Coffee, cakes and contentment

A homeless man lies on a sheet of cardboard just outside the fence of a primary school.

His long, bushy grey beard signals his age. He sits up to adjust his blankets.

Suddenly he leans over and vomits. It's a clear liquid, suggesting he's been drinking. It runs away down the slight slope of the square.

He is not alone.

From where I am standing on the sixth-floor balcony of my rented luxury apartment,

I can count at least nine other homeless men bunked down for the night.

Some cocooned inside cardboard boxes, others buried under blankets.

Some others, probably Albanians or Iraqis, sit around the base of a tree talking. One by one they begin to spread their beds for the night.
All these men are well dressed.

One man crawls out from under a box wearing a handsome black top and smart creme-coloured trousers, with shoes to match. He urinates on a fence and crawls back into his hovel.

Spotting them during the day would give no suggestion of their dire straights.

Yet as night falls so does their cover and they're reduced to the indignity of sleeping in the streets, buried for another night in their own filth.

By the edge of the square three policemen stand, eating their dinner, and making cursory attempts to discipline drivers, though none are actually booked.
Instead they are let off with a stern, but undeniably hollow warning.

The drivers know the police will do nothing because it creates more paperwork than anybody wants to do.

Surrounding the square are countless apartment blocks. Yet on a Saturday night the number of visible lights are less than you can count on one hand.

Granted, it's the height of summer, most of the inhabitants are probably off at their beach houses, living the high life that made Greece the envy of the world.

Coffees, cakes and contentment? Probably not. Maybe something a little stronger or maybe they just can't afford to live here any more, so they've gone back to the villages to save becoming one of the well-dressed homeless men sleeping in the park.

This is Plateia Eleftherias, central Athens, July 2010.

All this lies within easy eyeshot of the Parthenon, lit up in all its glory.

That grand, ancient monument to human ingenuity, innovation and endurance.

This place is steeped in history and mysticism. The boom of development in the lead-up to the Olympic Games showed that you can't even scratch the surface without revealing some ancient treasure. Yet even that has now become an impediment, slowing the excavation and construction of the infrastructure that Greece not only needs to improve itself, but to create jobs so that its citizens can feed their families.

Greece has gone from being a strong, proud nation, born out of thousands of years of deep thought and resilience, to a timid nation that has lost its way.

Then, interestingly, a sign of change? The police officers that had been sitting idle by the side of the road for at least an hour, spring to life.

With the aid of reinforcements, they begin to pull over drivers and motorcyclists for a drink-driving blitz.

Most appear to pass the test and are allowed to return to their cars.

Others can be seen hailing cabs to take them home.

A cynic might ask, could this simply be revenue raising by a struggling government, desperate to bolster its coffers?