Innholdsfortegnelse for 15-07-19 i The Big Issue

I discovered this magazine today in the streets of London. The guy who sold the copy gave me this for £2 because I was a Lynch fan. Overwhelmed. Ivano Spiga, Facebook It’s true. There really is no place like home. Greg Wallace, Facebook @dgw_23 It’s been a wet Saturday afternoon out there, so chance to take a break from the hassle and hustle. Superb interview with David Lynch in the current @bigissueuk Also an excellent one with Tim Burgess about TM (Transcendental Meditation). @jomarybutler I.DO.GO.OUT.I.JUST.DON’T.LIKE.IT. Divine David in The Big Issue. @bigissue @norwichlanes Happy 60th birthday @bigissueuk Jim. Thank you for your great work directing tourists around the Lanes. #norwichlanes #bigissue Hear from Jim on page 39 @jacky_writes My first time getting a @BigIssue today – really wanted to after…

Last year The Welcome Centre foodbank in Huddersfield supported 200 children per week in the summer holidays, providing 1,135 parcels with their first ever Feeding Families Appeal. But this year they are expanding their offering to help the adults who have been starving just to provide for their kids. That means that they will be working with 34 schools in the area, up from 21, and that has seen the independent foodbank lean even more heavily on crowdfunding to keep up with demand. In 2018, they raised £7,500 towards their £9,000 costs. This year that target has increased to £15,000 to meet the expected rise in uptake. Emma Greenough, The Welcome Centre fundraising manager, said: “The Welcome Centre has seen a 50 per cent increase in referrals in the last…

Essex County Council has decided to save their libraries! Well done to Save Our Libraries Essex and to everyone who challenged plans to close 25 of their 74 branches. This is good news for library users and good news for those who don’t use libraries. Why? Because if anything civilises a community it’s their library, closely followed by the local bookshop. Give someone a library book or a book token and you increase their chances of tapping into self-improvement. Self-improvement is one of the ways that, through the centuries, people in poverty have got out of it. Libraries, bookshops, cafes, pubs, bus stops, hairdressers (yes, hairdressers) are often places we swap stories and keep alive that all-important sense of community. Libraries in particular are crammed full of stories and the…

When Trump free-associated about homelessness with Fox News’ right-wing provocateur Tucker Carlson, he associated “filth” with descriptions of homeless people and declared his desire to “get that whole thing cleaned up” because the visibility of homelessness is “inappropriate”. “When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the president of the United States and they’re riding down a highway, they can’t be looking at that,” he said. “I really believe that it hurts our country. They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede.” While Trump’s comments about “interceding” are ominous, his sentiments are uncomfortably mainstream, embedded in “livability” policies and voiced on social media threads and in letters to the editor. Here…

The image of Aidan Turner, stripped to his rippled lower abs, having worked up a sweat swiping with his scythe in an idyllic Cornish meadow, has become an iconic one in popular culture. In scything circles, “Poldark” means two things, says Andi Rickard. “It could mean someone with no idea what they're doing, or someone who mows shirtless. But us ladies forgive him.” Rickard knows her scything stuff. Not only does she run the Somerset Scythe School, but she is all-UK scything champion, having beaten male competitors this year in a contest that measures speed and cut quality. “I was a bit slower than the men but, boy, was the quality of cut better. Without wanting to sound too conceited,” she says. In high demand, Rickard is booked to teach…

A visit to Naomi Wood’s website confirms what will quickly become apparent to readers of The Hiding Game – this novel is an intimate labour of love. The images there of Wood’s own colourful patchwork quilts and cushions find their echo in this work: namely, in the Bauhaus art school of 1920s and ’30s Germany, where design, architecture and art were revolutionised by a gang of radical modernists that included Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. The abstract thought processes and methods taught and encouraged at the Bauhaus – neatly, 2019 marks the centenary of its founding – had a transformative impact on the art and design that came after. This despite the relative brevity of the school’s existence – it lasted only 12 years,…

