Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 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 (except at Christmas when it’s £1.50 and £3). 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.…

I’m going to help George Osborne. He may say he doesn’t need it. He’s doing fine himself. And, in truth, who am I to argue? That soft shoe shuffle he worked to dance away from tax credit cuts was a Strictly special. And the way he suddenly became the austerity chancellor without austerity – well, that was quite a play. Still, I’m going to help him. The house-building plan in Osborne’s spending review is a good one. A goal of 400,000 new homes by 2020 is not to be sniffed at. There are a range of needs factored in. Inevitably, this won’t be enough and cost will still stop a lot of people who could use a leg-up. But a mixture of putting off those who’d buy second homes for…

Nobody likes to think about getting old, but if you’re lucky it will happen to you. This Christmas one million older people in the UK will be lonely. Loneliness makes you ill and is as bad for your health as smoking. Loneliness is a deep, creeping sadness that fills you with dread when you wake up, knowing the day ahead, and the next, will be filled with your deafening silence. Trapped behind curtains, their old life swept away by age-related frailty, disability and dementia, older people in the UK have never been lonelier. For 20 years Food Train volunteers have been passionately committed to bringing friendship, fun and smiles into the lives of older people alongside a range of weekly support services; over 80,000 contacts in the last year adds…

We moved from Chicago to New York City when I was 16. My mother, she was an actress and she’d just got divorced from my stepfather. So that was a big transition for me. I was still quite shy. I was friendly but I wasn’t advanced. I couldn’t wear anything too risqué or my mom would knock my head off. She’s a Chicago Irish woman and she’s true-to-core. She kept a tight rein on me and my brother and sister. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when I was 13, which doctors discovered when they went in to investigate a dislodged benign tumour. Otherwise I was a healthy child and once I had my operation I didn’t have any Crohn’s issues until I was 19 and tried to go on…

VIEW OF BUILDING BY PAUL GORMAN Jeremy Deller: I really like this. I can totally understand it. This kind of work is the kind of work I would make if I was painting – something like a fantasy almost of a building, almost like he’s a frustrated architect. I like the simplicity of it, there’s a lot of charm about it. It’s quite heartfelt as well. You can see he really enjoyed making it. MEDICINE LEAVES BY ROBYN FORMAN James Brett: The aesthetic medicine of Robyn Forman soothes both doer and viewer. The making of the art, like the taking of the leaves, is a healer. How rare to see so much in just a little piece of paper. AMY WINEHOUSE BY BRYONY FRY Jeremy Deller: This is quite interesting.…

Bob and I are especially thankful this Christmas. We have got a new movie being made on our lives and a paperback version of A Gift From Bob has been released to cap an incredible year. This Christmas we will be celebrating with family and friends. But I will also reflect on how grateful we are for everything we’ve been given, meditate on those who are not as blessed as we are and take joy in giving to others – the true meaning of Christmas. I will never forget those brutally cold winters when I didn’t have enough money to keep the heating on or buy food. Before Bob came into my life eight years ago, the streets were my home. My thoughts this Christmas are with the thousands of…

If ever you’ve been sceptical about the power of the online kitty, you need only look to Belgium’s response to the recent national emergency. Resilient Belgians reacted by taking to Twitter and flooding the hashtag #BrusselsLockdown with funny cat pictures. Intended to drown out operational details about police raids that could possibly have helped the terror suspects, the cats were also a perfect retort, meeting terror with humour – and cuteness. This response was proof again that cats rule the internet. And so it is that I’m interviewing Indiana native Mike Bridavsky about his cat – one of the world’s most famous felines – and her new album. (Yes, you read that right. The cat has an album. It’s called Science & Magic, and it’s really rather good.) With her…

