SID’S FATHER died in 1958 when Sid was six months old.

“Dad had been a Catholic and after his death I went to a Catholic school in London run by monks. I learnt early on that anything ‘religious’ meant pain and confusion. Pain because the brothers meted out such unrelenting beatings. Confusion because when they weren’t beating us they were such calm people. How could they be both, my child’s mind wondered?”

With no wage-earner in the house, extreme poverty hit the family. Sid was one of six children and keeping them all fed and clothed properly soon became impossible. Most of the time the children were kept at home and Sid only began to learn to read and write when he was fifteen.

Because of the poverty he’d experienced as a child, Sid grew up believing that life revolved round material things. He got to university thinking it would mean he could have all the goodies that he and his brothers and sisters had longed for as children. But, when he got them – qualification and a professional job – he was shocked to find they didn’t make any difference to the emptiness he felt inside.

Not long after this Sid became ill with glandular fever and had to take so much time off work that, eventually, he was made redundant.

“Six years of heavy drinking followed until my doctor warned me I was killing myself. He said with the amount I was drinking I was lucky to be alive – he couldn’t believe I hadn’t already damaged my liver. Actually, I’d given him an edited idea of how much I was drinking – the reality was much worse.

“I didn’t stop – even when my partner said that if I didn’t get help I would come home one day and find my bag packed on the doorstep. Well, I didn’t stop and when I came home, there was my bag.

“The next eighteen months I was lost – drinking heavily, sleeping rough, travelling from city to city – completely reckless – odd, given that before I had been a dedicated and seemingly professional man.

“Late one night in 2003, on a street in Northampton, I met two lads – both called Gary. In the pouring rain they sat down with me and gave me a corned beef sandwich and some mushroom soup which was good – until they mentioned God.

“At that point I said goodnight and walked away. But I was touched by these two strange men who walked the streets in the night giving out food.

“The following day I noticed a converted shop called ‘Jesus Centre Pilot Project’. Inside I met two women called Polly and Yvonne and an assorted band of rogues with cuts and bruises, black eyes and so on. I felt quite at home!

“For some months I found myself being pulled back to this place and wanted more. Not the endless cups of tea but something there that was simple and real.

“How do you define ‘simple and real’? You don’t – it just is. And I’d just found it! Five years on – here I am, living in what I found that night – part of a loving Christian community.

“There’s a song about Jesus that we often sing that’s got the line it ‘Your loveliness is changing my ugliness’. That line means a lot to me!”