Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/10/2018 i The Big Issue

Much-loved Big Issue vendor Fabian Bayet has been remembered in the town where he sold the magazine for 25 years – with a plaque and a joke book. Belgian-born Fabian, known as Belgium the Waffle for his chatty demeanour, had become a fixture of Stony Stratford High Street before he died in July aged 48. But his contribution to the local community has not been forgotten and campaigners from local homelessness charity The Bus Shelter MK have installed a framed sketch of Fabian on the high street to pay tribute. The drawing was unveiled on December 1 alongside a joke book written by homeless people, titled It’s No Joke, that has been dedicated to Fabian. “Fabian was very loved, said Lisa McDonnell, a Bus Shelter MK volunteer. “Stony Stratford is…

Our winner Lucy, from Ware in Hertfordshire, says she was “amazed” when she heard that she’d won, and that people across the UK will be seeing her drawing on the cover of The Big Issue. “I feel gobsmacked, amazed and very happy. When Mum told me the theme was ‘welcome’ I thought about the message welcome home. I wasn’t sure how to make it Christmassy, so I looked through old Christmas cards and saw the front door with a wreath hanging on it. “I’d like to put across the message that nobody should be homeless, but especially not at Christmas time, which is meant to be a happy time. That’s why I crossed out the ‘less’ – because everyone should be able to feel like they have a home. “It…

"THERE SHOULD BE MEALBANKS NOT JUST FOODBANKS" I'm most concerned for families in poverty in London. Not all children are getting a hot meal while they are out of school. They buy chicken and chips, which causes obesity and malnutrition. At school, they get a variety of meals. They can't at home. Kids go hungry when not in school, I've seen this. Foodbanks are wonderful but the pressure on them is more and more, but they can't provide all the essential ingredients. You can only use the foodbank once every two weeks, but within a week you run out of food. It would be a better system to have lunch vouchers for families, ones you could use in restaurants. You could get a hot lunch – they have surplus food…

AGE 0-5 Moon: Night-time around the world (Little Tiger Kids, £7.99) Britta Teckentrup and Patricia Hegarty If the great double whammy of early read-along picture books is a cry of ‘again again!’, married to enough space to talk with eager minds about the subjects that come up, then this book is special manna. As the moon waxes and wanes we skip lightly across the globe, from penguins up to puffins through to parrots and creatures of the deep. Rendered with truly stunning imagery by Teckentrup and delicately told by Hegarty, this book will encourage a joy in the world around and beyond. And it is genuinely full of wonder. As an adult you’ll look forward to reading this again and again! Dragon Post (Walker Books, £10.99) Emma Yarlett One day…

I always used to think that turbo-capitalism’s end game would be homogenisation of everything. Every little company would be swallowed up by one massive one. Every nation swallowed up into a superstate. Everyone from all over the country eventually doing all their shopping in one gigantic Tesco in Birmingham. All of us in onesies at all times. But I was wrong. In fact, the opposite has happened and now all of us can now indulge even our most obscure tastes via bespoke consumerism. For instance, as a non-drinker, I have the choice of several high-quality non-alcoholic online shops from which to buy my joyless, pretend beers – which I sip at home in my slippers, watching TV and reminiscing about how great the Nineties were when I had hair and…

A hand up, not a handout... At Christmas our sellers BUY every copy of the magazine for £1.50 and sell it for £3. 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. Poverty is indiscriminate… That is why we provide ANYONE whose life is blighted by poverty with the opportunity to earn a LEGITIMATE income. The right to citizenship… The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers tackle social and financial exclusion. Prevention… Big Issue Invest offers backing and investments to social enterprises, charities and businesses which deliver social value to communities.…

Look outside the ‘rotten barrel’ I read your piece on the UN interim report on poverty in the UK and then the alarming article on e-waste [Special Report/Tech, November 26-December 2], an issue of which I was completely ignorant. I guess, like many of your readers, I wondered if there was any real hope of turning any or all of this around. The one thing that really stands out from so much of Big Issue coverage for me is that trying to change traditional structures, whether financial, social or political, for the better is unlikely to succeed, but building new structures outside the ‘rotten barrel’ gives far more reason for optimism. John Chapman, email Vendor’s a hero Yesterday I witnessed a vendor in Morningside try to stop a shoplifter leave…

