We have a visitor...

We had a Romanian guy staying in the house last night – you see, my dad used to work for a children’s charity and one of the projects he set up was a childrens’ home in a place called Tirgu Mures. A good many of my childhood memories are of our family holidays in Romania where we spent four or five weeks each year there for a few years. Perhaps I'll tell you about those trips sometime, but one of the kids from the home - a man of 24 now, making his way in the world - he was wandering through Coventry yesterday afternoon and my dad happened upon him.

My heart breaks, if ever I thought that were possible - he spent two days hitch-hiking over to the UK in search of a job (5 million unemployed in Romania apparently) and had somewhere to stay for the last three nights but last night he was going to be homeless. For all we tell the world how much #welovetheNHS and tout ourselves as a welfare state, we’ve got sod all up our sleeves when someone genuinely needs aid. The poor guy has been turned away from how many different places and there doesn’t seem to be much promise of a job for him at the moment. Someone has apparently asked him why he should be given a job when there are two million people in the country without jobs. And it’s not like he has anything to go back to in Romania.

It seems to me that this is the American dream at work – he’s had the balls to make his way across one and a half thousand miles in search of a better existence and found it to be wanting. He actually went to the cathedral yesterday afternoon to pray that someone would come and help him – that he found my dad can be seen as proof in favour or against the existence of God I think...