Innholdsfortegnelse for 01-04-19 i The Big Issue

01 See the ‘Sistine Chapel of the UK’ Following a two-year National Lottery-funded conservation project, the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich – with its 4,000 square metres of decorated interior, a masterpiece of English baroque art – is open to the public once again. Much cheaper than a flight to Rome. Old Royal Navy College, London, open daily; ornc.org 02 Celebrate the legacy of Stanley Kubrick Heeeere’s Stanley! Twenty years since his death, the 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining director’s life and work are remembered in London. The BFI is screening many of Kubrick’s classics as well as hosting an in-conversation event with Malcolm McDowell, while an exhibition will explore his fascination with design and architecture. Film season at BFI…

Last night around 5.30 I was just coming out of a train at Leicester Square. I was jostled and a gentleman and his wife kindly informed me that the guy with the baseball hat who was now across the street had lifted my wallet. Now I am 60 (it was actually my birthday) but I am a fit old bird. Plus I am a deputy principal and from New Zealand. Hence I was off like a rocket. “Hey you, you with the hat, stop immediately” and words to that effect. I caught him up and made my disappointment in his actions very clear. He of course denied and showed me his empty pockets etc. I was well aware he had passed it on and continued to berate. Meanwhile one of…

@mrwriterman79 Quick @BigIssue stop on the way in to work to pick up this collector’s edition @KenBoon79 Scoured it, cover to cover for Cilla, moved my hand and there she is. I’ve never bought it before, it’s actually a decent read and obviously for a good cause @doodleally Lunchtime treat. Thanks to Simon the vendor on Gentleman’s Walk in Norwich @BigIssue and art by @Coldwar_Steve @HenryDavies All of the work of @Coldwar_Steve is so perfect for the moment that I’m struggling to enjoy it in any other way than gallows humour. And isn’t that what art is meant to do? To challenge and evoke? @mckendrigo Loving Frau Merkel’s exasperated look and Boris running away from the mess he created as per usual @sherylstuff Two of my favorite things in one…

The Department for Education (DfE) has scrapped controversial “myth- busting” advice sent to children’s social workers, which campaigners said could put vulnerable youngsters in danger. The advice included suggesting that annual visits to foster carers could be reduced and that it is optional for a social worker to visit a child at home after they have run away. Existing statutory guidance says this is mandatory. Children’s rights charity Article 39 took legal action against the DfE when it refused to act on a letter from 50 organisations to children’s minister Nadhim Zahawi asking for parts of the document to be taken out of circulation. Pointing out that the advice conflicted with existing law and regulation, the charity’s lawyers said the DfE was creating space for councils to deprive children of…

NAME: Katie Sparkes PROJECT: Flamingo Chicks IN BRIEF: Katie left a career as a charity strategist for others to do it for herself. She launched Flamingo Chicks, a ballet school designed to be inclusive of disabled children, and ended up creating a generation of inclusivity advocates. More than 3,000 children attend classes each year and have as many opportunities for activism as they do pirouettes. It started in a local community hall, a frustrated response to the dearth of opportunities for disabled children. But Flamingo Chicks founder Katie Sparkes did not expect her inclusive ballet school to take her and a generation of child activists all over the world, from Ghana to the UN in New York City. When she was 22, the Bristolian left work as a BBC journalist…

I’m terrible at parties; I can’t ‘circulate’. It just seems so rude to change conversational groups: you must either slope off hoping no-one will notice, which is unlikely, or make an excuse – and mine always come out sounding like, ‘I’ve just seen someone more interesting than you, so am off to talk with them instead’. So I normally end up stuck talking to the dullest person at the party, the socially more able people (which is everyone else) having successfully ‘circulated’ away. Oh, hang on – maybe that means I am the dullest person at the party. So, I’m going to let you in on a secret of mine. Call it Carter’s First Law of Social Awkwardness. It’s got me through many potentially disastrous situations of this sort, and…

