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Gypsies, Junkies, and agency

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This morning at seven the police cleared out a nest of junkies from the tumbledown shed in our front yard. At least, that’s what we thought they were doing.

The story has been building for a while. The shed is completely ruined, half the roof isn’t there, and the window facing onto the street has been smashed in for months, leaving a hole big enough for a determined junkie to crawl inside. (The landlord has promised to fix it up, but since we don’t use it and he wouldn’t want to, there’s not much incentive for it to happen quickly.) First there was a guy sleeping in there in the daytime … he said he was just crashing for a few hours, really needed the sleep, didn’t intend to stay. And he left, and never came back.

Then a couple of weeks ago somebody put a sheet of fibreboard over the window, on the inside. I guess I assumed it was the landlord, slowly getting started on doing something about the situation, but it turns out it was more uninvited lodgers — permanent ones this time.

I never saw them, but a friend of Andi’s who lives in the area said that he’d caught them there at six in the morning, that they were Bulgarian, and seemed like decent fellows. When I spoke to Andi about it he was pretty happy with letting them stay, and I didn’t have much feeling either way.

Not everyone in the household was as generous or as apathetic though. The idea of junkies around our house 24/7, knowing when we were home and when we weren’t, seeing all our laptops through the windows, this started getting disturbing. And then the question of a toilet came up, and in some winds the yard was smelling a bit nasty.

So we contacted the landlord, who said he would do something about it, but was moving typically slowly. And Maria realised that she was leaving for a holiday in a week, and assumed (wrongly, as it happens) that we would all be taking holidays too — the thought of leaving the house empty for a month with junkies nesting in the shed was too much. She called the police, and they came around this morning. The Bulgarians were removed, and the landlord is timbering the broken window shut this afternoon.

It turns out, though, that they weren’t junkies. They were street musicians, in Amsterdam for the summer season. Gypsies, if you like. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them playing out the back of Centraal Station — accordion and oboe, not fantastic but definitely professional (in a street-musiciany kind of way).

And this puts a completely different spin on the whole question of whether I want them living in our tumbledown shed. I don’t mean that I’d automatically invite them in because they’re part of the brotherhood of musicians, and I certainly don’t want to invoke romantic images of gold earrings and poaching rabbits by calling them Gypsies. But professional rough-sleeping travellers earning a minimal living by playing music are a different kettle of fish to junkies unable to function any more in society.

In retrospect, I should have gone and checked them out myself. (I would have recognised them, if it’s the guys I think it is.) And we still probably would have decided not to allow them to stay (the toilet issue is bulking large in the reconstruction here) but somebody (probably me) should have told them that, before getting the police involved. I don’t know how much legal trouble they’re in now, but I should have thought about it, and I guess Maria didn’t before calling the police.

Looking back, I let other people check out the situation (Andi’s friend), come to a decision (the flatmates), and take the action to enforce that decision (the police), none of which I’m comfortable with after the fact.

There’s an ashamed Kiwi in Amsterdam today, hoping that three Bulgarian street musicians don’t get deported.


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