There is a fantastic, but little-known Irish film called Silence . In it, a man travels back home from Europe to rural Donegal in an attempt to record silence. His works as an audio recordist, so this is not as bizarre as it appears. He is constantly thwarted as he tries to find some part of increasingly remote countryside that isn’t impacted by some manmade sound. Given that the film is Irish, it is really a rumination on identity, land, progress and death. It’s very slow. You should watch it. You’re ahead of me here… I was thinking about it this week as our national Brexit psychosis gripped further. Just how far would you have to escape to be beyond any mention or echo of Brexit? Top…

I was a very vivacious teenager, even a bit naughty, always willing to crack a joke and have a laugh. As they say where I come from, I was... “always up to something”. When I lost my sight [aged 12 following a football accident, having already been born with glaucoma] I cried, but only for a short while. I then set aside any form of self-pity and decided I needed to be positive and optimistic about life, finding ways to explore it. This did not affect in any way my musical training. People may perceive it as my main issue, but it never was and never is. I would not say I had any teenage ‘angst’. But I was restless for sure and I was always curious about everything, as…

Often left out of the conversation are the people who come through the doors. We wanted to find out the reality of who they were. We asked Suzanne Hudson, who volunteers at a church-run foodbank in Newcastle, to tell us who visited on one Friday morning, November 23. "Our foodbank is situated in the Elim Church and supplies areas such as Heaton, Byker and Walker and is open twice a week. We try and spend time chatting to them while their food is being packed, and they are given a hot drink, cake and biscuit, or if they obviously haven’t eaten recently, a Pot Noodle. We have such a wide range of people: ⚫ An elderly asylum seeker from Afghanistan with her daughter who spoke for her, as the benefits…

CHRISTMAS PAST While modern Yuletides differ in many ways to a Dickensian Christmas – one wonders what Charles would make of a plastic excreting unicorn, this year’s ‘must-have’ toy, yours for just under £50 – A Christmas Carol’s message of seasonal goodwill remains as evergreen as a window-shop tree. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly man who changes his ways after visits from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come, was adapted for the stage soon after its first publication in 1843. It has continued to be reworked for theatres and screen and has inspired several operatic works, including chamber opera The Passion of Scrooge (or A Christmas Carol) (1998) by Jon Deak, A Christmas Carol (1978-1979) by Thea Musgrave and A…

This is a personal top five informed entirely by my own taste and prejudice. That’s the beauty of podcasts, there’s something out there for everyone. Incidentally, I was not allowed to pick my own podcast Top Flight Time Machine so I am mentioning it here again instead. It really is first class. 01 Desert Island Discs The BBC have archived every single one of these beauties since 1942. My all-time favourite is Kenneth Williams talking to Michael Parkinson in 1987. 02 Confectionery Cast Mark Machado and Andre Walker talk about their favourite chocolate bars with a different guest every week. Turns out newsagent confectionery is the perfect springboard for childhood reminiscences and philosophical reflections. 03 Clinton Baptiste Clinton Baptiste is the psychic character originally played by comedy-behemoth Alex Lowe in…

01 My sweet home Chicago is an interesting city, we offer a variety of different types of entertainment. We have some good food, we have a lot of museums, we have a lot of theatres and there is the Magnificent Mile. That’s where a lot of people from all over the world go shopping because you have all the brand name stores. 02 The best park They host a lot of events in Millennium Park and most of them are free. For instance, during the summer they have the Blues Festival, the Jazz Festival and a lot of outdoor entertainment. The Bean [a public sculpture designed by British artist Sir Anish Kapoor] is right across the street from Millennium Park. Its official name is Cloud Gate, we just call it…

