The guy you don't expect to cry

This post is about Alan. He wasn't technically homeless, but destitute in every way except for a shoddy roof over his head.

Alan didn't look like somebody who'd start to cry on my shoulder. He had a shaven head and wore a dark blue tracksuit and was 40 years old.

He had a wide smile and blue eyes, and I could really read the pain he was going through in them when they met mine.

He was married for 15 years. He grafted his way up from a council house upbringing to a big home in Southampton with a swimming pool. He was a carpenter by trade. He had children. His wife split up with him for another man - he really seemed devastated by it, so much sorrow in his eyes. He came back to London to care for his elderly father, who's since died. And now his wife is saying she's going to move to Australia with her new man and the children. That was when he started crying, discreetly.

I don't know what happened with his work, if he felt he couldn't cope with it after she split up with him, but he seemed to feel he couldn't go back to Southampton and that he'd lost everything. He struck me as someone who would be ok, in a year or two, if he could stay away from drink during the bad times.