Innholdsfortegnelse for 27-05-19 i The Big Issue

@akitdds One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to buy The Big Issue every week and I have been. Although I missed one, and that was the one I got a letter published in ironically enough. Anyway, I must say I really enjoy reading The Big Issue, and every week I will read something in it that breaks my heart, but also something that will fill me with joy and inspiration. I often end up with tears in my eyes after reading, but in a really good way!! Great articles, not too lengthy. I really enjoy ‘Letter to my younger self’ a feature where well-known people write what they’d say to their younger selves, it’s always very interesting. £2.50. Well spent. Better than a coffee! Have a chat…

It’s the same instant calm each time I go through the doors. More immediate than a glass of white wine on an empty stomach, better than a Xanax. But it’s deeper than that, it’s a feeling of safety that settles softly inside me. I’m talking about walking into a library. My whole life, whatever has been happening, wherever I’ve been in the world, I’ve walked into a library and, at least for that moment, everything has been OK. Part of writing Lowborn is exploring what factors enable a child with a background like mine to survive, perhaps even thrive, in adulthood. For me, one of the most essential factors was libraries. When I was little and we shared a room in B&Bs, my single-parent mum, living on benefits, had somewhere…

When I was 16, it was kind of a fun time to grow up in LA. There was a lot happening in the clubs – there were punk rockers, pop lockers, breakdancers, people who were rockabilly and new wavers. Everyone was criss-crossing over each other. I bounced around all those scenes. Even though I was in a wild world and there were a lot of people experimenting with a lot of things, I don’t have any great regret about my behaviour as a young person. I was a real prude. When I was really young, I wanted to be a nun. I had good values about telling the truth and being a good person. I did lose a lot of friends to drugs. I had already lost people by the…

In a world of fake news and misinformation, there are scarcely any more confusing statistics trumpeted by politicians than those relating to poverty. That’s because, currently, there is no one universally agreed measure of poverty in the UK. To fix that, the DWP will work with the Social Metrics Commission – an independent, non-partisan group set up to introduce a new poverty measure – to develop the model they outlined in 2018. The single measure will take into account rough sleepers for the first time as well as factors that impact on household earnings like rent or mortgage payments, childcare and costs of disability, and liquid assets like stocks and shares. The Big Issue is also working through Parliament to lift people out of poverty. The magazine’s founder and crossbench…

12 HOURS maximum transportation time for live birds in the UK 28 HOURS maximum transportation time for live birds in the US 1.5% chance of getting food poisoning in the UK 11.4% chance of getting food poisoning in the US CHLORINE DIOXIDE one of the chemicals routinely used to decontaminate US chicken, and maybe coming soon to a plate near you Does the idea of chowing down on chicken that’s been blasted with chlorine dioxide sound appetising? Americans have been served up chlorine-washed poultry for decades and as we flap ourselves towards Brexit, chlorinated US chicken may well end up on British plates in the near future. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said earlier in May that the UK could import US chicken in a post-Brexit deal, with US trade…

When I was an editor for various periodicals I made sure that I published an article on women who were overshadowed by men every week. Somehow, Latife Hanim never came to my attention. After working for 10 years as The Daily Cumhuriyet’s Sunday magazine editor, my employment was abruptly terminated in 2004. I was looking for a job in the media industry and working from home for an NGO. One day, I was visiting a friend when a book on their bookshelf, written by one of Atatürk’s military assistants about Latife Hanim, got my attention. Atatürk was the founder of the Republic of Turkey and served as its president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He was one of the most influential people of the 20th century. Hanim was…

Olivia Wilde the director goes head-to-head with Olivia Wilde the actor this week. Downbeat thriller A Vigilante casts her as Sadie, a survivor of domestic abuse who – with the help of a Krav Maga martial arts handbook and a lot of sit-ups – has refashioned herself into a ruthless samaritan who helps women escape their abusive partners. The title might seem to promise a pulpy beat-em-up but Australian writer/director Sarah Daggar-Nickson has fashioned something much rawer and more upsetting. The result is a tough watch but Wilde is terrific. A Vigilante is in cinemas and on-demand from May 31…

