Innholdsfortegnelse for 24-02-20 i The Big Issue

@NaturesGoodNews YES to this! Not only supporting the homeless, but this issue is raising awareness of #PeriodPoverty. @crwarren How did I never know about this campaign? Periods were never, ever discussed in my household unless through a veil of shame. I hope there are more dads like @michaelsheen these days, because that can make a world of difference to young girls. @SirGothamHatt My fiancé was raised by women & helped take care of his sister. I feel he’ll be more comfortable on the subject when it’s our daughter’s time than my dad was with me. @emsjcreative The more families are willing to talk about periods the better!…

Last week The Big Issue gave period poverty a first-of-its-kind platform in a 24-page collaboration with period dignity champions Hey Girls – and it didn’t take long for the Scottish Government to take notice. In the week that the magazine hit the streets, the SNP announced that they would support Labour MSP Monica Lennon’s groundbreaking bill that will give everyone in Scotland a legal right to free period products. Lennon has long campaigned for period provision to made universal in a bid to reduce poverty and tackle the stigma around periods. But her efforts were dealt a blow when ministers said they would oppose the bill. But last week they U-turned on the decision and will now back the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Bill at its February 25 stage…

It’s easy to talk about going plastic-free, and the range of alternatives is growing by the day. But few of us have the time to research and source replacements for everything we rely on in day-to-day life, making it a lifestyle which risks being the preserve of the wealthy. Southport’s Beth Noy knew the solution was simple – gather the best, cheapest plastic-free alternatives to everyday items together in one place. That’s what she did with Plastic Freedom, an online one-stop shop for the most affordable products that are kind to the environment and take the thinking out of changing your habits. Just two years later the project has outgrown her spare room to become a business attracting hundreds of thousands of orders. Noy leǽt school at 16 to go…

The high street has become a barren wasteland of empty shop units and a graveyard for defunct major retailers in the present but the consensus is that retail will be jettisoned in the future in favour of community spaces. The government inquiry into high streets and town centres in 2030 heard that retail-focus should now be “unpicked”. That was the view of former Iceland CEO and retail tsar William Grimsey, who has written two alternative reviews into saving the high street. He told the inquiry: “Retail is not the main anchor any more for the 21st century, and it needs to be replaced with other activities.”But what are those other activities?They’ll be more social value- based and bespoke – gone will be the homogenised, cut-and-paste centres of old, replaced with…

Long-time Big Issue Street Art contributor John is represented alongside Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid among others in a new exhibition in Sunderland titled Received Wisdom, which celebrates older artists and challenges assumptions about ageing and what is expected of us at different stages of our lives. John began painting at the age of 51, and over the past 18 years has produced a vast body of work that includes painting, printmaking and sculpture, in addition to playwriting, poetry and music. His work has featured in the Big Issue countless times. His acrylic on suitcase painting/ sculpture Music in the Frying-Pan Pub Brick Lane in the Sixties is part of the prestigious Arts Council Collection – the most widely circulated national loan collection of modern and contemporary art in Britain.…

01 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë When I first read this, at 16, I found it unbearably painful, which, of course, made me instantly love it. Flawed, passionate characters making horrible mistakes and a spatter of supernatural ghastliness makes this one of my all-time favourite reads. 02 We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson This novel has the perfect setting for a great gothic yarn: a family, struck by tragedy, lives isolated in a big house, guarding a devastating secret. The unique voice of the narrator, Merricat, is what makes this such a spectacular and chilling read. 03 Dracula by Bram Stoker No list of gothic fiction is complete without the count. If it is the lush descriptions, Dracula’s ambiguous humanity, or the intriguing way the story…

A hand up, not a handout... Our sellers BUY 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.…

It is easy to feel punctured. It won’t stop raining. There is general, vast greyness around. Huge parts of the country are struggling to overcome flooding. And there is nobody clear to blame. This allows a generalised angst to grow. Layering on, the Westminster government announce immigration plans that sound like snapping the drawbridge shut. No matter how this is rationalised, and I have read some incredibly supercilious pieces in the last number of days about how Priti Patel’s move is good for the workers of Britain, it’s about closure. It’s about believing the ‘other’ has less value. This does not lead to progression and openness. Keeping a door open doesn’t suppress the chance for the native. Rather, it stops those with less being able to benefit in a place…

