Innholdsfortegnelse for 3-10-2016 i The Big Issue

WE BELIEVE in a hand up, not a handout... Which is why our sellers BUY every copy of the magazine for £1.25 and sell it for £2.50. WE BELIEVE in trade, not aid… Which is why we ask you to ALWAYS take your copy of the magazine. 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 is why The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers tackle social and financial exclusion. WE BELIEVE in prevention… Which is why Big Issue Invest offers backing and investments to social enterprises, charities and businesses which deliver social value to communities.…

The Urban Dictionary online states the word Spergy is as follows: “Used to describe an individual as socially unaware, or inept. “Just to the right of being incapable of social interaction. “Tolerable, if you have sympathy for their lack of understanding.” Indeed, I have sympathy for the lack of understanding this text clearly identifies. I am an autistic 24-year-old man who is also a performance poet. Writing poetry was always my most prominent communication tool in life and it is only through building confidence in the right settings that I felt capable of transforming my written works into performances. The impact of this creative outlet on me is the foundation of Spergy – the organic arts-based community platform for autistic people. Expressive, fun and free. Crucially adding to the above,…

“Literate people are more likely to have smaller families to feed and have more time for a better life” Here’s a conundrum for you: apparently there are five billion in the world who are poor. That is out of a population of seven-and-a-half billion. So two thirds of the world are poor; that’s about 66 per cent. When I was born in 1946 there were two-and-a-half billion people in the world. Almost two billion were considered living in or around poverty. So reducing the world’s poor population to only 66 per cent seems a great advance from 80 per cent when I was a babe. But whereas there were only two billion people who were poor and now there are five billion, you might say there has been a 150…

“For the public… seeing their little Pet get older was like watching their own youth disappear” TRUMP He deeply concerns me. It reminds me of when I was very young. The Cuban Missile Crisis, how tense that was. And if this maniac gets in we will be there all over again in a flying fart’s second. He is not a deep thinker. What he is, he’s a businessman, which means greedy and selfish. So he is only interested in considering his own point of view – which in his case is only his ego. And that makes him very, very irresponsible to the rest of us. I am anti-politician me, fully. So I understand that a lot of Trump’s supporters are disenfranchised. They are fed up with politics as usual.…

The big names always come to The Big Issue. For 25 years, icons of music have trusted this very magazine to publish their tales, their woes and their revelations. Back at the very start, The Stone Roses ignored the music press and tabloid newspapers and broke a lengthy media silence in these pages. Then we sat down with the Spice Girls to discover how the biggest pop band on the planet were taking girl power to the next generation. And how could we forget when Jarvis Cocker interviewed David Bowie in New York, exclusively for The Big Issue. Not to mention, of course, unforgettable one-on-one exclusives with elusive figures such as George Michael, Morrissey and Bob Dylan. The list goes on. The Big Issue has long been the number one…

1. THE UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL, VOL. 1 Ryan North Hear me out – Squirrel Girl is a hero with all the powers of… a squirrel! She’s also one of the most powerful, unforgettable, optimistic heroes in the comic world. 2. CORALINE Neil Gaiman Coraline is an adventurous girl who gets into the most frightful kind of trouble – and comes right out the other side in the way of all great heroines. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the trip. 3. RAPUNZEL’S REVENGE Shannon and Dean Hale This unbeatable duo (who have a prose novel about Squirrel Girl coming soon) upend and retell a classic fairytale in a graphic novel style that readers of all ages and genders will enjoy. 4. SKULLDUGGERY PLEASANT SERIES Derek Landy I’d have…

In Alice Through the Looking Glass, the all-star cast from the 2010 blockbuster is back together for another magical adventure. Johnny Depp portrays the Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway plays mild-mannered White Queen Mirana, Helena Bonham Carter is the short-tempered big-headed Red Queen Iracebeth and Mia Wasikowska stars as Alice, the adventuress at the heart of the story. In addition, Sacha Baron Cohen joins the ensemble as Time, a magical being who is part human, part clock. The late Alan Rickman – to whom the film is dedicated – is the voice of Absolem one last time. Out now on 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray and DVD digital download, the film is packed with in-depth bonus features exploring the whimsical world of Underland. Three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood reveals the creative process…

SUDOKU SPECIAL! Mike Colloby, ranked #97 in the world at solving Sudoku, commented on the fiendish nature of our puzzle, and readers were keen to share their views. Turn to page 45 for this week’s puzzle. Like many, after reading The Big Issue’s interesting and challenging articles, I always have a go at the puzzles. My spelling is awful, so I generally need help to complete the crossword. The Sudoku, however, whilst tricky, is nearly always manageable. So I was surprised that Mike Colloby’s email [Comment of the Week, September 19-25] suggests that only a rather small elite can do them. I checked the fabled September 5-11 solution to see if I’d made a mistake but all was fine. I can assure you, I’m not in any world rankings and…

