It seems he is looking at me. Shit. I only want to go into Tesco, grab the bottle of water and the toilet paper I need and head home. But this man standing in front of the supermarket is trying to grab my attention. And now he’s coming towards me. With a smile on his wrinkled face, wearing a red, worn-down jumper and a pair of washed-out corduroy trousers, he does not look like the average sponger or even a beggar, maybe he’s doing some fundraising or just in need of a conversation.

“I’m really sorry to bother you, and I don’t want to waste your time, but..”

Brilliant.

“..I’ve just come down from the north, I received a phone call yesterday that me mother is sick and in the hospital here around the corner.”

He is speaking with that strange accent from Northern Ireland that I always struggle to put somewhere when I hear it, stretching the O’s and U’s and not rolling the R as much as Dubliners do. My mind jumps on the word “phone”, and maybe he’s one of those guys who ask if they can use your phone and run away with it. He looks fit enough.

“So the first thing I do is to drive down here to Phibsborough where me sister used to live, but you see she moved away last month and did not tell me, and so there’s no one at her place, and me ma you know she has cancer and I really want to see her…”

The hospital is a five-minute walk from here, maybe he needs directions.

“..but now I’m stranded here as I have no one besides me ma and I’m asking all them good people shopping here to help me out with some small change. I don’t want to bother you really, but maybe you can spare some change, whatever you can dispense with?”

I feel almost a bit disappointed. All this ado because he wants to ask me for some change? But then, his story is not bad, compared to the people in dirty tracksuits that normally ask you for change straight away, and sometimes curse you when you ignore them. So I give him an Euro, for his tale of the sick mother and the misplaced sister that may be true or not.

Image by pidgeonpoo