Innholdsfortegnelse for December 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.…

Don’t panic. A few weeks ago a friend told me a story. His grandmother was very encouraging. If she was shown a picture drawn by talented offspring or read a piece of writing they had scribbled she’d tell them how great it was. “You should send that in,” she’d say. It became a familiar phrase. She didn’t say where it should be sent or what might happen to it. Just that it should be sent in. This is enough to make your heart sing. Such faith! That there is a knowledge-pool somewhere that will accept all contributions and make a respected value judgment, and that a piece of childish work will be met with unquestioned gratitude. The knowledge-pool doesn’t exist. Oh that it did. But the desire to send it…

Richard Lindzen’s article [‘Why the climate hysteria?’ November 16-22] contains a series of grossly misleading statements, taken straight from the climate deniers’ playbook. He claims that predictions of warming have got it wrong, ignoring the fact that 2015 is on track to smash all records as the hottest year. He says warming is beneficial, ignoring the wildfires and other extreme weather events increasing in frequency. He tries to blame the sun, ignoring the fact solar output has been declining over the past 60 years, sunspot cycles aside. He uses past climate variation to mislead your readers. The term “climate optimum” means a hot period, not a good one as he sneakily implies. The biggest ever mass extinction on Earth was associated with, and probably caused by, extreme heat and CO2…

What are my preoccupations at 16? Trying to have sex, obviously. And listening to lots of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Art Blakey. My friends and I used to sit up all night listening to jazz, then drag ourselves to school the next day. My mother was a primary school teacher but school didn’t work well for me. I was never very academic and I was naturally very anti-authority. The usual way to teach children is to say, okay we’re going to study the history of the civil war and you have to learn these names and dates and then we’ll test you on it. It bores children silly. We have to give children the power that comes from self-belief. We have to encourage them to think for themselves, not…

EVIL QUEEN BY CÔME GRAHAM “I experienced homelessness in the past but now I’m living in a hostel and looking for a job,” says 23-year-old Côme from Poland. “This is a modern take on the character of The Evil Queen from Snow White. It’s inspired by the television show Once Upon a Time and its star, the actress Lana Parrilla.” FISHES BY ANONYMOUS This artist, who prefers to remain anonymous and describes herself as “a lone wolf”, started painting after attending art classes at West London homeless charity the 240 Project. “My work comes straight out of my head,” she says. “It’s happy and sad. At the end of the day, how you feel comes out on the paper, in the colours and the shapes. I get inspired by people…

RYAN GILMORE (13) from Mrs MacAllister’s class at Perth Academy ALINA CALLENDER (8) from Hounslow And here are a few other entries we thought merited special mention. Jamie Owen (12), South Nutfield, Surrey, painted a snowman and his four-legged friend, with a smiling star on top of the tree. George Parker (13), Nottingham, shows Santa’s sleigh and reindeers flying across a night-time cityscape with the moon in the background. Malaika Islam (11) made us laugh with her snowpeople being held up by a pesky rabbit, who’s melting them with a hairdryer to nick their carrot noses. Mrs Snow-woman says: “It’s not worth it Roy! Let’s just give him our noses and let him go!!!” We’ve no idea what’s going on in this cover from Lauren Vine (13), from Bristol, but…

£15 could give a young person a hot meal, a warm, safe bed and someone to talk to. £50 could provide someone with clean clothes, a warm, safe bed and essential health checks. £100 could provide a warm, safe bed over Christmas, plus the professional support these young people need to turn their lives around. Donate to Centrepoint today at centrepoint.org.uk/donate  or call us on 0800 138 3249…

1. ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET Judy Blume Blume is the master of capturing adolescence in all its undignified glory, and Margaret is one of her most endearing creations. All the most vital teenage firsts are covered here, from Margaret’s first bra and first period, to her inevitably awkward first kiss. 2. MATILDA Roald Dahl I think everyone has a favourite Roald Dahl book and as a lifelong bookworm, mine has got to be Matilda. The triumphant ending has me cheering every single time. 3. THE OUTSIDERS SE Hinton One of the first books written about teenagers, for teenagers. Narrated by 14 year-old Ponyboy, its frank and shocking depiction of the conflict between two warring gangs, the greasers and the socs, still packs a massive punch more than…

Nude not crude I found Dr Victoria Anderson’s article about nude paintings [November 16-22] interesting as I have four nude pictures hanging in my house. They are my choice and I purchased them because I liked them rather than any monetary value – rather like any other ‘man’ in the street except I’m not a man! I certainly don’t regard them as pornography. I abhor most kinds of pornography but am still able to admire the female form when portrayed artistically. For me, the female form is much more pleasing than the male to hang on the wall even though I am a happily married lady in her 50s. My pictures do not represent the emancipation of women as far as I’m concerned and I can’t imagine anyone gasping with…

