The strangest thing for me about The Centrepoint Sleep Out was sleeping so close to so many other people…

We lay on cardboard sheets to soften the paving stones beneath us. Above us was a canopy roof to keep off the rain.

We needed it. In the brief period between the last late-night talkers nodding off and the first early-morning ones waking, I opened my eyes and listened.

The wind grappled with the roof, making it ripple and crack like sails on a stormy sea. Rain smashed down like hammers. Behind these sounds the snores and grumbles of the three hundred dreamers all around me were a constant, ghostly moan.

I felt like Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s Ancient Mariner. When I got home this morning I reread it, in the Dover edition with the gorgeous artwork by Gustave Dore.

It was even more thrilling and wonderful than I remembered.

With thanks to all my friends and family who sponsored me so generously,

Sam