Thank you John for your important story May I express my gratitude to My Pitch interviewee, John Williams, for talking about his experience of living with an eating disorder and how that affected him as a man [My Pitch, May 13-19]. I recently found my father (I was adopted). Unfortunately he had long since passed when I found him and the death certificate indicated that when he died he was suffering the fatal effects of an eating disorder. Thank you, John, for using your voice and for talking about the lack of support you received to cope with this. I am running the London 10km next week to fundraise for the Linda Tremble Foundation in my father’s memory. I’ll be thinking of you too, John, when I run. Thank you…

Just for a day, I’d give The Big Issue vendors a go. Maybe extend it to a week in order to get a little more done. The great argument coalescing around Boris Johnson as the putative PM is that he has the people behind him, that he has the real voice of the real people ringing in his ears. He’ll listen and deliver on this truth. I’m not sure where all these truth-telling people are coming from. He hasn’t said. Of course the obvious argument runs that this is about Brexit, and that Boris Johnson, as one of the key architects of withdrawal, is plugged closest into the only real show in town. That he of the false figure bus and the misinformation about Turkish accession is part of the…

It is true that researchers found that screen-time abstinence and wearing blue light-blocking glasses can help to improve sleep for teenagers – but it is incredibly misleading to suggest that sunglasses would make the difference. The study tested Dutch youngsters aged from 12 to 17 in two groups – one for youngsters who use screens for more than four hours and another for less than one hour per day. The first group were assessed on three evenings per week for five weeks during habitual screen use, while wearing blue light-blocking glasses and while refraining from screen use. The second group of infrequent screen users were assessed for one week. Researchers concluded, after collecting sleeping diaries and measuring melatonin using saliva sampling, that both intervening with glasses and abstinence aligned the…

A healthy, balanced diet is difficult to fit into any lifestyle, even more so for those who are homeless. People sofa surfing, in supported accommodation or rough sleeping can be affected by hunger and malnutrition, preventing them moving on with their life. Isabel Rice, a dietician who works for homeless charity Centrepoint, says that food insecurity is on the rise. “We did a survey in 2017 and more than 60 per cent [of clients] said they go to bed hungry or skip meals because of a lack of money. In the current climate with Universal Credit and benefit issues it's happening more and more. “Hunger has a knock-on effect on everything else. If you're malnourished you can't function properly. We see a lot of nutritional deficiencies, particularly vitamin D and…

Britain is a fast-food nation and chicken and chips is our choice chomp, whether a cheeky Nando’s or finger-lickin’ KFC. Recently, KFC invited customers into hundreds of its outlets to see how their meals were made. The company has proved itself a marketing maestro, whether running ad campaigns mocking their many imitators or handling what quickly became a national crisis after a chicken shortage caused store closures across the country. The Open Kitchen event in March fed into the cult KFC has built around itself, with fans snapping up tickets faster than they could demolish a bucket of the good stuff. At my local outlet in the south of Glasgow, there was predictably an emphasis on health and safety and hygiene as we were shown how to wash our hands…

One of the things I love about cities is their air of mystery: that sense that behind the next corner you might find a hidden street, an unexpected alleyway, a specialist supermarket for a local diaspora or an obscure museum. I love, too, the accompanying gift of anonymity that comes with big city living, that you can fade into the background, that you can walk just 15 minutes in any direction and disappear. But there’s a sinister side to a city’s vastness, too – not everyone who disappears wants to, and not every surprise lurking around the next corner is a happy one. A big city’s complexity is both a gift to novelists and a trap. In crafting a satisfying novel, with a beginning, middle and end, writers often have…

Like the outstretched digits of Adam and God in Michelangelo’s famous fresco, after reaching out to one another for so long the epic forces of Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber have finally, inevitably met on the duet I Don’t Care. In which our heroes sing about being at some stuffy buttoned-up party, feeling awkward, until a special lady takes them by the hand and makes everything OK. The true subtext of which is plain to read: say what you like about these two fun-lovin’ young bajillionaires teaming up to string together some throwaway summertime goofy tropical pop nonsense just for the laughs and the buck, they literally do not care. As the streaming counts smash records like plates at a Greek wedding, partners in bumfluff Ed’n’Biebz’ laissez-faire attitude to life…