DISCERNING READERS... Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is clearly delighted to have picked up her copy of The Big Issue at an SNP event in Irvine. Hope you’re taking notes from our Dickensian guide to austerity in the 21st century, First Minister. And the Exeter Chiefs can be seen devouring their Big Issues in the dressing room. Even rugged rugby players can’t get enough of Street Cat Bob – like our cover star they’re having a great 2015-16 season too. Good sports! NET GAIN In other sporting news… Northern Ireland Street Soccer scored £10,000 of funds to start a soccer academy. The cash comes at the end of a spectacular year, with five of its eight-strong 2015 Homeless World Cup team now in full-time paid work. The previous year’s HWC…

Andrew Jaspan, former editor of The Observer, onetime publisher of The Big Issue, erstwhile editor of the Scottish Sunday Herald, and former editor-in-chief of Australian newspaper The Age, sits opposite me in a hotel lobby in London’s Charing Cross. He is here to talk to me about the 45 million – I hope I do not exaggerate – people who each month visit or use The Conversation; and he explains about this digital behemoth. After he left The Age in Australia, where he has now lived for 11 years, he got a desk at Melbourne University and fell into discussion with some of the brightest people on the campus. Scientists of the environment, technology and a number of the other disciplines represented at the university. He asked them what they…

Very few people can be unaware that Prince William is a father of two young children. Baby George turned two in July, while his sister Charlotte is now seven months old. And as William reveals in our exclusive interview, getting a full night’s sleep is a luxury, even if you’re second in line to the British throne. Yet the Duke of Cambridge remains a busy man. He works as a full-time pilot for the East Anglian Air Ambulance, based at Cambridge Airport. He also keeps on top of a wide array of royal duties and charitable work, including his role as patron of Centrepoint, the country’s leading charity for homeless young people. Significantly, this was the first patronage he chose, back in 2005, and it was a cause very dear…

Our kids’ Christmas cover competition delivered hundreds and hundreds of wonderful entries. One set particularly stood out, and not only because of the great images. They were sent in by kids living in a homeless hostel in Wales. Four children – five-year-olds Kian Campbell and Nadia Mohamed; Maison Campbell John, six, and Olivia Mohamed, 10 – who are in the family hostel run by Cadwyn Housing Association created designs and decided to send them in. Their entries illustrate what Christmas means to them, including a smiling Santa Claus sitting at home, a happy snowman in a wintry setting and a robin redbreast. “It’s important that we create a sense of normality for the children, who are going through a difficult time,” said Kerry Rowlands, assistant manager at the hostel. “Many…

I’ll always be grateful to Jacques Papier. For one memorable week my eight-year-old son and I floated off in a bubble every bedtime, taking turns to read aloud this tale of a unique friendship, the air around us rich with the intoxicating language of children’s dreams and flights of imagination. What a pleasure for me, to make vivid again those snapshot childhood memories – drawing ‘endless maps’, carving initials into trees, making up ‘songs about birds flying backwards, about notes lost in bottles, about caterpillars pining to be butterflies’ – that are still fresh for my son but bleached out long ago for me. I felt the novel starting to do a number on me but wondered if an eight-year-old could appreciate the emotional significance of what was happening. After…

1. OUNCE, DICE, TRICE Alastair Reid; drawings by Ben Shahn A visit to a glorious circus – where words dance, fly, juggle and tumble; a celebration of the wildness and wonder of language at play. 2. FREDERICK Leo Lionni A timeless fable about the great importance of those who – while seeming idle – are observing the world closely, then giving it back to us as poetry. 3. THE RED SHOE Ursula Dubosarsky An eerie modern fairytale in which a family of three sisters watch – and often misunderstand – the strange goings-on between the adults in their life. Viewed through the eyes of six-year-old Matilda, this haunting story reminds us how differently the young see the world unfolding around them. 4. STOP THE TRAIN Geraldine McCaughrean One of the…

Downton Abbey [right] has its finale on Christmas Day. Are you happy people will stop asking you all the time what’s going to happen next? I suppose I am, yes. But I never want to appear ungrateful for the show. It’s so easy to take for granted but it would be totally unnatural for me not to want to go on and play other characters and do other things. It’s nice to talk about something else. Even if it’s swinging? Your new film, Swung , is set in the world of the Glasgow swinging scene. I’ve lived in Glasgow for several years and had no idea… I have to admit, nor had I. Glasgow’s opened up a bit, has it? Is this the reality of…