Marks & Spencer, Gloucester Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm  It’s quite surreal being on the streets. I never thought something like that could happen to me. I became homeless after my marriage broke down. I was married for 14 years and. when that ended it wasn’t a good time. I hit the drink hard. I had a very good job as an engineer. It was high-spec work but my head was just in bits so I couldn’t concentrate. It wasn’t fair on my employer or on me, so I left. I was just going to take a few months off but it spiralled from there and I never went back. To start with I was mainly on the street. Back when I was an engineer I always used to give to people who…

Fifty years ago, on July 16 1969, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin were strapped inside the tip of a 111m tall rocket filled with 2,500 tonnes of kerosene and liquid oxygen. At 2.32pm this was ignited. If something had gone wrong on launch, the Saturn V rocket would have exploded with the force of a small atomic bomb. As well as this rather worrying health and safety concern, the three astronauts carried the ambition of a nation and the hopes of the wider world. Their whole lives, years of training, focussed on this apex. The brilliant Apollo 11 documentary from Todd Douglas Miller, still screening across the country to coincide with this anniversary week, uses restored archive footage to outline the mission in minute-by-breathless-minute detail. You are with…

FACES (Family and Children Early Help Service) has had such an impact in Bedford that they are being honoured this week after receiving The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service. The charity identifies gaps in services and works to solve them. That led to LunchBox launching last year to take aim at holiday hunger. The volunteer-run offering is a cafe in all but name, designed to give kids food and activities without a “stigmatising” effect. Last year the programme provided 700 meals to kids but this year they will be feeding families as well. And in a heartwarming turn of events, the nearby private Polam School donated more than £1,000 to help make LunchBox happen. “What was nice about this is that it was fairly privileged children who chose this project…

Meet Susan Aktemel, founder of the UK’s first social enterprise letting agents. Homes for Good finds and creates homes for people on low incomes in Glasgow, with half its clients on housing benefits and the investment arm of the business renovating homes to plug the social housing gap. The values-driven business works to make sure both landlords and tenants get a transparent, ethical and kind service, subverting the reputation of letting agents everywhere. Homes for Good is the second social business launched by Aktemel, 50, who as a languages graduate went on to teach adult literacy in some of Glasgow’s most deprived communities. “My eyes were opened to the extent of poverty that there was in the city, and I hadn’t been aware of that growing up,” she says. “I…

Our leaders and leaders-in-waiting could do worse than look to Ross Kemp for a critique of all that’s wrong with housing policy. The filmmaker and former EastEnders star was given a blank slate to make documentaries on four of Britain’s biggest issues for his new ITV series. So obviously he picked homelessness. After years of infiltrating gangs, facing war zones and hunting pirates off the coast of Somalia, Kemp wanted to look closer to home at issues that have been “stuffed under the carpet” while Brexit dominates the agenda. In his mission to understand Britain’s homelessness crisis, he slept out on the coldest night in seven years in Cardiff with rough sleepers Connor and Jammo before spending the night in the city’s main shelter, the Huggard. He sat unrecognised for…

01 The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler A man goes slowly mad as trusted relationships run out of steam. The beauty of the novel is that we realise he’s disintegrating; he doesn’t. 02 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Reading this is like climbing a volcano. It’s not easy, and I tried and failed several times. One you’re in, though – you’re in. There is no book on alcoholism like it: you approach the crater, and look right down into the inferno. 03 Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden A 1970s children’s chestnut. Carrie is an evacuee, sent to a tiny village in Wales. Her war is not about bombs and the Home Guard: it’s the conflict of terminally isolated, troubled adults who have made a hell for themselves. It’s a…

@francomattis Hey folks! Today I bought the @bigissueuk from this awesome dude through contactless payment. So here’s my shout out to Exeter and beyond to buy The Big Issue if you don’t have one already, and you don’t even need cash monies! @Actuarial_Tutor Big Issue man at Waterloo has contactless. This is the next level up @CharlieBlags Just bought my frst @BigIssue using contactless card from a chap in Bank. Great innovation @bobcrazydaisy Bought my @BigIssue from a seller with a contactless machine today. Impressed that I didnt need to go to the cashpoint. Friendly guy selling outside M&S #swindon today…

