Before joining Hireup, Paddy was a support worker at the St Vincent De Paul homeless shelter in Woolloomooloo. Just before Christmas in 2019 he was laid off due to a company restructure.
So, in January 2020, Paddy became a Hireup support worker. He now supports two people on the platform and believes that “if you don’t connect with people you’re not fully alive... I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to do and then the virus hit… but I wasn’t ready to stop!”
One person Paddy supports requires help around the house. He enjoys “supporting her out into the garden, doing a little bit of weeding and digging around and having a laugh.” The other person he supports is quite isolated. “One of the big things I noticed during isolation is not having contact... what’s she feeling like if she’s at home alone? So I send a message to her and a phone call there, just to make sure she’s OK.”
Paddy also felt isolated. “I didn’t have a lot of people to be with so I went to my poetry.” He started writing poems when he was seven after reading ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ at school. “It was the rhyming that made me realise I could write and I haven’t stopped since. It's always been there.”
During COVID-19 isolation, Paddy wrote 67 poems, one for each day of isolation. He described poetry in one word as “observation!” “I’m an observer…all that I wrote in isolation, that's describing a lot of the stuff around my house and things that fly in and fly out of my garden.” In isolation poem #42 “they’re all the prints on my coffee cups.”
“A lot of people pass things in life and it's sad because there’s so much around us. Why are we here if we don't pay attention to what's in our lives?”
Paddy’s favourite poem is one of his own and written on the walls of the Surry Hills Library in Sydney. It’s called ‘The Shadow of a Man’. “There’s a man I used to work with, we'd walk out in the lane in Woolloomooloo and see these people and try and put ourselves in their place.”
As for what’s next for Paddy, he’s working on different ways to share his creative work. “I do little zines (A5 little booklets).” At the moment, some of his zines are in libraries and there are three currently running. Paddy's planning a zine to share all of his isolation poetry along with some photos to go with it.
Isolation Poem #42
Rhinos and elephants,
Meet with zebra and deer,
Monkeys in treetops,
A young gorilla sits near,
A large lion out stalking,
A stealthy beast on the prey,
Two ladies all dressed up,
They’re going out for the day,
A blue bird on a long branch,
Alone he sits with his hen,
Puddle Duck in her bonnet,
Walking out in the glen,
Ladybirds on green leaves,
A seal lays with her pups,
These are all the patterns,
Found on our kitchen cups.
Time for some soup. Asian Laksa?
