Innholdsfortegnelse for 13-04-20 i The Big Issue

KIDS Cast a Banishing Charm on boredom with Harry Potter at Home JK Rowling and co have waved their magic wand across the Wizarding World website to conjure up a free set of entertainment and educational resources. There’s access to the audiobook and e-book versions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone as well as craft videos, articles and quizzes. wizardingworld.com/collections/ harry-potter-at-home THEATRE Travel to Treasure Island from your couch The show must go on, so each week National Theatre are making a filmed performance available to view free online. This week: Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of murder and mutiny on the high seas – the story that gave pirates a bad name – featuring Arthur Darvill as Long John Silver. And see Jane Eyre until April 16. From April…

Other people’s dreams are normally dull. They are private, and they are so internalised they rarely carry anything for anyone except the dreamer. There have been exceptions. A few years ago, Paul McCartney shared with The Big Issue a dream he’d had many years previously. He said as a boy he’d had a recurring dream of digging in his garden and finding an old tin can. It always came up empty. And then he met John Lennon. A little time after, McCartney had the dream again, but this time turned up a gold coin. As he dug further, more and more coins appeared. When he told Lennon, he said he’d had the same dream. It was something that they talked about afterwards. “So the message of that dream,” said Paul…

St Thomas’ Hospital, opposite Parliament and a spit and a fart from Number 10, has once again proved itself geographically well placed in its dealing appositely with the PM’s viral infection. Once upon a time responsibilities for Whitehall and nearby Buckingham Palace’s health would have been shared with St George’s. This was a very fine hospital at Hyde Park Corner and – once being knocked off my bike nearby – I was treated in casualty (A&E) there most expeditiously. Here royalty with sudden nose bleeds and minor injuries would also have been treated. But in Maggie’s time it was decided to move the whole kit and caboodle south to Tooting. Not so far also from Number 10 was another hospital of choice called Charing Cross. It nestled near Trafalgar Square…

“I am so happy I found acrylic pouring/fluid art a few years ago,” says frequent Street Art contributor Robyn, who is in her late 50s, lives in Brighton and copes with physical and mental health challenges including rheumatoid arthritis and bi-polar disorder. “It has helped me in so many ways and it just keeps getting better and better. This visual arts creative outlet has made me so happy. I hope to keep doing this for years to come.” The theme of Robyn’s latest set of paintings is climate change. The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com At least half of the profit goes to the artist.…

There will be those living on the streets who find the present crisis grimly familiar. Living alone is for them scarcely a novelty. Withdrawal from society has a long history, which informs how we will cope with the coronavirus epidemic. Solitude was once seen as a privilege reserved for educated men. In the words of the first major work on solitude by Johann Zimmermann, it was a necessary moment for ‘self-collection and freedom’ in the midst of an increasingly busy urbanising society. Women were held to be too emotionally frail to cope with such isolation, and working people would not have any spare time to spend by themselves. The monastic tradition of solitary prayer within a disciplined institution, which stretched back to the desert fathers of the fourth century, had…

In these troubled times, the telly is your friend. (The telly and the fridge to be precise, but let’s not split hairs.) It’s gone from being something you idly turn to when you’re having a night off from your Body Pump Attack Hot Yoga class to becoming a 24-hour essential service. So let us hold it dear, because the telly is basically a microcosm of our lives BC (Before coronavirus) featuring life, laughter and people standing scandalously close to each other. It is both our past and our future. And the good news is that no matter what state of existential quarantine angst you’re in today – or indeed, this half-hour – there’s a TV show to help. IF YOU’RE TIRED OF COOKING CRAP MEALS EVERY NIGHT Forget all that…

