Innholdsfortegnelse for 22-2-2016 i The Big Issue

WE BELIEVE in a hand up, not a handout... Which is why our sellers BUY every copy of the magazine from us for £1.25 and sell it on to you for £2.50. In this way we have helped hundreds of thousands of people to take control of their lives since 1991, and in the process created a global blueprint for social change. WE BELIEVE in trade, not aid... Which is why we ask that you ALWAYS take your copy of the magazine – it’s a bloody good read and our sellers are working and need your custom. WE BELIEVE poverty is indiscriminate... Which is why we provide ANYONE whose life is blighted by poverty with the opportunity to earn a LEGITIMATE income. WE BELIEVE in the right to citizenship... Which…

Augustus Gloop had it coming. We knew it, Willy Wonka knew it and probably, deep down, Gloop knew it too. In case you’ve forgotten what happened to gluttonous Augustus, one of Roald Dahl’s most memorable, most selfish characters, he fell into a river of chocolate when he got greedy. And boy was he greedy. Roald Dahl had a vicious, moralistic streak. When he toppled Gloop into the, well, gloop, he was punishing the boy, “a doughball of a body”, and also his mother, a woman who refused to accept the reality of the greed of her child. Last week there was a lot of hurrumphing about the levels of sugar in some coffee drinks on sale in high street coffee shops. One of them, a hot mulled fruit Venti –…

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“I took a week off to go on tour with The Rolling Stones” We were the first people to become teenagers. The name wasn’t in the English language before then. It was a period of change, and I could feel that myself because I had gone to a grammar school, which nobody in my family had done. I realised my options were far more open than my mother’s. I turned 16 in December 1959. It was such an exciting time. We didn’t realise we were at the centre of this revolution. Everyone got a conscience, we marched against the Vietnam War, the change was phenomenal: socially, politically, musically. When I said I wanted to be an actress, the careers officer nearly fell off her stool. Choices were still limited for…

1. Buy food that is recognisable. For example, buy fish with recognisable features – head, skin, tail – that assure you it is the species the label says it is rather than non-descript white fillets. Buy whole cuts of meat rather than minced products. Grind whole spices at home. 2. Where possible make your food from whole ingredients. I appreciate that this isn’t always easy but it is without the doubt the easiest way to know what’s in your food. 3. Reduce the number of stops between the farm and your fork. If every stop in the food supply is an opportunity for fraud, then reducing the number of stops reduces your vulnerability to being scammed. A side benefit to this is that you will end up supporting more local…

This is Steve and his dog Ted, who have become well known in Dorchester selling The Big Issue. “Steve looks a little bit scary on the outside, a big guy with tattoos, and he’s got a fierce-looking dog,” says local artist Mike Chapman, “but him and the dog are really sweet. Steve has much more depth than apparent at first glance. That’s what I wanted to paint.” The portrait of Steve and Ted is the centrepiece of an exhibition of Chapman’s work at Duke’s Auctioneers Fine Art Salesroom. “Everybody who walks in goes, ‘I know that guy’,” says Chapman. “He’s a local character, very well known, very well liked.” The picture has sold for £10,000, and Chapman hopes the work will discourage people from judging Big Issue vendors. “People need…

Birth and death are, of course, two monumental subjects that affect all of us. Both are so commonplace and yet bring about such profound experiences, and that juxtaposition often makes for great books. This week we’re looking at a book from each end of the human experience. First up is the quietly profound Quicksand by Henning Mankell. The Swedish novelist died last year from cancer, and this posthumously published book is a thoughtful and insightful collection of short essays, written after the writer received his cancer diagnosis, looking at all aspects of his life and drawing subtle wider conclusions about what makes humans tick. In keeping with Mankell’s prose style in his Wallander novels, the style here is stripped back and matter-of-fact. George Orwell once wrote that good prose should…

