Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/18/2021 i The Big Issue

A memorial to a Big Issue vendor who died in 2018 has been unveiled on his old patch in Hackney, East London. A mural, an “English Hedonist” blue plaque and a photo of Kevin Headley now take pride of place on the wall of the Lord Napier Star pub overlooking Hackney Wick rail station. Street artist Teddy Baden had been asked by the owners of the pub to curate a mural on the outside wall and he chose to honour Kevin, a much-loved community figure who died of a heart attack aged 52. “I felt Kevin needed to be represented here, and it’s lovely and fitting that he’s still stood there for us to remember him,” Baden told The Big Issue. “He was such an approachable guy. He was softly…

SUPPORTYOUR LOCAL VENDOR VENDORS Following a long lockdown, vendors in England, Scotland and Wales are back out selling the magazine. Please continue to support them. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND SHOPS Since the first lockdown in March last year, we have supported our vendors with more than £1m of financial assistance to make up for lost sales. We still need your help to make sure we can continue to support them through uncertain times. HOW YOU CAN HELP 1. If your local vendor is selling The Big Issue, please buy from them. Vendors buy magazines for £1.50 and sell for £3, keeping the difference and working their way out of poverty. 2. If you cannot buy from a vendor, subscriptions to the magazine are available on a three, six or 12-month basis with…

It is the most curious thing. A place where journalists aren’t the bad guys. I left a screening of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch feeling elated. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot since. The French Dispatch is about magazines, and why storytelling of the sort that magazines can deliver matters. It’s set in the French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, where a publisher/editor has established an outpost of an American newspaper and assembles a host of curious contributors to write for the titular magazine. It’s stylish, naturally. And just about everybody is in it. It’s a Wes Anderson film that is a tribute both to Wes Anderson and a host of great movies, particularly those from the French new wave onwards. But you don’t have to be an art house…

It’s very strange but when I ask people what they think about the threat of mass homelessness, they refer to getting people out of rough sleeping. I say getting people out of rough sleeping is a very pressing need. But this very pressing need can take the focus off the thousands who could, through pandemic-created poverty, be evicted; and they and their children could end up sofa surfing into temporary accommodation and head first into homelessness. People then talk about the need to end rough sleeping as if it’s too difficult to realise that people who become homeless could become rough sleepers. And that the mathematics of social collapse thrown up by Covid is enormous. I do hope I am wrong. I do hope the big campaign that we have…

The ideas for my series always come from frustration. There’s been a lot of reports that show Black people in a particular way. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to sort out with gang violence and knife crime, but there seems to be a propensity by the media to present Black people and Black lives always in a way that is tragic. Yet when I look around me, I look at my family, I look at my children, I look at my parents, I look at my friends, I look at the people I admire, I see a very, very vibrant culture. I tend to think of Black culture as like NBA basketball. The court we play on is not owned by us. The rules are not made up…

Aleksandra Melnikova: Over a year ago, Laura Hobson and I had a conversation about the diversity (or lack thereof) of characters in traditional fairy tales and books. My kid could not relate to any of the beautiful golden-hair Rapunzels or Cinderellas out there. Things got even more complicated when I’d undergone a divorce and had to answer questions like ’why do I have two homes?’. I could see we’re not alone in this, speaking to other parents: the kinds of literature suggested and widely distributed by our largest book retailers often do not reflect the reality of the wonderful, complex world around us. As designers, we felt we could do something about it, we could create a resource where diverse books (diverse representation, diverse circumstances, diverse backgrounds) would live and…

Nothing dropped off during the race, in which I came a stunning 35,151st I was one of two vendors to complete the London Marathon this year. It took me 6h 56min but my strategy was to walk – which I did, at a nice steady pace. My race plan was to not die – which seems to have succeeded. I had no aches or pains except a twinge in my quads on sitting and standing – and nothing dropped off during the race, in which I came a stunning 35,151st. I’m very chatty, so that slowed me down a bit. I’m pretty sure everyone around me was losing the will to live. Also, I stopped to play with steelbands along the way – notably Nostalgia Steelband. The crowds were fantastic…

An organisation representing more than 500 independent foodbanks across the UK is backing The Big Issue’s fight to prevent a wave of homelessness. The Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) reported food aid centres “running out of options” to support people, and warned the £20 cut to Universal Credit (UC) could see them unable to offer emergency food. Staff and volunteers are facing a surge in demand far exceeding any seen during the pandemic thus far, as families across the country struggle to put food on the table or pay rent while the supply chain crisis leaves shelves empty. “Like food poverty, homelessness is preventable,” Sabine Goodwin, coordinator for IFAN, said in support of The Big Issue’s Stop Mass Homelessness campaign. “We’re now facing increasing foodbank use and mass homelessness as…

letters@bigissue.com @bigissue  /bigissueUK  @bigissueuk  letters@bigissue.com [RE: NATIONALISE IT!, OCTOBER 4] Low energy Jon Burke failed to mention one important fact in relation to the nationalised and post-nationalised energy sectors. At the time that the energy business was nationalised, almost all our energy was home-produced. Electricity was generated using coal, gas was initially town gas produced from coal and later North Sea gas produced in our national waters. We are in a very different environment now as coal must not be used and our North Sea gas is becoming depleted. The use of gas from other countries might not have occurred if solar and wind power had been built earlier. However, both of these technologies have only recently become low cost, and so would have been expensive to the user had…

Who did I see when I was growing up that showed me I could be anything? Lord Bill Morris is one. I grew up thinking, how’s he got there? How has he become so powerful? He ran the largest trade union in this country [Lord Morris was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union from 1992 to 2003] – and in doing so had more votes than any politician in the country. I used to look at him, tackling Thatcherism. He tackled several prime ministers and they could never get the better of him. And he looked after the people within his union as if he was their father. He is a really brilliant man that I think doesn’t get enough flowers. Maybe I should make a documentary…