The Big Issue: Dumbo is your first Hollywood film. Not bad going, right? Sharon Rooney: I know! How did that happen? But actually, I got it like any other job. I went in for meetings, then at the last stage got to meet Tim. At that point, I was like: I’ve won! I’ve met Tim Burton. You sing the song from the original, Baby Mine. Were you nervous about covering such an iconic song? Yes, and that song means a lot to me. I used to sing it with my gran and she’s not here any more. I was thinking about her a lot. We were very close. I don’t know if it’s a Scottish thing, but my gran was like another mum. It’s nice, but I was thinking: I…

Fun fact – according to evidence gathered by researchers at music company Ostereo, the length of the average Number One song in the UK has shrunk by almost a fifth over the past two decades. Back in the patient old days of 1998, the average UK number one was four minutes and 16 seconds long. In antsy young 2019, the average is currently three minutes and three seconds – with the trend travelling in such a direction as to suggest hits will only get shorter yet. What’s to blame? Spotify, obviously (it’s always Spotify’s fault). Experts reckon it’s algorithms used by the Swedish streaming giant and other platforms that are pushing producers to take scissors to their songs. Anglo-American hitmaker of Uptown Funk fame Mark Ronson more or less confirmed…

A hand up, not a handout... Our sellers BUY every copy of the magazine for £1.25 and sell it for £2.50. 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.…

THIS WEEK WE ASKED YOU... Buddy Holly is the latest dead star to get the hologram tour treatment. If you could bring one music great back for a live show (in person, not a hologram), who would it be? @IntentionalG Bowie @gfpaterson Darby Crash of the Germs. That would be interesting. @ResonanceFM Phil Ochs, obviously. @2gtaAvoice4All I have a feeling I might get quite a bit of backlash over this choice, so I’m prepared!! But @RIPMaggieT or lol I’d quite happily settle for my idol @amywinehouse @GraemeKing1 There are many who could make the short list but if I had to pick one it would be Jimi Hendrix…

RE: WHY I THINK DEMENTIA IS A GIFT, MARCH 18-24 Absolutely love the piece by Wendy Mitchell in the Big Issue on how dementia underlined to her the benefits of living in the here and now not stressing about the future or dwelling on the past. Pippa Kelly I know too many people who have suffered with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease and my dad lived very much for the day... by the day. I can imagine that’s the best way to live through this disease. It’s the worst but people find courage to fight it! Adele Dunn…

Cut into the hills in south China, about 2,000km from Beijing, is the world’s largest telescope. It’s not one of those telescopes that you look through, the sort that non-science minds like mine think of as telescopes. It’s a radio telescope. Effectively it’s a massive dish (alright, cosmos lovers, there is unquestionably a more informed way to describe it, but I’m hardly Carl Sagan). It’s 500 metres in diameter. That’s very, very big. It’s sitting there, ready to move a little to focus better, to pick up radio signals, signs from deep space, both of the origins of our universe and, more interestingly, really, of other life. So far, it’s picked up evidence of a few new pulsars. And after I googled pulsars I felt that, frankly, our big Chinese…

Wiltshire’s HMP Erlestoke hosted its third Penned Up festival last month. Held over two weeks, it featured numerous guest speakers from the world of literature offering inspiration, knowledge and creativity to the inmates, including Big Issue founder John Bird, there to talk about how he went from homelessness to prison to the House of Lords. I was there to report on the talk and along with the other men in the room, I listened intently as Lord Bird explained how he hadn’t even picked up a book until a prison officer handed him one when he was 15 years old. That prison officer mentored him and eventually taught him to read and write, opening a whole new world of opportunities. It lit the fire for a lifelong love affair with…

I spent a lot of last year singing the praises of William Boyle, the American author who was my top writerly discovery of 2018. He published two sublime, loosely interconnected novels, Gravesend and The Lonely Witness, set in the same unfashionable end of Brooklyn, and they were masterclasses in modern noir, beautifully crafted books that took the reader to unexpected places around the edges of the crime genre. And now we have his latest offering, A Friend Is A Gift You Give Yourself , and it’s even better. My proof copy of the novel comes with the elevator pitch across the top: ‘Thelma & Louise meets Goodfellas’, and while that of course sounds utterly terrific, in truth A Friend… is an even more rounded and accomplished piece of writing than…