• Beauty Kubes shampoo, made of dry biodegradable materials which form a paste when you take them in the bath or shower. They’re all natural, contain no chemicals and don’t strip the natural oils from your hair. Plus there’s no liquid so you can travel with them easily. • Upcircle, a London brand that repurposes used coffee grounds and chai spices to make top-notch skincare. • Wild Sage & Co was the first brand I ever stocked. They do an oil cleanser which takes your make-up off. It works a dream. Cosmetics products tend to be hard to pull off because regulation often requires plastic to keep things hygienic.…

Rob Bilott is not a man who’s quick to anger – even after more than 20 years fighting. Bilott’s fight has been to get justice for a small community exposed to deadly chemicals, against a system that wouldn’t listen. Calm and deliberate when he speaks to us, he is clearly accustomed to stating his case over and over again. Back in 1998, Bilott was rising through the ranks as a corporate environmental defence lawyer in a prestigious Cincinnati law firm. “A lot of what we were doing was helping our corporate clients, including a lot of chemical companies, comply with different state and federal environmental laws,” he says. “I’d been working within a system I thought I understood but there was this whole world of unregulated yet potentially more dangerous…

“Do you know what ‘l’chaim’ means in Ivrit, modern Hebrew?” “I think so.” “Life. ‘L’chaim’ means ‘to life’.” “I know…” “Do you also know why Jews say ‘l’chaim’ when they raise their glasses and make a toast?” “Er…” “Germans say ‘Zum Wohl’, meaning ‘to your health’. The French say ‘santé’, the Dutch ‘proost’ and Scandinavians ‘skål’. Nearly everyone drinks to good health. But not us.” “No.” “We drink to life. Do you know why that is?” he asked. “Tell me.” “We Jews have been persecuted throughout the ages. So we know all too well that our lives can be over quicker than our good health.” The conversation had been with Samuel, a liberal Jewish acquaintance of mine, a regular customer at an antiquarian bookshop in town. Samuel likes the same…

Stick your head inside a homemade iron helmet and what do you see? Thanks to the crude eye slit, probably not much. But the whole world suddenly looks like it has been framed in widescreen. Perhaps that’s why the story of Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly – the Aussie outlaw, agitator and problematic folk hero – has been retold, rehashed and reimagined so many times on film. By the time Mick Jagger pulled on the metal togs in 1970, it was already the seventh Ned Kelly movie to be produced (albeit the first in colour). For good or ill, the notorious 19th-century bushranger remains a foundational figure in the modern Australian psyche. The latest biopic True History of the Kelly Gang is adapted from Peter Carey’s Booker-winning 2000 novel, which takes the…

When kids reach a certain age, you also reach an entertainment hinterland – an in-between stage when everything really good is just that bit too old for them, but they’re also thoroughly fed up of children’s TV and its rat-eating billionaire gangster dinner ladies. Or maybe they’ve just given up on watching telly completely because they prefer to download YouTube directly into their brains. So it’s easy to become separated and permanently distracted – parents sitting in pyjamas downstairs tweeting about Corrie, children upstairs constructing meta TikTok videos of them playing ping pong with a hoover. Then the teen years will happen, and your paths will only cross when you find a cereal bowl in their room with Cretaceous-era Weetabix in it, or you might see them for 10 minutes…

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos pledged $10bn (the equivalent of £7.7bn) to fight the climate crisis. If he gave you that amount what would you use it to sort out? I have got two disabled sponsored “children” in Armenia who are actually young adults now. Both went to school as kids but are at home all day now, because they don’t have a chance of finding a job (one has got severe learning difficulties, the other is physically disabled) and of course there are hardly any social benefits. So I would take the money to start an inclusion project where they and others in the same situation would be able to earn a living. Barbara Strohmenge, Facebook Buy a couple of miles of HS2 Kris Franklin, Facebook I’d use it to…