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.…

TWITTER @Joe90_Jen If moving in with Tom Hardy would benefit mankind in any way, I’m prepared to consider it. @ManleyLynsey @kforhee Isle of Skye ??? @kforhee Replying to @ManleyLynsey @BigIssue Is that an invite? We can draw up a list of the people who get to come with us. A shortlist. A very short list. @efm_uk The problem is wherever I went I’d still be me. With the same ties. @SuicideGaming Easy. I’d live in the lighthouse in Fraggle Rock. INSTAGRAM @coral.gibson.18 I would live in Tasmania @akitdds I would live on a Croatian island with a small cottage, with a studio and garden. Simple tingz. @Fried_art Who wouldn’t take the fantasy option?…

Spending much of one’s time bigging up your own work, and by that yourself, comes at a price. You must have to lay down the burden of self-promotion sometimes. For at times it makes you into a weirdness. Performing one’s act, of comedy and purpose, does not look good the morning after. It feels like you’ve fooled around too much, exaggerated too much, boasted and boosted too much: and claimed too much. I mean, after all, my large and loud mouth and stupendous claims are based on inheritances from former large mouths I must come from. My mother being the greatest example in my life of a woman who “could talk the hind legs off of a donkey”. Hence at her knee I must have picked up the fine art…

The most surprising thing to Kartik Raj when he toured the UK with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty was how parents dreaded their kids having even one day off from school as they struggled to feed them. New York NGO Human Rights Watch’s Western Europe researcher joined Dr Philip Alston in a 12-day whirlwind tour of foodbanks, schools and deprived areas of cities and towns all across the UK to find out what life was really like on the breadline. Both released their findings last week with scathing reports, laying bare how Britain has been impacted by years of austerity, welfare cuts and slashed local authority funding. Holiday hunger? “If kids don’t go to school they don’t eat today,” a shocked Raj discovered. The welfare safety net? It’s…

Ross Following a short prison sentence Ross lost his accommodation. Since moving to the shelter he has achieved catering qualifications and hopes to be a full-time chef. “I should have took more pictures… I got silly pictures of things like crisps and that, I should have took a bit more care. I dunno why I took a picture of Haribo! “Most of my time is in the kitchen and it’s good because even on the days when I don’t have to go in I can still go in and keep myself busy, keeps me occupied, instead of going away with the lads and having a drink, you know what I mean? “It is team work. We do have a lot of bitchiness going on as well. We have the morning…

01 Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin  A bold and beautiful expression of same-sex desire about an American man in Paris obsessed with an Italian bartender and grappling with his sexuality. 02 Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller Hilarious short stories by a personal hero; from starring in John Waters films to partying with Andy Warhol to accidentally burning her friend’s house down. Someone once said Cookie couldn’t leave the house to buy milk without something wild happening to her. This book proves that’s true. 03 The Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarowicz New Yorker Wojnarowicz was one of the most powerful literary voices to come out of the Eighties Aids crisis. Here are his poetic and head-spinning vignettes of life on the road, hustling and…

A raunchy comedy about two hyper-articulate teens trying to survive one crazy night of picaresque hell-raising might sound more than a little familiar. Superbad was released in 2007 and made instant stars of its unfamiliar young cast: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Emma Stone (OK, maybe not that gawky dude who played McLovin). It was also another big hit for industrious producer Judd Apatow, whose shaggy, freewheeling approach would influence mainstream Hollywood comedy for the next decade and beyond. The rambunctious but heartfelt new high-school comedy Booksmart invites comparisons with Superbad, and not just because of their comparably crammed one-word titles. Both feature a bickering central duo in a cute but clearly co-dependent relationship. Both see their nerdy leads uncharacteristically throw caution to the wind to go in search of…