Boundary? What Boundary?

Imagine yourself homeless in London. You sleep in a shop doorway – let’s suppose it might be Garrick Street in Covent Garden – with cardboard as a mattress and shoes as a pillow. Your head nestles in the indentation created by its own weight, while your determination supplies the feeling of absolute comfort. It is 1995 and you’ve been leading this life for 15 years, punctuated with sporadic stays in cheap bed-and-breakfasts, hostels and night shelters. You don’t do drink or drugs. But you’ve been known to steal – pork pies and Cornish pasties from supermarkets; milk and bread from early morning doorsteps. And you are very fond of Eccles cakes. Once you stole a friend’s tent and paid for it with a criminal conviction. One way or another, in your early twenties you exhausted the goodwill of all your friends and now at the age of 39, as if to make up for it, you claim friendship with every pigeon in London: their amber eyes remind you of your mother. Observing them, you’re surprised…