering more than ever. We need to figure this out together.

That’s what I hope to do when it comes to The Signs Are Coming, and in the next few months, I’ll be revealing a bit more about how I’m going try to keep up these efforts, but I’ll leave you with this for now.

And next time you see or hear about a homeless person, try to take a moment to address your preconceptions, because that could easily be you. Or that could even be your hero.

The Signs Are Coming will be released in September 2021. Please follow me on my blog and social media links below. Thank you once again for taking the time to read this blog post.

N.A.K.