Innholdsfortegnelse for 17-08-20 i The Big Issue

This week the Ride Out Recession Alliance welcomes backing from Cabinz CIC, a grassroots group encouraging the creative reuse of building materials to construct shelters and homes and to distribute fixtures, fixings and hardware to groups tackling Britain’s housing crisis. Paul Ridley, Cabinz CIC founder, said: “We want to join RORA, alongside our sister group the Shelter and Hardware Bank, to donate or distribute hardware and fixings at very low cost from our stock of six million-plus items. “These could be used to create jobs in conjunction with insulated panels to insulate or divide up properties to house homeless people or build vital standalone shelters. “We also bring 30 years of grassroots knowledge to encourage community material reuse, DIY workers and shelter builders to build their own insulated panels for…

VENDOR RETURN VENDORS: Not all vendors have been able to return to their pitches at once. Health issues mean some are shielding and areas of the country are subject to local lockdowns. We will continue to support vendors who need help until they can sell again. PPE: Safety is key, we do not want to risk any vendor or customer’s health. So we have provided ‘Welcome Back Packs’ for each vendor that include masks, gloves, sanitiser and wipes. Vendors will also be given waterproof bags to safely store magazines. PITCHES: Some pitches may have moved, depending on local safety measures and circumstances. A large number of vendors will now be offering contactless payment, but they will continue to accept cash – there is no indication that handling cash or magazines…

At 16 I loved football. But I was also realising that I was too skinny and too wayward, and just not good enough to be a footballer. When I was a child, that was my obsession. Some of the epic games I used to play in the street when I was a kid – I can still feel the adrenaline and the passion and the joy. They lasted for hours, like those medieval games that went on for three days, until somebody died. But I think maybe even then I had an idea I might not be good enough. I tried though; I really worked on my left foot. I’d spend hours out kicking a ball against a wall. I thought, if I’m two-footed that will give me a definite…

My hope has always been to die while largely in possession of my physical and mental faculties, having had a decent notice period in which I haven’t had to give up on very much, but have managed to set my affairs in order, emotionally at least. But sometimes, when it seems likely that we will fail to get a grip on the climate crisis, and I feel particularly depressed about the way the world is going, I like the idea of a much longer life: just think! If we don’t get this climate stuff under control, and I manage to get to 90, I might live long enough to see the end of the human race. Not the actual literal end – but as close as anyone could reasonably expect…

Babyteeth In cinemas and streaming now “This is the worst possible parenting I can think of.” So says a woman watching her 15-year-old daughter rolling around the garden with her 23-year-old boyfriend, limbs all in a tangle. I say boyfriend, but actually, the woman and her husband are paying the young man with prescription drugs to stay at their house. Like a lot of scenes in this odd-funny and devastating coming-of-age film from Australia, the moment is unexpectedly tender. Babyteeth is a breath of fresh air from first-time filmmaker Shannon Murphy (who directed episodes of Killing Eve), working from a script by playwright Rita Kalnejais. Lovely and messy, it’s the most original film I’ve seen all year. Which is funny, because on paper it sounds like another film in that…

Perhaps most extraordinary about the song which sums up the sorry state of the music industry in the 21st century better than any other is how early in the new millennium it arrived. Gillian Welch’s Everything Is Free was released on the Nashville country-folk singer’s defining album Time (The Revelator) in July 2001. Coincidentally the same month in which Napster was shut down for copyright infringement, having spectacularly let the genie out of the bottle insofar as MP3 sharing, the collapse of physical sales and the devaluation of recorded music in the digital era go. Listening to it today, at a time when Covid-19 has wrecked live touring – the only dependable source of income most full-time musicians had left when streaming still pays a pittance – Welch’s angry lament…

A hand up... Our sellers BUY the magazine for £1.50 and sell it for £3, keeping the difference. Not a handout… Vendors 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 to 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.…

School and college pupils should be focused on celebrating exam success at this time of year, but instead the Covid-19 confusion has sparked a row over the attainment gap. The Scottish government made an unprecedented U-turn to stick to teachers’ estimates after plans to mark down individual grades in line with schools’ past performances sparked fury, unfairly penalising pupils from disadvantaged areas. Westminster’s Education Secretary Gavin Williamson was keen to avoid a similar outcome in England. He announced that pupils would have three options: accept their calculated grade, appeal to receive a valid mock result, or sit autumn exams. And Qualifications Wales said outright that some A-level and GCSE results would be lowered in response to “generous” estimations made by teachers. The controversy has highlighted how where you come from…

The inspiration for my article this week was a man in his 60s with a large stick, like a shepherd’s crook. He stood before me when I was out on a walk telling me that the country had to learn not to panic. That’s what he was worried about. He was on his way to tend to his cows and I was out with my son doing my 10,000 steps; the 10,000-a-day method supposedly sees you through to a hundred. “All this fighting over this, that and the other,” he was saying. “Not about how grim the economy is looking. And us all getting together to sort that out.” We talked until my son got restless and wanted to carry on and finish the next half of our steps. We…

Covid-19 is a major global shock that has turned our lives upside down, but how does it measure up on the grand billion-year scale of Earth’s history? The answer puts our human dramas in the largest perspective – and may yet be critical to all our futures. The pandemic won’t leave a direct record of the virus for geologists of the far future to investigate, as viruses don’t fossilise. And it may be hard to pick out a clear fossil record of the victims too, as they could be difficult to distinguish among other causes of death. There will be indirect signals such as some specific ‘technofossils’ that are spiking in abundance. For instance many billions of disposable face masks and gloves are already showing up in litter globally and…

