Innholdsfortegnelse for 03-02-20 i The Big Issue

Computer gaming has always been another country to me. I’ve never been taken by any aspect of it. I understand that gamers can get hooked and lose hours and days down rabbit holes. But the switch has never flicked. I don’t believe Boris Johnson is a devoted gamer either. Given his appetites and rumoured peccadilloes, I can’t imagine him lost in a Call of Duty binge. Which is why his repeated pledge to ‘level up’ Britain rings hollow. For a start, it’s meaningless. I know Boris Johnson likes to roll out broad and fairly meaningless epithets, but really, what’s he talking about this time? Getting a new phaser? If we give him the benefit of the doubt and we do attach actual meaning to it, let’s assume that he’s insisting…

Since December, London sellers have been swapping their pitches for The Boogaloo pub, the former stomping ground of Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, with a weekly Tuesday morning slot on Boogaloo Radio. Vendors take charge of the airwaves from 10am until midday, offering an insight into their lives behind the iconic red tabard. They also get the chance to handpick the tunes with a bespoke playlist. Dave Martin, who sells the magazine outside Tesco on Barb Mews, Hammersmith, stepped into the slot last month. “Seeing as it was my first time on the radio, I thought it was brilliant,” he told The Big Issue. “You just end up wanting to do more, basically. I’m keen to put my second playlist out there.” Boogaloo DJ Jenn Crothers added: “Everyone loves music and…

London is a big place. For young people, cuts to youth services have only made it bigger. Alex Baine knows it – that’s why he created London Football Journeys (LFJ). The charity brings young people from across the city together through football exchanges and filmmaking projects that build connections between postcodes. Baine, 38, grew up in London. Aǽter seven years working on social inclusion in Japan and India – including a stint working with Japan’s Homeless World Cup team – he returned to the capital in 2011 inspired by how he’d seen football used as a tool for change. “At that point I was determined to start a project that celebrated London’s diversity and brought people together using football,” he tells The Big Issue. His research coincided with the London…

Ukraine being used as a pawn between super states will come as no surprise to anyone who went to school with Andrea Chalupa. By the age of 12 she was giving talks to her bewildered classmates about the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine that killed between three and five million people in the early 1930s. Andrea and her sister Alexandra grew up in northern California hearing stories about how her family suffered under Joseph Stalin’s regime and survived the Second World War. “I knew as a child that there was widespread cannibalism in Ukraine, that when a mother was driven mad by hunger she ate her own children,” she says. “All around me, people had never heard of it and that really deepened the tragedy for me.” Chalupa’s parents were born…

Frequent Street Art contributor Christie came from an abusive childhood, and as an adult has struggled with depression, alcohol and drug problems and homelessness. Her latest painting is her largest canvas to date. “It’s a depiction of how I feel at this stage,” she says. “My past being the barren cracked earth and dark skies and my future being the bright sun over the sea. They are merging, and making me feel as if I am rediscovering the energy and life that I felt I had lost.” Regeneration is on show at the Centrepieces pop-up gallery in Bexleyheath, London among other works Christie has contributed to The Big Issue over the years, as well as works by fellow artists from the margins. The Broadway, Bexleyheath; centrepieces.org The work on this…

01 See Jane Run by Joy Fielding A perfect thriller. A nameless protagonist finds herself in a shop wearing nothing but a bloodstained coat. She has lost her memory and has no idea who she is, so when a man comes forward claiming to be her husband, and armed with proof, she has no choice but to let him take her home. 02 House Rules by Rachel Sontag A real-life domestic memoir about a psychologically abusive childhood and a girl who saved her own life with very little help from anybody. Sontag describes her journey from thinking her father was a little strange and difficult to realising that he was a dangerous narcissist. Absolutely brilliant. 03 Broken Harbour by Tana French French’s masterpiece, about a family annihilation murder. The Spain…

Last summer, I wrote about how I couldn’t understand anything about Love Island . Clinging on to the last vestiges of common sense 2019 had to offer, I dug in my heels and refused to have anything to do with the brazen, oily skinned Neanderthals, whose greatest achievement in life was ordering the correct size of pink teddy bear jacket from boohoo.com. However, thanks to an almost full term of the gonk in the White House, the introduction of a slightly smaller troll doll at Number 10 and the inexorable rise of idiocy, I now find myself unable to resist. I have been helplessly swept along on a slipstream of sunscreen, bumhole bleach and cries of “it is what it is”. It would appear that the ‘trick’ to the show…

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The Big Issue: Your pinned tweet is an Orwell quote: “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” What does that mean to you? Joseph Mawle: Facing uncomfortable truths. That’s something that Orwell was renowned for. There are ideas and there are facts, and they are different things. Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable, grizzly, mean, pessimistic, but it’s actually about looking at those facts rather than ideas. Is it a quote you came across while researching the part? I can’t say I was a huge fan of his beforehand. I’m not brilliantly well read until I find a purpose to read. On this occasion, it was to find out more about a man whose real name was Eric Blair. There are parts of him that can…