A year of disruption, the worst punctuality figures in a decade and a 3.1 per cent rise in fares... so what’s the one thing you would do to solve the nation’s rail crisis? I’d say nationalise it but this government couldn’t get a coin flip right. Adam Richard Corrigan, Facebook Get someone who is an expert to be in charge, give them the power to make long-term changes. Instead of asking people who only see a small part of the puzzle and short-termism. @BestyMike, Twitter Let everyone work from home. Ban offices. Starve the railway fatcats. Rhiannon Moorhouse, Facebook Nationalise them immediately to stop the fatcats in one fell swoop. All the shareholders should have been made to realise they would not be paid until the infrastructure was put right!…

A Big Issue vendor who sells the magazine outside a theatre has fnally been given the chance to get in on the act himself. Clive, 55, requested to sell The Big Issue outside The Theatre Royal in Plymouth after getting tickets to watch a production of In My Dreams I Dream I’m Dreaming in 2016. Since then, the veteran seller and his dog Geezer have become community favourites and he has got involved in the theatre’s Our Space programme. The initiative uses theatre skills classes to build confidence for adults with multiple and complex needs. Now, ever-popular Clive has turned those skills into a starring role in Words Like Kites. The production at The Clipper, a former pub turned community space, saw 15 people offer emotional, heartwrenching stories that the…

Visiting the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square is my idea of a great holiday, a great escape, a recuperation, for rest and relaxation. A place for me to forget Brexit, happening half a mile away in Parliament, and whatever else I want to forget. Without forgetting, we cannot survive as people. We cannot always remember the troubling things because that’s where health and wellbeing goes out the window. Anxiety, among other things, is not being able to forget the grim and troubling; and forever always living the worst bits of life – which is the crap. I’ve known the National Gallery as a place to use since 1961, aged 15. Back then I used it as a place to have a wash in the lavatories after sleeping rough around Trafalgar…

It’s only a door, to begin with. There’s no doubt whatever about that. But the more you look, the more you’re drawn in. It’s a brightly coloured, simple opening to everything. Since 2013 we’ve run the annual competition to have under-13s design one of The Big Issue Christmas covers. And each year the response knocks us sideways. It starts as a small trickle of envelopes and then becomes a glorious paper tsunami. Each of the 1,100-plus entries from right across Britain has been lovingly crafted, with colouring pens and glitter and pencils and bits of felt and boundless, unquenchable imagination and enthusiasm. Increasingly letters arrive from teachers and youth leaders explaining how the creation became a class activity that sparked debate about the realities of Christmas for people who go…

PORTAL BY MARY VALLELY “Art helps with my depression,” says Mary. “I have a history of homelessness and use day centres to access art materials. Without these I would be unable to create my work. I love using colour; it helps my mood; the sadder I am the more colour comes out; the pain becomes beautiful.” Street Art is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com At least half the proft goes to the artist.…

We can all agree it’s the most wonderful time of the year. But when it comes to the movies that get dusted off in December for audiences in search of seasonal cheer, it increasingly feels like we’re experiencing a yule logjam. This week sees the umpteenth cinema run-out for It’s A Wonderful Life, a reliable cockle-warmer that is now 72 years old, while modern favourites Die Hard and Home Alone have also recently been given the rerelease treatment. Surely it’s time to cast the net a little wider? There must be some other films – apart from the dreaded Nativity franchise – that deserve some time in the snowy spotlight? Here are a few suggestions to update the Christmas canon. ANNA AND THE APOCALYPSE (2018) Good news! There’s…

Wimbledon, outside station Mon-Sat, 8.30am-3pm and occasionally Sunday Being homeless and in a wheelchair you feel completely vulnerable. It meant I never used to feel able to get out of my chair unless I had four walls around me and a door because I knew that somebody would think they were a joker and I’d wake up with no chair in the morning. So you don’t relax. You don’t sleep. That was how I lived on and off for two years. The worst thing about being on the streets is not knowing where you’re going to sleep at night and not having a base to go back to. I had a motorbike accident back in 1986 when I was still working. I had nine years of hospitalisation but when I…