While writing my book Spirit of Place I formed a mental list of writers and artists with whom I would not like to have gone for a walk. At the top of it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It would have been fine during the years he lived at Nether Stowey in Somerset – I would have jumped at the chance to ramble sociably with him over the Quantock Hills, especially if his friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth were there too. People who walked by his side never forgot the brilliance of Coleridge’s talk, his way of noticing things. But when in 1800 he moved to Keswick in the Lake District, something changed. He couldn’t concentrate on nature, he complained, when he was with other people. It was only when he…

HOW TO CHANGE A WHEEL Before moving to the UK when he was 16, Giovanni, 30, grew up with his head buried in an engine of some sort. “I used to work on Land Rovers, Bedfords, Ferguson tractors, old Lister engines, Cessna aeroplanes, combine harvesters, all sorts of stuff. Once you know one diesel engine you tend to know all of them. I’d love the smell of them too. I know that mechanics also tend not to get common colds so I think working on vehicles helps with the immune system too.” So who better to tell us how to look after our vehicles? Here’s how Gio says you should change a tyre: • If you need to change it then you should first put the handbrake on to make…

A great opportunity is staring us in the face. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the complete mess governments in Westminster and Holyrood have made of school exam results. Due to lockdown, final exams for A-levels and GCSEs, technical equivalent exams such as BTECs, as well as National 5s and Highers, the Scottish GCSEs and A-levels, could not be taken. So results had to be calculated based on a few variables, including mock exams and teachers’ predicted grades. And despite having several months to get things ready and work out systems that were fair and equitable, the governments and their examining bodies didn’t just drop the ball, they burst it, kicked it into nettles, set the nettles on fire, poured some petrol on the fire, then said play…

Something changed in The Big Issue last week. Do you remember that Jarvis Cocker as guest editor brought some razzmatazz to the magazine, filling the pages with a different class of thoughts and ideas from Britain’s brightest creative minds including Jeremy Deller and Baxter Dury. Jarvis shared with his tens of thousands of fans: “Very proud to have been asked to guest-edit this edition of The Big Issue. My heartfelt thanks to all the contributors: visions of a post-Corona world, stories from the frontline & more! The work The Big Issue does is more important now than ever.” If you missed out on your copy, back issues can be ordered from bigissueshop.com…

Another week, another member of the billionaire’s club. Apple chief executive Tim Cook benefitted from the company’s share price soaring and a take-home salary of £96m. The company itself is heading towards being the first valued at $2tn – a higher figure than the GDP of countries like Mexico, Australia and most European nations. This month too, the status of Mark Zuckerberg’s bank account reached $100bn (£76bn). But that is still just a little over half of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ $186bn fortune. Technology intersects all aspects of life – and to weather the pandemic we’ve all relied on it more than ever – but it can reinforce divisions as much as connect people. What can we do to ensure that great wealth is not amassed at the expense of…

“I don’t fully recall the process I followed to make this image,” reflects regular Street Art contributor Andrew. “The idea of leaves being dreams came to me as I walked through the park near where I live. A friend sometimes talks about the possibility of trees being conscious, so perhaps that made me think of trees dreaming. But to describe leaves as the visible evidence of dreaming trees I thought was good. The contrast with the sun and daytime and summer was something I found attractive. “Lockdown has not made much difference to me as I am fairly reclusive and solitary anyway. I have enjoyed the quiet, the empty streets and the considerate attitudes of people. I have found it rather lonely though, and miss the company of my friends.”…

01 London: Poetry of Place by Barnaby Rogerson A jewel of a book that contains sumptuous poetry from a range of poets including Benjamin Zephaniah, Wendy Cope and Diane di Prima. It’s pocket-sized and one way of keeping past and present London with you. 02 Ordinary People by Diana Evans Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written – a South London family coming apart and finding new ways forward. The way we live now. 03 London is a Forest by Paul Wood According to the UN there are 8.3 million trees in London and this means that we live in an urban forest, corresponding to one person per tree – this book will make you fall in love with London’s trees, parks and streets. It’s now officially OK to hug a tree.…

As we move through the uneasy summer of the Pandemic Year of our Lord 2020, baking has been replaced with holiday quarantine roulette, queuing to spend one hour 45 minutes in an impromptu beer garden near some bins and trawling the internet for a face covering that really expresses your personality. To be honest, it’s all a bit much. So as a form of emergency occupational therapy, I have started doing 500-piece jigsaws of English village scenes from days of yore. These jigsaws look like a Farage fever dream; sunlit uplands scattered with playgrounds, sweet shops, churches, vintage buses and Caucasian faces as far as the eye can see. (In fact, if anyone knows of any multicultural jigsaws, do let me know, because if I see another white kid on…

I’ve been selling the magazine, off and on, since about 2008. I’ve sold all over England – I’ve done Plymouth, Norwich, London. I’ve done parts of Wales and Scotland too. With me, anywhere I lay my head is home. I’ve never been indoors really. I’ve just been going from town to town. I don’t really call anywhere home but I’ve been in Kingsbridge for a year and it’s the only place I’ve been where everyone speaks to you, it’s very welcoming. I like moving around because it gives you that freedom and because I’m self-employed I don’t like anyone telling me what to do. I spend 40-50 hours a week selling the magazine and the more you sell the more you bring in, that’s the way I look at it.…