Innholdsfortegnelse for 05-08-19 i The Big Issue

I stay each summer in a beach campsite next to a nuclear power station in northern France. I come a day or two after Mr Johnson put together his combative cabinet. I come with the publisher of Chapter Catcher, who was also my first helper in starting The Big Issue. I bring my two youngest children while my wife attends a ‘hermetically sealed from the world’ vipaśyanā retreat. It rains, then it’s full of sun, it blows, it does it all. My main preoccupation is with rewriting a book I wrote a few years back about fairies that, last new year, I realised was crap. So each morning I rise early and apply myself to writing. I hope it’s good this time. Even though I write and have written enormous…

At 16 I had outgrown that period of going to the park on my bike and having the local bully throw darts at me. I was listening to a lot of music. Rave and drum‘n’bass and Oasis. Oasis was my gateway into different kinds of guitar music and then I started to get into psychedelic music. I became fascinated by the psychedelic world, that kind of abandonment. I saw a link between that and the rave community, Tribal Gathering, that kind of thing. There wasn’t much to do in Leicester though. Lots of people got excited about ‘going into town’ but that bored the hell out of me. I didn’t care about anything except music. I felt pretty strongly that, oh yes, I’ve found it, the thing I want to…

“I was thinking recently of John Peterbridge who used to run the Big Issue writing workshops in Vauxhall when I first took an interest 20 years ago,” says John, a long-standing Street Art contributor with a history of homelessness and mental health problems. “The art and writing help me so much. I don’t realise how much until afterwards. I surround myself with it. “I have started painting a mural on my yard wall, an ongoing piece with people, animals, places – the good, the bad and the ugly. Maybe it’ll increase the value of my property, maybe I’m decreasing it. I have a painting in the Ruth Borchard self-portrait exhibition at the Piano Nobile gallery in London. I’m delighted to be there. I am always looking for opportunities to have…

01 Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso The last member of an aristocratic family is turning into a monster resembling the Imbunche of Chilean folklore. Gothic, bizarre and disturbing. 02 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind This was quite the literary hit back in the day, though I’m not sure younger people are familiar with it. An orphan with the uncanny ability to detect smells decides to create the perfect perfume, distilling the essence of beauty and resorting to murder. 03 Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Márquez attempted to tell the story of a nation in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Thiong’o’s goals are even more expansive: to tell the story of a continent. The result is a satire peppered with fantastical details.…

Luton, 1987. “Go back home to your own country.” A National Front skinhead in Doc Martens, his face twisted with hate, spits at a 17-year-old British-Pakistani kid walking home from college. Five years ago, you might’ve watched this scene comforted by the thought: Well at least ugly blatant racism like that is history, gone the way of Walkmans, Golden Wonder crisps and the rest of the 1980s detail in Blinded by the Light, Gurinder Chadha’s mostly lightweight comedy- drama fictionalising the writer and Guardian journalist Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir about his teenage years in Luton. But today, the president of the United States tweets ‘go back', we have a Prime Minister who compares Muslim women to bank robbers and racial hate crime has increased since Brexit. It’s depressing and it gives…

Some time ago one of my friends in Nottingham was selling The Big Issue and he told me I could sell it too if I wanted. I was sofa-surfing at the time and I used to work, but it wasn’t full-time – just a bit here and there. I started doing voluntary work too, behind the counter at The Big Issue office. I like helping the homeless and people who have disabilities because my sister is physically and mentally disabled. That kind of work means a lot to me. The Big Issue is amazing. It’s helped me loads. I used to be paranoid going out because I got panic attacks, but selling The Big Issue and meeting people has made me more confident. On my very first day I think…

A group of 25 organisations took to the streets last week to fight modern slavery. Stalls, workshops, film screenings and the unveiling of a bold new mural around Southend-on-Sea’s High Street and Elmer Square hammered home the message about the UK’s modern slavery crisis. Southend Against Modern Slavery (SAMS) – a mix of charities, police, faith groups and statutory services – held its first public event to coincide with the UN’s World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. “It went really well and turnout was good,” SAMS founder and coordinator Dan Pratt, 39, told The Big Issue. “A lot of people were stopping to talk with us and take photos of the mural – it definitely stopped people in their tracks. “Some people who spoke to us denied that modern slavery…

When you think of food waste, you probably picture discarded vegetables, bread, fruit that’s gone off. But do you think of coffee? The guys behind Revive Eco did. Fergus Moore and Scott Kennedy are taking on the 500,000 tonnes of spent coffee grounds that go to UK landfills each year and are turning it into fertiliser, eco-friendly fuel and an alternative to wildlife-threatening palm oil. The pair met studying at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde. “I always liked the idea of being able to create something that would allow me to have an impact wider than just myself,” says co-founder Moore, 26. Moore worked in a Marks & Spencer cafe during his studies and saw first-hand the amount of food that was going to waste…

