Innholdsfortegnelse for 30-03-20 i The Big Issue

This is a Big Issue magazine like no other. For the first time ever in our history, we cannot be on the streets. Our vendors, iconic figures across Britain, are unable to sell outside due to the Covid-19 lockdown. You have answered our call to subscribe and you have our first ever subscriber-focused edition. We have other news. We’re delighted to reveal that some retailers have generously come forward and invited us into their stores to sell the magazine, and therefore to allow us to generate more income for vendors. Special thanks here to Sainsbury’s and McColl’s. Until then, we will continue to sell The Big Issue in stores, through subscriptions and as digital editions. Or you can make a financial contribution. Your money will directly support Big Issue vendors…

THE BIG ISSUE MANIFESTO A hand up... Proceeds from sales of this magazine are being used to tide over our vendors until they can get back to work on their pitches. Not a handout… In ordinary circumstances our vendors buy magazines for half the cover price and sell it at full price, keeping the difference. They earn a legitimate income, and gain valuable social and employability skills. With your support now, we will continue to do so once the crisis has passed. The right to citizenship… The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers tackle social and financial exclusion. Prevention… Big Issue Invest offers backing and investments to social enterprises, charities and businesses which deliver social value to communities. HOW TO KEEP SUPPORTING VENDORS • Subscribe for three months and…

Things changed quickly. A matter of days ago, and it seems like a lifetime, we removed The Big Issue vendors from the streets of Britain. It was becoming clear, at incredible speed, that they were unsafe. The streets are tough enough at the best of times. When they’re stalked by an invisible enemy that picks on the weakest, and your people have underlying problems putting them right in the crosshairs, you’ve got to act. And so, for the first time since John Bird wrestled this magazine into being 29 years ago, an edition didn’t appear on the street. That was a hell of an emotional thing to happen. But that was just the start. No time to rest and ponder. It precipitated a complete change in how we work. Our…

She’s in her 90s and suffers from arthritis and a degenerative eye condition, yet nothing will stop frequent Street Art contributor Rene Robbins from getting creative when the mood takes her. She used to enjoy making intricate collages from materials cut out of magazines, but when that became too challenging she found a new approach. “I’m using coloured paper these days,” she explains, “cutting my own simple, shapes. I got inspired by a Matisse exhibition. Ill health made him have to change his approach. I don’t rush it, I take my time.” Rene lives in London and submits her artworks via the 240 Project, a health activity centre for people affected by homelessness and exclusion. The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to…

01 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Treat your own home like Crusoe’s ‘Island of Despair’ by marking the days on a doorframe, growing barley on your window ledge and adopting a tame parakeet called Poll. The famous castaway survives on his desert island for 28 years. 02 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez Or why not pursue a long-distance infatuation? Lovesickness is equated with bacterial infection in Márquez’s epic novel, as one character struggles to eradicate a cholera epidemic and love is revealed in its many varied forms. 03 The Plague by Albert Camus This chilling novel doubles as a handbook for how to behave under quarantine: some plague victims become violent, some sink into passivity, but the best join forces to resist the terror and…

In this period of isolation, finding connection is vital. EM Forster’s oft-quoted “only connect” is tricky when you must not only be two metres apart, but are probably quarantined too. Musicians have been quick to react and there are all manner of ways to watching someone you like doing an acoustic set on their sofa with occasional interruption from an eager dog or a flamboyant cat. Neil Diamond’s reworking of Sweet Caroline with “Hands washing Hands” and “reaching out, not touching me, not touching you” has been a deserved online hit. REM’s Michael Stipe has humanity and charisma as he sings a little of Underneath the Bunker and reminds us “we are TOGETHER – Separate, TOGETHER – separate”. Radio is so often a lifeline for those who spend much of…

My name is Danny, and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been saying those words for many years now, at various church halls and treatment centres all over London. For a recovering alcoholic and drug addict like me, going to regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and all the other various 12-Step fellowships – Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous et cetera – is an essential part of my life. Thousands of these meetings take place every day, all over the world. The meetings play a vital function for anyone trying to stay clean and sober. For the broken and busted newcomer, fresh in off the streets, they offer a beacon of hope. For the old-timers, a daily reminder of how things used to be. For all of us, a rich fellowship, a genuine…

A satisfied subscriber In these worrying times I have been unable to buy a copy of your marvellous magazine for a few weeks now, and I am so sorry that I have not seen the lovely lady who sells it outside Waitrose in Wallingford, South Oxfordshire. I always enjoy seeing her, having a chat and then taking my copy off to a local coffee shop for a sneaky peek. Over the next few days I read it cover to cover and the last edition I was able to buy [March 2-8] had me in tears when I read beautiful Anabel’s story in My Pitch. I have decided to start a subscription. I still want to support the fantastic work that The Big Issue does, and I’ll keep the subscription up…

Retirement can upend everything we know about who we are, leaving us grappling with a profound loss of identity. For professional footballers, who begin playing as children, sign to clubs professionally as teens and train for nothing else, retirement is often extremely traumatic. In its wake can follow relationship breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and, in some cases, suicide. It can also quickly bring financial trouble. Players’ wages in England’s Football Leagues One and Two range between £40,000 to £70,000. According to the PFA, an average playing career is seven years, leaving no space to build financial stability for retirement. The pressure is on to find mainstream work, but ex-players find themselves underprepared and unqualified for anything else. Ex-footballer Oli (a pseudonym), said retirement “was the hardest part of…

