After about two weeks of living/working out of a hotel room, we managed to get our own place. We are located in a one bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a building which is roughly in the centre of town. We live on the edge of the financial district and above a collection of restaurants and pubs/bars - right in the centre of the action. This makes for very interesting viewing out of our windows on a Friday and Saturday evening!
One of the more interesting sights are the beggars who regularly work the streets below our windows. They all have some sort of angle or gimmick...... so we just had to give them names. We have;
dog lady (tells people the dog she drags around will give them a smile if they give her spare change).
blanket man (carries a sleeping bag with him at all times).
crutchman (carries cruthches with him all the time but never seems to use them - he spends more time swinging them around than actually using them).
Don't mean to be rude or cheeky (this is his opening line before he hits you up for money and he uses it every single time without fail - even if he has asked you fifty times before). This guy also has an accomplice who he describes as "his lovely lady" (when he says this she is usually trailing behind picking up old cigarette butts from the ground and putting them in her pocket!)
trainman (this guy looks quite well presented and spends all day trying to convince people he is short on his train fare and only needs a few coins to get by).
It's strange, but these beggars are rarely ever seen on the street at the same time, they seem to work shifts. When they do appear at the same time though they tend to fight/argue over their "patch" of begging territory. Most of these people though aren't that poorly dressed and don't appear to be "sleeping rough", it appears that they are doing this out of choice to some extent (we see plenty of other people in Leeds performing low skilled jobs every day, lots of other homeless people even sell The Big Issue magazine to make a living).
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