What do you do after winning TV’s glitteriest trophy – maybe head to Syria to meet Isis brides or hang out with bounty hunters and arms dealers in the States – or Boko Haram militants in Nigeria? Well, that’s what reigning Strictly Come Dancing champ Stacey Dooley did. But all this is fairly normal for the 32-year-old from Luton, who for the last decade has carved a niche for her jaw-droppingly hard-hitting yet hugely personable films for BBC Three. Since winning Britain’s most dazzling ballroom extravaganza, Dooley has transformed from quite-well-known documentarian to one of the country’s biggest celebrities, whose every move is scrutinised by the tabloids (one news website published six stories about her on a single day last week). Her relationship with Strictly partner Kevin Clifton may dominate…

Some books take a long time writing. I sat in a Tanzanian vilage in 1993 and started to ask why people there and in many villages, towns and cities round the world were unheard and ignored while billions of dollars were spent on supposedly improving their lives, and this year I finally wrote Making Aid Agencies Work. My work then was filmmaking. An enlightened aid agency agreed we could make a film about the ordinary lives of people in a poor country, a counterpoint to the bleak images of powerlessness and suffering used to extract donations from the public. We went to watch, listen and record what we saw, living in the village for a week at a time. A farmer told us about his family’s weekday life, working the…

I have always loved the sound of brass bands. Nothing beats hearing the intertwined harmonies of trombones, saxophones, trumpets and sousaphones. I admire the skill it takes to move while playing and performing complex routines. The rhythmic, almost hypnotic, drum patterns, the horns serenading you one moment and screaming for your attention the other. Let’s not forget their uniforms always adding pizazz and colour. Think brass bands and you will probably picture New Orleans for its rich history and numerous bands, but in the UK in the 1900s, the sounds of brass bands were the norm with coal mines and collieries. It was subsidised by their unions and as the coal mines closed during the Thatcher era, the brass bands disappeared. Now brass bands are back all around the world…

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.…

There’s an issue with fairy trees in Ireland. Dotted across the landscape, north and south, you’ll see trees standing proud in the middle of fields. They’re frequently hawthorns – gnarly, old, with roots full of deep memories, a lovely blossom in spring, but woe betide if you mess with them. Children growing up in Ireland would listen to parents as we passed the trees, about how farmers left them for fear of angering the fairy folk. You don’t want to mess with that mob. Perfectly rational people still retain a certain apprehension about fairy trees. It’s not so long ago that a motorway in County Clare was diverted to avoid cutting down a fairy tree. There are a good number of these trees around the border and so I thought…

"Michael Sheen has arranged everything, even some traditional Welsh weather,” says the match commentator over the tannoy at the Homeless World Cup as Cardiff’s Bute Park is pelted with rain. “In fact, I must be the only person in Cardiff who hasn’t met him this week.” That pretty much sums up the impact that the actor-cum-activist has had on the tournament after spearheading the Welsh capital’s bid to host it. If you’d walked around the three 3G pitches at the site last week, you’d have seen Sheen throwing his heart and soul into things. He was co-commentating, he hosted cultural side-events in the debating tent, he was the MC for the free gigs, he was walking around shouting into his phone for social media videos. Everywhere you looked, the imprint…

Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh’s memoir Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a film in which an old man reflects on his life, and it shares its melancholy and dreamlike quality. On the anniversary of the Six-Day War, Shehadeh, now 68, sets off on a walking tour of Ramallah. His journey is a tale of two cities: the invisible one he summons up from childhood, with its bakeries and haberdasheries, and the one that exists today: filled with high-rises, cafes and burger joints. As he walks, he reflects on his own experiences and that of the West Bank, as it has faced the upheaval of the occupation, the Olso Accords and two intifadas. Going Home is a book saturated with regret,…

When I was a teenager I was locked in a state of perma-crush. From the moment I turned 13 I was ensnared in my own bittersweet psychodrama of unfocused love, lust and longing. The girl from the school trip; the girl who was going out with my mate; the girl who was mates with the girl who was going out with my mate. Everywhere I looked there was someone new not just to admire but to become pathetically, gormlessly, hopelessly fixated upon. Every stolen glance in the playground carried explosive meaning; every song on Top of the Pops prompted beautiful pain and crushing ecstasy. It was tough being that romantic. And it was exhausting hiding it all behind the yobbish persona of a heartless teenage dickhead. There was this one…