Toe-curling I read the article about the vendor Daniel repaying his customer Joe’s kindness by buying his breakfast [#CelebrateYourVendor, February 1-7]. I was pleased to read the positive responses but I am sad to say it is not like that everywhere. The vendor who sells The Big Issue at M&S, Leicester, is Romanian. Her name is Aurora, a nice Christian lady who asks God to bless you. Her English is not very good but I have noticed over the last three years that it has gradually improved. She is always smiling no matter the weather and is always happy to see you. One day I noticed she was wearing a pair of knitted boots, which were wet. I took her to a shop and bought her a nice pair of…

Want to hang out with a Hollywood legend? Who doesn’t?! What about one with a social conscience who is putting in the hard yards to raise awareness of homelessness? Could this get any better? What if we told you it was free? This is your chance to spend a night with Richard Gere at the UK premiere of his new acclaimed film Time Out of Mind, and give him a grilling at a Q&A afterwards. During filming in New York in his role as George, a man whose life hits rock bottom, Gere discovered how completely invisible people become when they’re homeless – even when you have one of the most famous faces in the world. “Because I was this character, people decided within two blocks of seeing me that…

“The gap between rich and poor is what happens when every last human is on the hunt to buy something” Awash of blue swept over me. I had got up and gone to town to sit in some coffee shop and write, perhaps look in at a bookshop. It’s raining and it’s deadly grey and it seems there are a lot of people like me caught in the heavy rain without an aquascutum – which as you may know is Latin for umbrella; or was back when I was told it by an 18-year-old, when I was an 18-year-old. More to get out of the rain I go into the bookshop and look at all the books that are arrayed over tables, each with an appealing message to buy them.…

If talk of ‘fake’ food turns your stomach, it’s worth remembering there is a lot of good fresh produce in Britain – but so much of what comes out our fields, one-third of what we grow, ends up binned. Some is rejected by supermarkets at the farm gate as ‘imperfect’ or chucked in the skip when shoppers refuse to buy bruised stuff on the shelves, while the rest goes in our bins at home. But that is all changing. Asda is leading the way by launching ‘wonky veg boxes’, a carton costing £3.50 packed with fresh vegetables that might not be as pretty as the veg on the main display but will feed a family of four for a week. Rolling out across 128 stores in Britain, the boxes contain…

What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? It’s a huge question but one that London’s Southbank Centre plans to address throughout 2017. The Centre – along with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under its principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski – will host a year-long festival, Belief and Beyond Belief, exploring fundamental questions of humanity through music, literature, performance and discussion. This ambitious project, the focus of eight weekends across next year, was announced at the Southbank Centre’s 2016/17 Classical Music Season launch late last month, alongside an impressive billing of performers. Names like Martha Argerich, Mitsuko Uchida and Maurizio Pollini – to name but three pianists – are bound to turn heads but what really excites me is this season’s emphasis on exploration. Not only does Belief and…

I work in Newbury in Berkshire. There are a fair few disadvantaged people I see regularly on my trips to Tesco. Walking through the busy high street I see men in suits, women trying to speed-walk in heels and bedraggled parents on their way to work and school. There are very few who spare a second to lift their head as they are so caught up in their own lives. But there is one individual that stands out – the lovely gentlemen who sells The Big Issue outside Tesco. Despite his misfortune, he’s always smiling and loves to crack a joke! I always think, wow! Despite clearly having little, being looked down upon or ignored and working a job that means being outside on your feet in the cold all…

When will on-demand providers catch up on the need for subtitles? We’ve all had days when we couldn’t wait to sit on the couch with the remote and a cuppa, so we could catch up on several episodes of our favourite TV show in one go. Especially now, when the weather is too chilly to stay out long and the days are too short for a post-work pub crawl, there’s nothing better than an occasional binge-watch. But 7.5 million Brits are excluded from such indulgences. They rely on subtitles to watch TV but many providers don’t offer that option for their on-demand services. The BBC led the way as the first broadcaster to subtitle 100 per cent of their main channel content. Channel 4 has since followed suit and ITV…