So, we learn that E.coli bacteria have broken through the last barrier separating our society from the end of modern medicine, potentially [November 23-29]. Will this be the moment when we start to take the antibiotics crisis seriously? When it’s almost too late? This is more than just a disaster-in-waiting for the health of every one of us. It serves as an indictment of our culture’s ruling principles. For this could only happen in a culture that prizes individual choice above all and that refuses to put the common good above the whims of time-pressed doctors employing antibiotics as placebos, patients who as consumers demand them, and the short-termist practices of industrialised farming. We need to recalibrate our culture and reintroduce the balance that comes from giving due weight to…

I’ve played since I was about eight. My highest-ever score is 600, I’ve had 500s 46 times, my average is 411 – put that in! I have spreadsheets and keep a graph of every score. There’s no point in me playing someone who plays twice a year, it would be a massacre. I’ve played Johnny Maitland, he’s a proper Scrabble player. He beat me two games to one. I almost solely play against my wife. We have had 1,050 games. My current all-time average is about 412, my recent is 425; she averages 370 because she doesn’t care about building averages. We have a range of different sized sets. We live stressful lives and sometimes, like many men, I can’t do conversation. We’ll go out for dinner and play Scrabble…

James Campbell has been sleeping rough in Edinburgh since May when he left his home in Kettering to look for work. He has kept a diary of his experiences. This is his fourth chapter published exclusively in The Big Issue… My friend Nacho has gone home to Spain and once again I am alone. Nacho has been my mate ever since I arrived in Edinburgh. We met when I was hanging round the train station wondering what the fuck to do with myself. Nacho had arrived a few days before, having flown in from Spain. He quickly sussed where to go and get blankets, food, cover from the elements. Despite the language barrier – Nacho’s limited English (although I must say it vastly improved when talking to nice-looking female tourists)…

We asked the kids of Britain to draw our Christmas cover and you answered us in your thousands! We received a record number of entries for this year’s Big Issue Cover Competition – more than 1,200 – so choosing just one winner was an almost impossible task. From snowmen to penguins, Santa to the Nativity, we examined every single one and we want to thank all the talented youngsters who took part. But we had to pick just one winner, and we’re delighted to announce that this year’s cover is designed by 11-year-old Millie Bevan, from Kent. “I’m very excited!” she said when she heard the news, and when she realised that people will see her drawing all over Britain, she added: “That’s so cool!” Millie’s picture shows a troupe…

After four years of conflict in Syria, more than 10,000 children have been killed and two million others have fled the country. An estimated 80,000 people live in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, just seven miles from the Syrian border. Two years ago Save the Children began teaching photography skills to some of the teenage refugees so they could document their daily lives. My Own Account is their photographic memoir, capturing the experience of a childhood lived in extraordinary circumstances. To see more pictures visit their blog insidezaatari.tumblr.com  or follow @insidezaatari on Instagram…

1. JUNK Melvin Burgess Teen pregnancy, young love, heroin, domestic abuse. This has all the elements for a bad episode of EastEnders. But Junk actually has a perfect sense of time and place, characters who feel real and it may just be the best YA book ever… 2. THE SECRET DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE, AGED 13 3 / 4 Sue Townsend Adrian Mole is about a year older than me. As a tween, reading this was a slightly scary glance into my future. Now it’s full of Thatcher, miners’ strikes, The Falklands War and a hundred other chunks of ’80s nostalgia. 3. THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME Mark Haddon Ahh, the good old days when kids’ book charts weren’t owned by…

The Doctor Who Christmas special now has its title. The Yuletide episode will go by the name of The Husbands of River Song. There’s been a bit of chatter about a third Anchorman film. Director Adam McKay noted it’d be at least 10 years off – and would see Ron Burgundy in the land of bloggers. The latest draft script for Predator 4 has been completed. Writer Fred Dekker broke the news on Facebook, and the plan is for Shane Black to direct the film. Assuming Hollywood bosses like the new script. Marvel’s Doctor Strange film is currently being made – but it turns out that Neil Gaiman and director Guillermo del Toro had previously pitched a version of it. Marvel, though, knocked back their idea. Gremlins 3 won’t be…

If A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s final album, as singer Chris Martin has implied, then it’s an atypical one: kaleidoscopically colourful, celebratory to the point of annoyance, so free from inter-band tensions that it’ll be promoted with an enormous stadium tour. Imagine the direct inverse of ABBA’s The Visitors – right down to Martin getting along famously with ex-wife (Gwyneth Paltrow guests on ode to post conscious-uncoupling cordiality Everglow) – and you get the basic spirit. The four-piece have good reason to sound cheerful. Five million sales of 2014’s subtly promoted Ghost Stories proved Coldplay maintain remarkable commercial traction even as each new album leads further from Yellow and their maudlin anthemry of old. In the case of seventh album A Head Full of Dreams, that’s very far…