1. TAO TE CHING Lao Tzu I’m suspicious of people who claim vaguely to be “fascinated by eastern philosophy” but Tao Te Chingis packed with humour and practical wisdom. Best of all, it’s short. Just a few thoughts on how to live in sync with the rhythms of the universe, written by a Chinese mystic 2,500 years ago. 2. THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS Albert Camus A beautifully written (and pleasingly concise) essay on that most fundamental question: if life is meaningless, why live? Camus has the answers. 3. ORLANDO  Virginia Woolf Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the readers of this jaunty novella about an immortal transgender troubadour, inspired by the author’s love affair with garden designer Vita Sackville-West. 4. SELECTED POEMS  ee Cummings Free-wheeling, lyrical, and showing an enjoyable…

Laid bare It seems Dr Anderson, in her cloistered world [November 16-22], is missing one fact about our world when bemoaning the poor prices commanded by ‘sexualised pictures of naked… men’, to paraphrase! We live in a capitalist society, governed by supply and demand. Just like female footballers who complain they aren’t paid as much as men, to whom I say when you can fill stadia with tens of thousands, and subsequent TV audiences are in the millions, they’ll get paid as much. Then when artists’ work showing male nudes is in equal demand to the female equivalent, it will command higher prices. On her other point, some of Modigliani’s work is – subject matter aside – stunningly beautiful. I believe some of Freud’s art divides opinion and is not…

THE BIG ISSUE: BIGGER THAN 1D! Last week The Big Issue owned the news. We were trending higher than One Direction on Twitter – and it was thanks to coffee, love and art. We revealed in last week’s magazine our partnership with coffee start-up Change Please. It sees some of our vendors moving on from selling the magazine to training as baristas so they can sell coffees at the Change Please mobile vans across London. So many readers shared the good news that we felt a bit Kardashian. Such was our power to drive the agenda that Piers Morgan tweeted: “Now trending between Ed Miliband and The Big Issue. That feels ominous.” Charming! Millions of listeners heard Change Please founder Cemal Ezel across radio stations including BBC 5live. Millions more…

‘Humbug’ is afavoured Dickensian word. It gets thrown around a lot at Christmas. Especially around that much-loved Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol. That terrible humbug Ebenezer Scrooge, based on the man who started The Peabody Housing Trust and JP Morgan (at one time the richest investment bank in the world), really needed converting to goodness. He got his predictable comeuppance in the course of Dickens’ story of the fight between good and evil. Yet there was always something sad at the centre of Dickens. Something desperate and needy. He was appalling to his first wife, and at times to others of his nearest and dearest. His biography shows that he was damaged by his early years in a boot-blacking factory while his father and mother languished in debtors’ prison.…

The last time Bob featured on the cover of The Big Issue we were inundated by thousands of Bobites across the globe asking to buy copies of the magazine. There was so much interest, we decided to spread a bit of Bob-love, and invited readers to send us pictures of their own cats, either reading their copy of ‘The Bob Issue’ or just doing their own thing, which is of course what cats do best. We were amazed by the response – hundreds of people from all corners of the world emailed and tweeted us their paw-some photos. James mentioned our quest for photos of Bob fans on his Facebook page and on Twitter and we were swamped – it became planet of the cats! If you look very closely…

Richard Gere is one of the most famous faces in cinema but during the making of his latest film, Time Out of Mind, in which he plays George, a homeless man living on the streets of New York, he found himself being completely ignored by passers by. “I was invisible in New York,” he says. “Because I was this character, people decided within two blocks of seeing me that I was homeless, and didn’t look any further. No one made any eye contact. It was confusing and profound. If Richard Gere, who has money and fame – and in this situation everyone thinks kindly about me – if I can stand on a street corner and be treated like garbage? That’s a profound lesson for me personally but for an…