I have no idea why I found myself telling a terrible story to my daughter as we walked to the cinema to see Emma . As a very recent though committed convert to Jane Austen’s writing, I went to see Emma with a good deal of anticipation. Emma really is a complete prick of a young woman; monied, socially well positioned, yet dreamy and ill-educated. A dangerous matchmaker, she nearly kills off her best friend with the best of intentions, trying to get her to aspire socially above the farm manager who has proposed to her. Yet, prick or not, she is “most engaging”, and both Austen and her latest interpreter, the wonderful-sounding director Autumn de Wilde, keep us rooting for her; and we are pleased when she finally gets…

Power to Change (PTC) is an independent charitable trust that supports and develops community businesses in England. Endowed with £150m from the National Lottery Community Fund, it works to revive local buildings and spaces, protect the services people rely on and address local needs. Since 2015 it has invested nearly £18m in community hubs. Its ethos echoes The Big Issue’s ‘a hand up, not a handout’ spirit: “We believe community businesses help make places better, for example by saving local shops, giving more training opportunities for local people or providing affordable housing.” The projects PTC works with have four things in common. 1. Locally rooted This means a business started by local people that will benefit the immediate community around it. 2. Accountable to the local community The local community…

PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, are a family of per- and polyfluorinated chemicals that are biopersistent, meaning they do not readily break down in the environment and build up in humans and wildlife over time. PFOA is just one member of a group of more than 4,700 industrial chemicals. Common items containing PFAS are waterproof clothing and shoes, stain-resistant school uniforms and office shirts, greaseproof baking paper and cardboard food packaging. However, a number of UK high street retailers’ clothes are now completely free from PFAS, including H&M, Zara, UNIQLO, M&S, Primark and Tesco. Health costs related to PFAS exposure are estimated between £44bn and £71bn annually for all countries of the European Economic Area. 99% of Americans have forever chemicals in their blood and numbers are now considered…

One of my many disreputable reading habits is a tendency to flick to the end. When I am finding a novel hard work, I skip ahead in a similar way to how I used to behave as a child in church – just one more Bible reading and the communion until we can go! – counting down the pages I have to endure until the ordeal is over. The more unsatisfying I fnd the experience, the more of the back of the book I read. I very rarely abandon a bad book – I just fnd that eventually I’ve read the same page twice: once by getting there in the normal way, once by skipping ahead. When I enjoy a novel, I don’t gobble up whole chapters in the same…

The 16th annual Glasgow Film Festival blasts off this week with the UK premiere of space-race drama Proxima (pictured). The otherworldly Eva Green stars as a single mother determined to succeed as an astronaut despite gruelling competition. It is just one of almost 400 screenings, talks and special events in a crammed 12-day programme that includes a particularly nifty late addition: a new black-and-white version of recent Oscar winner Parasite, bringing Bong Joon Ho’s masterful social satire into even sharper relief. The Glasgow Film Festival runs February 26-March 8 @GlasgowFilmFest…

In his superb 2012 book How Music Works, David Byrne revealed that he has borderline Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism which can affect the way a person communicates . I tried to keep this in mind when I interviewed the former Talking Heads frontman for The Big Issue in a posh hotel in London in 2018 – a nerve-wracking encounter which commenced inauspiciously with one of my all-time heroes leaving me hanging as I reached to shake his hand. Byrne scarcely made eye contact throughout our precisely 30-minute conversation, during which he fiddled with a cup, fidgeted in his chair and at one point – never an encouraging sign – yawned (in fairness it was his last interview of a long day). The whole thing felt like it hadn’t…

Outside Greggs, Cheltenham High Street 7.30am-1.30pm, Mon-Sat I went to school in South Africa because my parents wanted me to leave high school with an internationally recognised qualification. Unfortunately this was during the apartheid era. After five years I became a permanent citizen, which meant I was eligible for military service, and I was faced with either joining up or facing a significant prison sentence. This kickstarted the next 30 years of my life, and then a very unfortunate incident left me with no legs just before my retirement from the army. One leg was blown off straight away and efforts to save the other one ultimately failed. It was amputated at Cheltenham Hospital at Easter 2015. I still find it very difficult to look back on. It’s caused me…