A hope for peace

A really productive day. I spent most of the day volunteering with Hands On London to help sort the coats we had collected a couple of weeks ago. The first task was to move about forty huge bags of coats from the Broadgate Welcome Centre to a basement storeroom behind Liverpool Street station. Each bag holds ten to fifteen winter coats so are really heavy and awkward to move. There were five of us but it took nearly an hour and half to move them from one location to the other as it was a fair walk. The basement already had twenty or so bags so it was a huge mountain to get through. The coats have to be recorded, counted and then sorted in to men's, women's and children's coats. They are then bagged up into orders for the different homeless shelters and charities to be collected later. It was tiring work but we had a great laugh doing it and managed to get through everything.

After that I met Matt briefly at Liverpool Street, then had a walk round Spitalfields and Brick Lane before meeting my friend Andrew for a couple of beers. It was lovely to catch-up as he has been travelling for a year and I cant believe how much he had changed. It was so great to hear his new outlook on life and see how chilled out he was.

I loved this piece of street art by Stik. It shows a simple friendship with no need for words and made me think about the current situation in Israel and Gaza which fills me with despair. The only thing that will ever work for both sides is peaceful negotiation and settlement, otherwise how many more lives are going to be lost before they both come to the table? I'm heartbroken for all the victims caught up in this ongoing tragedy and really hope a ceasefire can be reached soon.


Stik, Princelet Street, London