As the majority of kids in England and Wales join Scottish children on their summer holidays over the next week or so, the effects of holiday hunger are really going to start to bite. In our last issue, we told how catering for an extra meal every day once kids are no longer in school can see up to three million children go hungry because their parents can’t afford to buy the extra food. It’s a national crisis. That’s why holiday hunger was the subject of a committee inquiry in Parliament earlier this month – and food poverty remained on the political agenda last week. The ‘Other Britain’ interim report by MPs Heidi Allen and Frank Field and campaigners Feeding Britain delivered results of the politicians’ visits to foodbanks around…

HOW IT WAS TOLD Stranger Things is the talk of the streaming service town at the moment with its Eighties-infused tales of parallel universes and monsters that can only be toppled by puberty-stricken kids. The show’s story of a dark mirror world is nothing new – The Twilight Zone was mooting this idea in the Sixties while sci-fi cult heavyweight Star Trek also went there with a parallel universe where, wait for it, Spock had a goatee. It can be little coincidence, then, that as Stranger Things season three rolls around a story surfaces about scientists searching for a portal to a parallel universe. You know, kind of like the one that the Russians are trying to open with a very powerful electric beam in the opening scene of the…

PROJECT: Homes for Good “Barack Obama’s advisor told me nobody could run two businesses at the same time. I should get back in touch.” 01 Last week it was announced that the Homes for Good founder is one of the winners of the Cambridge Social Innovation prize, awarded by Trinity Hall and Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation. 02 As a result of the prize, which celebrates people creating real social change, Aktemel will benchmark her own business’s practice with other European cities (she’s considering Amsterdam, Berlin and Barcelona). 03 She’ll also undergo executive training in investment, while Aktemel and her senior team will receive additional support. Homes for Good will also develop a new investment fund as a result of winning the prize.…

Unemployment, low wages, food shortages – no, this isn’t Project Fear’s prediction for post-Brexit Britain but the big issues of Cornwall in the year 1800. The fifth and final series of Poldark sees Ross and Demelza, played by Aidan Turner and Eleanor Tomlinson, plan to lift locals out of poverty – one in his role as an MP, the other through opening a school. Together the impulsive, righteous, buccaneering hero and his determined, principled partner have grown into their roles as community leaders keeping locals afloat in tough times. And they may have lessons that could help us tackle the same problems today. Poldark has always been about a lot more than a Cornish glamour couple scything their way into our hearts on Sunday nights. From the start Turner was…

In March 2016, I decided, while in the sauna, to move to Poland. It seemed sensible. For one, I wanted to know what the Poles in Britain had left behind. For two, there was a referendum in the diary (cheers Dave), and so I thought I’d better take advantage of my European mobility while I still had any. Another thing that made the prospect of moving to Poland attractive was that whenever I mooted the idea, people generally laughed or frowned. If I’d said France or Spain, or Denmark or Italy, nobody would have questioned my intent, because the common sense has these countries down as desirable locations. As respectfully as possible, I hold common sense in contempt. In my experience, things that are commonly frowned upon or disparaged or…

If a scene from Disney’s new live-action remake of The Lion King popped up on your TV screen unannounced, you’d probably think you were watching a David Attenborough documentary. The ‘live action’ tag is actually wide of the mark – this film is almost entirely computer generated. And technologically, it’s a thing of wonder, a mindblowing miracle of photorealism. The glowing red sunsets over the savannah, the individual strands of golden lion cub fur so downy soft that you can practically feel it – all of it looks like the real thing. Then a lioness opens her mouth and a Beyoncé song comes out. Does Sir David know who Beyoncé is? I doubt it. The circle of life isn’t that big. The original Lion King is a sacred Disney classic.…

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