Last week, the US sent a lot of gas to Britain. There was fanfare and a welcoming committee as a ship carrying 27,500 cubic metres of ethane sailed into the Firth of Forth. However, not everybody was happy. Though the cargo was part of much more to follow, and part of a scheme that would help secure thousands of jobs, the Scottish government was absent from the quayside. The cargo was of shale gas, removed from the ground by fracking in the US – and this causes problems for those in Edinburgh, and beyond. There is a moratorium on fracking in Scotland until assessment of environmental impact is carried out. The argument is simple; injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into the ground in order to force…

ANTRAN BY TOM MCCARTHAIGH Tom has a history of psychosis and has lived in mental health accommodation for four years. His support worker noticed he likes to draw and encouraged him to illustrate. This is a picture he did based on a story called Antran, which is about an android found in a skip. Tom wanted to depict the social rejection that comes with mental health issues, as well as the experience of no longer being valued. FOLLOW THE HERON HOME BY MONIQUE VAN AALST Monique, in her 40s and from the Netherlands, struggles with a chronic pain condition, called fibromyalgia, and has experienced homelessness in her native country and in Scotland where she lives. “I always try and make the best of a situation,” she says. “Art is one…

Two years after Kate Bush’s extraordinary Before the Dawn 22-night run at Hammersmith Apollo, fans obsessed with the elusive pop goddess have new reason to celebrate, with the announcement of a live triple album of the gigs. There are no plans yet for a DVD but for visual thrills while listening, there’s Italian photographer Guido Harari’s archive of Kate from 1982-93. With incredible candid pics, unseen shots from the filming of The Line, the Cross and the Curve, plus classic album shoots, it’s a lavish limited edition. The Kate Inside, Kate Bush Photographed by Guido Harari (1982-93), is available at wallofsoundgallery.com/en…

Musicians Against Homelessness was a fluke really. A really lovely woman called Emma Rule got in touch with me. She’s a PR. Most PRs don’t have a social conscience – they’re good at sending invoices. That’s okay, it’s the nature of the beast. But Emma told me she’d spent the last six Christmases, for a week a time, feeding the homeless. She got in touch and said she had an idea, would I help. And she’s really great, so I said yes. She asked if I’d act as an ambassador for this, to be the frontman to help it get going. She knew I had a few bands I’m managing, like Happy Mondays and Cast, but it’s not hard to talk about. It wasn’t hard to do. She’s the songwriter.…

At 16 I was already something of a star and quite a lonely teenager. Rank [The Rank Organisation, Britain’s most powerful film studio at the time] was quite strict and so was my father – he didn’t want me to be spoiled and he didn’t want me to ‘get into trouble’. I wasn’t allowed to go out with boys or wear certain clothes, all the normal things teenagers want and need to do. I didn’t have a lot of friends; my only friend was my stand-in. My schooling was pretty much nothing. The kids at school were probably half jealous but they also thought it was funny because I was so terrible at school because I was hardly ever there. There was no romance in my life. Diana Dors was…

You can hear Andreya Triana’s story in her songs. The Brixton-raised singer has Jamaican, Trinidadian and Scottish roots – this multicultural mix influences her sound, which she describes as contemporary soul. “People hear a million different things when they listen to the same piece of music,” Triana says. “The beauty of songs is that they take on their own meaning for people. At one show there was a couple at the front clinging onto each other and singing every single word to one of my songs. It belonged to them in that moment.” Triana’s break came while she was living in Brighton, working in a series of uninspiring jobs – a hearing aid shop, for an insurance company and even selling ice cream from a van in a layby –…

“She had the temerity to tackle head-on the most prominent (and notorious) man in Germany” Have you noticed how often, when looking for one thing, you find another? The Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989. The Germans call it Die Wende, the turning point, change or in sailing terms: going about. I was fascinated by this. How can a country that has been divided for 40 years – physically, politically and culturally – come together again and smooth away those differences, not overnight but little by little, while avoiding conflict? What an achievement! In 1992 I went to the former East Germany to research a dissertation on agriculture, land management and conservation in the New Lands of Germany. The former East Germans (known as Ossies) spoke freely to us when they…

If music were a planetary system, Johann Sebastian Bach would probably be the sun around which everything orbited. His music emits light and warmth on a universal scale, and draws everything and everyone – composers, performers and listeners – ineluctably inwards. Opinions will vary as to which of his works is at the core of this gravitational force but many pianists will claim it is the Goldberg Variations. Glenn Gould, that enigmatic genius of the piano, was drawn back to the piece, recording it for a second time a quarter-century after his acclaimed 1955 interpretation. A generation later, the Variations have had the same effect on Angela Hewitt, one of the finest exponents of Bach’s music of our time. Her latest disc, released last Friday on the Hyperion label, is…