“Think of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark but with every treasure on open racks and rails” The chill hits me and a slight tang of… meat. I’ve entered the fur store room at Angels Costumes. We stand in silence. There are racks of fur coats – like a multiverse of Narnia entry points. Fox stoles are piled high to the ceiling. Tim Angel, the seventh-generation boss of a family firm, is giving me a guided tour. “A lot of actors refuse to wear fur, of course,” he says, “but we feel we have to keep them.” And there is the dilemma and fascination for Angels – a family firm since the 1800s, which just won a special Bafta for outstanding British contribution…

I’ve been trying to make a fake egg for two weeks. My kitchen counter, now a makeshift laboratory, is covered in various white powders – all perfectly legitimate chemicals used by the food industry, I assure you. Kitchen scales, bowls, mixers and an egg poacher are my tools – nothing out of the ordinary here. I have mastered the yolk and egg white and I can even get it into an approximate egg-shape but a perfectly crackable shell still eludes me. Why am I making fake eggs, you ask? I am trying to replicate a form of food fraud that has cropped up in China since the mid-1990s. I was hoping to use it as a demonstration of what is possible in the world of food fraud because, without a…

Michael Smiley arrives to our rendezvous in Brixton on his six-speed fold-up Brompton bike. After a chat about his many two-wheeled friends, he gives an impromptu guided tour, detailing where to find vintage clothes, leather goods, furniture and damn fine coffee from his friend Carol. He has lived here since the last century, and is deeply embedded in the neighbourhood, judging by the number of people who stop to say hello. He is also concerned about where the increasing pace of gentrification will lead. “Money is moving in. If it is used with empathy for the environment, then everyone is okay. If you walk in with a scorched-earth policy, that is heartbreaking,” he says. Smiley might be an in-demand actor these days but his first forays into showbusiness were as…

1. MAGGIE & ME Damian Barr A brutally frank and deeply compelling memoir about surviving a childhood of abuse in the Buckfast Triangle of western Scotland during the Thatcher years. 2. LOVE, NINA Nina Stibbe It’s 1982 and live-in nanny Nina writes letters daily to her sister, detailing her hilarious adventures and comic mishaps being in charge of two boys in the heartland of the London literati. 3. BEDSIT DISCO QUEEN Tracey Thorn An honest, funny and fresh memoir from the frontwoman of Everything But the Girl, about breaking into the big time during the 1980s and ’90s. 4. NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY Andy McSmith Insightful and comprehensive, this non-fiction book covers everything from politics to pop music, feminism to Fleet Street during the decade that fashion forgot. 5.…

After Deadpool’s massive success, lots of other comic book-inspired films are queuing up to follow suit. But Spawn, The Wolverine 3 and X-Force could all get a harsh R rating in the US. Julianne Moore is in talks to join the Kingsman: The Secret Service sequel. She might play the villain – if she can fit the film into her busy schedule, that is. It seems Predator 4 is finally getting a move on – a teaser promo image was released last week. Shane Black – currently putting the finishing touches to The Nice Guys – is set to direct. Meanwhile, get ready for an annual fix of Transformers. Transformers 5 is out next summer, a Bumblebee character spin-off film is due in 2018, and Transformers 6 will follow in…

The Benefactor is a dramatic and affecting thriller that follows one man’s downward spiral. Five years after Olivia’s (Dakota Fanning) parents are killed in a car crash that was Franny’s (Pretty Woman idol Richard Gere) fault, he becomes obsessed with Olivia and her new husband Luke (Theo James). Franny, a powerful, mysterious and possessive philanthropist, tries to relieve the pain and loss he feels through them – but the stress and grief resurfaces, and his addictions lead him into an inevitable downward spiral. We have five copies of The Benefactor to be won on DVD. To enter, tell us: which star of Pretty Woman plays Franny in The Benefactor? Send answers with THE BENEFACTOR as the subject to competitions@bigissue.com or post to The Big Issue, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2…