1851. A frontier town in the gold rush. After amputating a man’s arm, a surgeon massages his achy hands, fingers stiff from sawing through all that bone. It’s details like this that make this Western such a pleasure. The Sisters Brothers is the French director of Un Prophète Jacques Audiard’s first film in English, adapting a novel by Patrick deWitt, and the acting is off the scale. John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters, hired killers in the pay of a wily old businessman called the Commodore (Rutger Hauer, though sadly we don’t get much of him). Reilly’s Eli is the older brother, podgier, softer and suffering from killing fatigue. It’s time to call it a day, he tells his brother Charlie (Phoenix), quit while…

@M_Arr_J A profile piece on Michael (our friend & Big Issue seller @ Temple Meads) in a recent issue of the magazine he sells. Sounds like he’s had a rough time but trying to make a go of it – lovely chap @BigIssue glad he’s doing well @Honest_Sy1 The whole point of controlling immigration is letting in what we need. However, being employed in THE worst industry (care work), we need a little scarcity to drive up wages. We’ve been on the same pathetic hourly rate for decades. Immigration has partly been responsible.…

While the House of Commons was resolving itself to remain unresolved, I attended an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Poetry event. Surely we should have been in one of the galleries of the chamber, following all of the twists and turns of a political development that was inevitably divisive and unresolvable? You can’t have a vast, vast minority of voters reject the results of a referendum and still not be thrown into a damaging pit of anger and conflict. The goose was cooked, and it remains cooked. What will come out of it all? Certainly in Committee Room One, where about 70 people met (members of the public, a few from Parliament, poets and publishers), Brexit was not brought up. I note that the poet that drew me into considering myself…

“I see people who suffer from depression, who see a deeper meaning in life, who often help others with emotional pain and who can express themselves in intuitive and creative ways as dark angels,” says regular Street Art contributor Christie of her latest oil on canvas portrait, of her son. “I often feel alone with the battle with depression as each person’s mental illness is different,” she says. “Painting is my medication. I feel that when I am depressed, it is like my mind is stuck in a way of thinking. Painting is a way of shifting my perception, and if anything can shift my perception I can find my way out of depression. When I paint portraits of people, they become an expression of part of my personality.” Street…

01 Gnomon by Nick Harkaway A disturbingly credible extrapolation of modern Britain’s obsession with surveillance and the shifting balance between privacy and convenience, this multi-layered, time-bending tale is so much more than it seems. 02 Rosewater by Tade Thompson Visions of the future have been dominated by Anglo-Saxon ideas, but this novel is surfing the crest of new Afrofuturism with style. Set in Nigeria, it’s a game-changing tale of aliens and mycology that drags you in with its rich texture. A fresh take on the world of tomorrow. 03 Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman This ostensible romp through a phantasmagorical mirror of London’s tube system, peopled with angels and demons, also drips with dark hints that the protagonist is in the grips of a delusion. A subtle but powerful allusion to…

I turn 44 in a couple of weeks. There is no getting away from it, I am totally middle-aged. Luckily, I still dress like a man half my age and retain a defiantly juvenile personality. Some people might say clinging to my youth in this way only makes a bad situation worse. But to those people I say: your mum makes a bad situation worse. One symptom of the ageing process that I am unable to defy is a tendency to fall asleep all the time. If I sit down anywhere even remotely comfy for more than five minutes, I am gone. Head rolled back, tongue hanging out the side of my mouth, dribble running down my chin, emitting a grotesque, asthmatic rumble that scares the kids. Only, to be…

The Clock, High Street, Bangor, North Wales Monday-Friday, 9am-midday About 20 years ago I went and lived in the woods. I had to because I didn’t have no money or anything. I spent the next five years being homeless. I started off in a tent but it got too cold so I built a shelter. All you’ve got to do is lean a few trees together, it weren’t really hard. I was begging in Bangor, but I also poached chickens and fish. Only for the belly, not for monetary gain. One day when I was begging, one of the lads selling The Big Issue at the time said, “Why don’t you give it a go?”. My first day selling was frightening. I’d spent the last five years living in the…