Bringing people together on social media every night to take comfort in music and community, Tim Burgess has been a superstar of the entertainment world in lockdown. And here’s an anecdote that not only proves it but also underlines why it matters. A couple of weeks ago the Charlatans frontman was announcing another slew of Twitter listening parties for albums classic and new – hosted by everyone from members of Oasis and Blur to Paul Weller, Joan as Police Woman, Róisín Murphy and Wolf Alice – when he was tweeted at by Colin MacDonald, a Scottish junior orthopaedic surgeon working in London, who wondered if a session for Gomez’s Mercury Prize-winning 1998 album Bring It On could be scheduled around his on-call shift times, because he’s a big fan and…

THE BIG ISSUE MANIFESTO A hand up... Proceeds from sales of this magazine are being used to tide over our vendors until they can get back to work on their pitches. Not a handout… In ordinary circumstances our vendors buy magazines for half the cover price and sell at full price, keeping the difference. They earn a legitimate income, and gain valuable social and employability skills. With your support now, we will continue to do so once the crisis has passed. 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.…

On hearing the news Big Issue vendors were being removed from their pitches for safety I decided to sign up for a subscription. I eagerly awaited the first issue dropping through the letterbox and was excited when it did. As a precaution I took the magazine, along with another magazine I received, to the kitchen sink to wash the plastic cover as you never know who has handled it. I dunked both magazines in the water just used for the breakfast washing up, gave the other magazine a wash then carefully unpacked it, then got The Big Issue out only to find there was a hole in the packaging. I am now reading a crispy radiator dried version, guessing the bits that didn’t survive. Next time maybe I’ll just wipe…

Having a routine at this time is crucial when it comes to coping with long days (and weeks?) of isolation. Whether you kick off your day with Joe Wicks’ PE class or not, here are some tips from mental health charity MIND about structuring your day: • Plan how you’ll spend your time. It might help to write this down on paper and put it on the wall. • Get up at the same time as normal, follow your usual morning routines, and go to bed at your usual time. Set alarms to remind you of your new schedule if that helps. • If you aren’t happy with your usual routine, this might be a chance to do things differently. For example, you could go to bed earlier, spend more…

I want to write something funny, but what’s funny about this moment? We’re all being urged to give freely of our services, but while others offer hair-cutting tips and online baptisms, the best I’ve got to offer are gags. Do people really want gags from someone like me who’s running low on good cheer? I’ve always been an optimist, but while a shard of it remains, I’ve never had that optimism more tested and shat on than now. Now makes us yearn for the happier pre-Covid days of Brexit, the rise of totalitarianism, koalas on fire, and the total control of our lives by Mark Zuckerberg and the government of China. Now, we’ve turned our living rooms into an open prison while outside the police are on the point of…

One of the many strange consequences of these odd times we are living is in that it has all but killed the contemporary novel. Modern fiction is now either science-fiction – or period drama. The plot device that renders contemporary literature fantastical or historical is simple: physical contact between relative strangers. In part as a comfort, I’ve returned to the fantastical stories I loved in my childhood: E Nesbit’s Five Children and It, the story of a family of five who unearth a magical creature in the quarry behind their home who grants them wishes – though they don’t quite work out as planned, Endgame, the collected run of Doctor Who comic strips that ran in the show’s official magazine while the programme was off the air and Mortal Engines,…

01 The Cockroach by Ian McEwan Gossamer-thin in masking its real-life inspirations (and bullish about it). A metaphysical farce that’s all the more discomfiting for its bleeding-edge relevance, McEwan’s post-truth satire is a delicious acid drop of a novella. 02 Autumn by Ali Smith By turns hazy, poetic and brutalist as a cracked pavement. Ali Smith doesn’t dress up Brexit Britain, and the more circumspect passages are heartbreaking in their verisimilitude. Thank goodness for cuts of wry humour that appear just when they’re needed, and the battered optimism that underpins the novel. 03 Perfidious Albion by Sam Byers The fictional microcosm of Edmundsbury explores the push-pull of toxicity in the media and online, presenting what 10 years ago would have been cartoonish avatars but now are unsettling mirrors of our…