I remember my first encounter with a drone vividly. It was 2013, the year before drones really hit the big time in consumer terms. And, from the moment it blasted into the sky, I felt that this would be a game-changer. I had heard about drones before, of course. Everyone had. The US Predator drone was etched into the public consciousness. This superweapon signalled a new kind of warfare which removed the combatant from the field of conflict. The Predator was not just another new weapon, it was a device that would completely transform the means by which conflicts were resolved. It was the perfect metaphor for modern society, lived at a distance through remote, digitally mediated devices. However, the drones that really gained prominence in the years that followed…

With Parasite, a horribly delicious black comedy the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho (Okja) gives us the bits of the upstairs-downstairs dynamic that Downton Abbey scrubbed clean: namely the seething resentments and mutual contempt inherent in the master/servant relationship. Bong’s film is set in modern Korea, the tale of a family of scammers who worm their way into a wealthy household but don’t know when to stop scheming. Using industrial-strength social satire, he strips the veneer off the myth of classlessness, giving an outrageously entertaining instant classic. Bong has assembled excellent actors. Woo-sik Choi is Kim Ki-woo, a bright kid who can’t afford university fees, so lives at home with his family in a scummy basement flat earning a pittance folding pizza boxes for a local takeaway. The family’s…

Three million Brexit 50p coins have burst into circulation. What will you do with your first one? Giving it to charity... I can’t imagine the money alone spent on those coins without taking Brexit into account. The money spent on Brexit could’ve actually gone to make a real difference in communities in a way I don’t think people realise that Brexit won’t. Emily Lawrence, Facebook Save it and celebrate when letting my fireworks off. Richard Wallington, Faceboook Give it to the charity that helps child refugees to come to be with their parents. Pamela Graham, Facebook Refuse it and ask for another! Alison Davies, Facebook Write I Love EU on it with a sharpie. Judith Jones, Facebook Keep it for my son as a keepsake. Loren Tiernan, Facebook I plan…

At least 12,000 people experiencing homelessness are missing out on vital lifesaving drug and alcohol services resulting in a “health crisis”, a leading charity has warned. St Mungo’s has made a plea to the government to end deaths on the street as part of its Knocked Back report, released last week. The study revealed the impact of spending cuts on services, slashed by a quarter since 2015/16, before pointing to the 726 homeless people who died in 2018, according to the ONS. Half of these deaths were alcohol or drug related, while the number that were put down to drug poisoning rose by 55 per cent between 2017 and 2018. St Mungo’s also wants boosted funding for drug and alcohol services. A government spokesman responded by confirming it is investing…

It so happens that the last full day, last week, we were members of the European Union coincided with my 74th birthday. January 30, aside from being my birthday, has a welter of historical connections, and I have been writing a book on those coincidences for many years. Although I have said it before, the book is almost finished and threatens to be an incredibly brilliant book; or a complete pile of pony. I have collected together about 30 January 30s of significance, but have only used 20 of them. The very reason we have had a European Union in the first instance is to be found in the book: if one January 30 jumps out it is the day that President von Hindenburg, having listened to military and political…

At 16 years old, I was just starting out as a young adult on an acting career. I knew my own sexuality, I knew I was attracted to boys. I was really, really trying to find a place to belong. I came from the East End of London to the West End of London, this other world that I could hide myself in and fantasise in, a world of tiny gay clubs where the strongest drink you could get was a black coffee. People pushed pills towards you, and you ducked away from them. It was an incredibly confusing and brilliant time. And life threw some heavy punches sometimes, in places where I least expected them, like my school. But I was a smiler. I looked out with wide, wide…

Sometimes news just catches you cold. Especially in the age of Twitter. We’ve all been there, blithely scrolling down that hypnotic timeline when the torrent of words and pictures comes to rest on a story that knocks you for six. So it was for me the other day, when I stumbled across the news that Fergal Keane, the BBC’s Africa editor, is stepping down because he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The announcement serves as a valuable reminder of the extraordinary job many journalists do and the profound personal toll it can take. I wonder how many colleagues had a quick moment to themselves when they heard the news and reflected on quiet struggles of their own. I don’t really know Fergal Keane but I’ve met him on the road…

Weather; it’s a clever name for a novel about one woman’s daily battle to stay sane and upright in the face of swirling storms, dark clouds, and killer lightning (only some of them metaphorical). Every aspect of librarian Lizzie’s world is under threat; her health, her food supply, her access to medicine, her marriage, her son’s future, her requirement to fill a hole in someone else’s life. And there are times during Jenny Offill’s new novel when it reads almost oppressively, like the blackest of blackhole comedies. But like a great, wry Ali Smith novel, or that exquisite bookshop scene in Annie Hall (“you only gave me books with death in the title”), it’s that second part of the equation that keeps it gleefully alive; this paranoid wreck of a…

Out of all composers (dead or alive), Beethoven needs the least promotion. His quotes are on mugs, Lego has created a figure in his honour – there’s even a film series featuring a St Bernard named after him. Most people who may claim not to know anything about classical music would recognise the ‘da, da, da dum!’ opening figure from Beethoven’s Fifth. And those who think they don’t like Beethoven usually fall for his ‘Pastoral’ symphony – the one made famous by Disney’s cupids, rainbow goddess and centaur couples in the 1940 animation Fantasia. Nevertheless, as 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth – and because the arts world loves a date to commemorate – we’ll be hearing even more of the great German composer’s work over the coming…