Netflix is already believed to be considering a second series of its Marvel show Jessica Jones. The streaming service already has Daredevil series two on its slate. Vin Diesel is planning not just a fourth Chronicles of Riddick film but also a spin-off TV show by the name of Merc City. He’ll likely turn his attention to them once he’s done with Fast & Furious 8. Fox appears to have pulled Fantastic Four 2 off its release schedule. The film had been earmarked for a June 2017 release. The title has quietly been removed from Fox’s list, however. The return of Luther for a two-part series four has been confirmed. The first episode will screen on BBC One on December 15 – the concluding part the week after, on the…

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales has returned to its wet and windy homeland after a tour of South America, which saw them perform in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Several players spent the beginning of the visit in a Welsh home from home – about 7,000 miles away, in fact – in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Y Wladfa, the Welsh settlement in Patagonia. Harpist Catrin Finch, conductor Grant Llewellyn and a dozen orchestral musicians spent time in the remote region of Argentina, undertaking outreach work in schools, with youth orchestras and choirs, and performing to people in deprived communities who hadn’t experienced classical music before. Joined by their orchestral colleagues, the full ensemble performed gala concerts in a wool warehouse in Trelew, converted into a…

Lars Mytting’s article on chopping wood [November 16-22] reminded me of the 1980s when, as a family, we took advantage of a local tree affected by Dutch elm disease. My husband chopped and dismembered the fallen tree while my two boys, just five and six years old at the time, helped to pile it onto a trailer to transport it approx one kilometre home. Of course, this took many trailer trips over many days – it was an ancient, large tree! We had always enjoyed open fires in our childhood homes and had built on a chimney to our home – that firewood lasted us many, many years after drying out, a welcome glow that somehow makes you feel warmer than any other form of heat. We did mix the…

Even as a kid I would hear harmonies. It is not something I learnt to do, it is just the way my brain works. I hear harmonies as soon as a song starts playing. It is really strange. I assumed that was how everybody heard music. I sang with choirs through school. I started out as a singer – not a very trained one but I used to sing jazz and write songs for the Oxford Revue at university. I was in a double act that performed character comedy songs, and used to hear the whole thing in my head – all the chords, the harmonies, everything, as I was writing it. My personal taste is largely classical music and non-choral, which is hard to harmonise. But I also love…

Every year, as the darkest and coldest days draw in, newspapers scream warnings over the state of our energy security. “WINTER BLACKOUT FEAR: UK at risk as National Grid suffers multiple plant breakdowns,” shouted the Daily Express at the start of this month. “Osborne’s green taxes blamed for power supplies falling to danger level,” thundered the Mail on Sunday. This month’s headlines came after National Grid was forced to spend more than £2.5m on back up supplies, when reserves ran low one day in early November. At no point did National Grid engineers warn we were at risk of blackouts. In the past decade nearly 500 articles have warned of the risks of blackouts, when in fact real power cuts have proved vanishingly rare. So are we really on the…

Big Issue vendors CathyJohnson and Lee Sims take centre stage in a major new documentary sharing the stories of people across the UK faced with difficult circumstances at Christmas. After featuring Cathy’s story in the magazine last year, filmmakers got in touch to document her life on the street. She became homeless in early 2014 after losing her job at a mortgage broker and decided to move from Cornwall to Oxford believing it would be easier to find work, but within days she was forced to sleep rough. “Selling the magazine helped me get enough money to get by,” she says. “Without The Big Issue I don’t know what I would have done, it’s really helped me get my confidence back.” Cathy met Lee who also was also a Big…

There are a number of special screenings of Hector around Britain to mark its release. These will involve director/writer Jake Gavin, a cast member and a local homeless charity representative talking about issues raised in and around the film. We have a pair of tickets for each of these for Big Issue readers. To claim your ticket, simply tweet @bigissue with #hectorscreening and the date and place of the screening of your choice. We’ll pick the first winners on December 5. December 7 Cineworld Haymarket, London This is the premiere and will be followed by a very special Q&A with director Jake Gavin, star Peter Mullan and The Big Issue’s chief John Bird. December 9 Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow Jake Gavin and Peter Mullan December 11 Cameo, Edinburgh December 12…