Drawn during lockdown, Defiant Dawn “symbolises new beginnings as the sun comes up on the horizon”, explains long-time regular Street Art contributor Christie. “The defiance of nature as a blackbird stands alert and ready to fly, leaving behind suffering and decay symbolised by the old wooden post and the barbed wire.” “The Big Issue is a lifeline to me,” Christie continues, “helping me to keep painting, drawing and sculpting, providing me with a way to earn a living and at the same time sharing my message through art and keeping control over the anxiety and depression which makes it difficult to function in day-to-day normality. “Thank you for your continued support, and the amazing work you do for others.” The work on this page is created by people who are…

01 A Case of Hysteria (Dora) by Sigmund Freud Freud openly embellishes his teenage patient’s version of events and uses his speculations as the basis for his often outlandish analysis. One is left thinking: how much of Freud’s account should we believe? 02 A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch Psychoanalyst Palmer Anderson is not quite the central character of Murdoch’s 1960s cult classic, but he’s as slippery and duplicitous as any of the others. It’s a novel that demands to be immediately re-read, just so you can work out exactly who’s been screwing who. 03 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey The iron-fisted Nurse Ratched is not exactly a therapist, but Kesey’s 1962 novel became the lodestone of the anti-psychiatry movement which began to question whether the…

When Apple TV launched a couple of years ago, it served up ›e Morning Show as gleaming bait to potential subscribers. It seemed to have the lot: an all-star cast in Jennifer Aniston, Reece Witherspoon and Steve Carrell, a glamorous setting inside the cut-throat world of morning TV and a zeitgeisty theme in the post-#MeToo storyline. I’d originally given it a swerve not because of what the critics said but because I find dramatisations of newsrooms corny. They always make the journalists seem more calculated than they really are. Newsrooms are chaotic places where there is no time for many grand statements to be made beyond: “Just get the fucking thing out on time.” I’ve worked in many fast-moving newsrooms and have never seen those long, nuanced, ethical debates that…

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A Big Issue-backed project has converted two London buses into healthcare and support hubs for people sleeping rough on the capital’s streets. The Driving for Change initiative has been launched by coffee shop Change Please, which trains people experiencing homelessness as baristas and pays them a living wage. CEO Cemal Ezel, who has received backing from Big Issue Invest since he founded the social enterprise in 2015, called the project an “urgent intervention” ahead of the potential worsening of the homelessness crisis. He told The Big Issue: “We believe at the beginning of 2022 we will see a huge spike in the number of people who are homeless, and we need to intervene now to try to provide services straight to rough sleepers to help rebuild trust in society and…

1. ‘I just wish I’d got to say goodbye to Freddie Mercury’ – Roger Taylor’s Letter to My Younger Self 2. Petition to make lying in Parliament illegal could get MPs’ debated 3. How does minimum wage in Britain compare to the rest of the world? 4. How Jon Bon Jovi fights poverty with the JBJ Soul Kitchen 5. Who are Insulate Britain and why do they keep blocking the M25?…

The role of Black men and women in the United Kingdom is often overlooked in the history books. As recently as 2001, the BBC commissioned a poll of the greatest Briton ever, spawning a television series and the votes of more than 1.5 million people for the final list of 100. There was not one Black or Asian face among them. The arrival of people from the Caribbean to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948 has been mythologised as the defining moment that changed Britain from an exclusively white population into a racially diverse one; the beginning of a constant Black British presence in this country. Yet there is substantial evidence of an African presence in Britain since the Roman period, and a constant presence since the 16th century,…

Billy Connolly has, over the last six decades, unloaded an avalanche of intimate details about his private life. Such is our familiarity with the Big Yin’s saga, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s already written his memoir. But no, that’s the Mandela Effect in action; Windswept & Interesting: My Autobiography is actually the first time he’s committed his entire life story to paper. If you’re a Connolly fan, you’ll recognise many of the stories contained herein. Some of them are recounted verbatim from his stand-up routines. However, and at the risk of sounding morbid, this is essentially Connolly’s final written testament: the ultimate account of his extraordinary life, recorded for posterity. The repetition is permissible. And it’s not as if the book is entirely reheated. It’s peppered with anecdotes…

The baritone sang of stuffing socks into a stolen blouse while outwardly pretending to be the “perfect boy”. Meanwhile, his future self – a mezzo-soprano – describes her joy at being recognised as a female (“pardon me miss”); both describe the searing pain experienced along this path to understanding and acceptance. A dancer represents Hannah’s liminal development, a silent presence on stage for the entire duration of As One, thought to be the world’s first opera about a transgender woman. The work premiered in the US in 2014 and has become the most produced contemporary opera in North America. It has just had its first UK performance: As One headlined this year’s London Festival of American Music, held at The Warehouse, close to Waterloo station. Laura Kaminsky’s score cleverly integrates…

NEED HELP? Why not get together with other Big Issue readers on Twitter – @BigIssue Get the answers in next week's mag! Good luck 1. What type of dog was TV’s Lassie? 2. Who topped the UK singles chart in 1974 with Kung Fu Fighting? 3. What was the name of Susan Tully’s character in EastEnders ? 4. In which year did Soviet Yuri Gagarin become the first human in space? 5. What colour is a tennis ball? 6. Which famous American author died on February 19, 2016? 7. Which US president was nicknamed Long Tom? 8. Which team won the Super Bowl earlier this year? 9. What is the capital of Cambodia? 10. What is the name of Pink Floyd’s drummer? 11. Who was the first woman to climb…