CRIP CAMP on Netflix now Crip Camp. That was the name disabled teenagers in the early Seventies gave to Camp Jened, a New York summer camp run by a bunch of long-haired hippies. The incredible, inspiring story of Camp Jened is now told in a Netflix documentary produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, co-directed by one of the campers, Jim LeBrecht, who was born with spina bifida. The black and white archive footage shows the sheer joy of disabled campers on a summer teenage high – kids being kids, many for the first time in their lives. Some were “shut-ins” – locked away in institutions for years. But at Camp Jened they were free to be themselves, swimming, playing football, snogging, getting laid – during one especially hot ’n’ hormonal…

EXERCISE 1: STANDING UP The first step towards a regular home fitness regime is often the hardest, Mr Motivator says, but it needn’t begin with anything complicated. “Practise just getting out of the chair without using your arms,” he says. “That’s already a starting point.” Then once you’re done you can read our interview with the ex-homeless maestro of motivation on page 34.…

Bel star I met your vendor Anabel who featured in the International Women’s Day issue. She’s such a lovely lady and we had a great chat at her pitch. I really wanted to write about the effect she had on me that day – she was like a ray of sunshine, a real antidote to all this corona misery. Beatrice Donnelly, email Super Steven I’ve been buying my weekly Big Issue from a fantastic vendor called Steven, who always sells his copies with a smile (and usually a song and a dance!) on the corner of Northumberland Street in central London. The last time I saw him was the day before I had to stop commuting to work because of the coronavirus outbreak, where he was his usual cheerful self.…

Imagine for a moment you are John Anthony Bird. You are 74 years of age, which seems like you are the most antique of persons. Imagine that for close on 30 years you have been running a homeless project that suddenly folds in the middle of a pandemic. And that you are unable to keep the show on the road, because you are banned from the road, the street, the high street and the plaza; and anywhere else the public congregate. Banned from selling the product that you developed with a team back in 1991, and which has put millions and millions of pounds directly into the pockets of people in need. So what is to be done? Here I am having to drop out because it is the staff…

Zoo Quest from 1954 The idea seems horribly outdated now – Attenborough documents the expeditions taken to wild places to bring back interesting specimens to London Zoo, but the programme’s role in introducing British people to wildlife is undeniable. For example, the team recorded the first-ever footage of the Komodo dragon. The People of Paradise , 1960 When there were still undiscovered countries and cultures, Attenborough was first to share their stories with the world. Episodes focus on ‘cargo cults’ – societies that worship the magical powers of radio transmitters – and fire walkers of Fiji. Elsa the Lioness, 1961 The story of Elsa the orphaned lioness – and her guardians George and Joy Adamson – changed the way people thought of wild animals. The…

Amid our grim and daily-grimmer reality, there is a pressing need for escape. Denied the comfort of broad social interaction, marooned for the majority of each day between four walls, beset by the BBC’s relentless rehash of daytime dreck and wearying of the explosions and car rolls of Netflix, one searches for surer terrain, for a more rewarding illusion. This is where the avid reader comes into his or her own. Lockdown is, in a way, something we have practised voluntarily for years. What else are those long hours slumped in a chair, lost between the pages, the physical world swapped for Cold War Berlin or the mountain tunnels of Middle-earth or a Neuromantic near future? At the best of times we are peevish when disturbed from the gardens of…

There’s a good reason to trust Mr Motivator when he says that he’s standing behind The Big Issue during hard times, and it’s this – he just interrupted a workout to do this interview. “You guys are special mate, I don’t do this for just anyone!” he laughs, pausing a usually sacred daily morning session to answer the phone, sounding not remotely out of breath (as if Mr Motivator ever gets out of breath!). He does 67 push-ups every day, one for every year of his life. When asked if he was up for being our new home fitness guru, the erstwhile star of Nineties breakfast telly, famed for his retina-searing Spandex unitards, didn’t hesitate. At a strange and frightening time when we’re all stuck inside sorely in need of…

When the coronavirus crisis is one day finally over, we’ll look back and we’ll remember. We’ll remember the caring employers who spent their own cash to keep staff in pay and the understanding landlords who accepted IOUs on rent. In the music world we’ll remember the true fans who forwent refunds on gig tickets so as to leave a little cash in the pockets of artists and promoters (while doing our best to forget that video in which all those tone-deaf celebs uselessly caterwauled John Lennon’s Imagine). We’ll remember the good souls and the ethical businesses that decided to be part of the solution, just as we won’t forget those who shrugged their shoulders and opted to go on merely exacerbating the problem. Bandcamp, the online music market favoured by…

Like so many of us, Vicky McClure was supposed to be working at the moment. She should be in Belfast, chasing bent coppers. But, like most film and television production across the world, filming on the next series of Line of Duty has been suspended. Until they are back at work and cooking on diesel once again, McClure is instead holed up in her home town of Nottingham. So what is keeping her happy and healthy during this enforced period of isolation? BOXSET I can’t wait for Save Me Too coming soon, and I am waiting for the full series of The Nest to come out so I can binge that. MUSIC Motown! Always uplifting, always gets me dancing! TECHNOLOGY Everyone has got into Zoom and Houseparty recently, great way…