Innholdsfortegnelse for 19-12-2016 i The Big Issue

Sunshine in Keith I sympathise with Craig Moore for his friendless journey to work [Letters, November 21-27]. My own experience, commuting into London for the last two years, could not be more different though. On the platform I meet up with my new ‘train buddies’– Marc, Susan and Verity. As the train glides into the station, Keith waves comically from his usual seat and we join him and others travelling into London that day: Rowena, Russell, Ben, Sarah, Jim… Keith has been doing this trip for 20 years and knows almost everyone in the carriage! By the time I get off at Waterloo my faith in humanity is restored and a smile is on my face. Perhaps every carriage needs a Keith. James, email Wheel of fortune Just wanted to…

‘I miss my home…’ Ali, 56, Syria ‘I miss my family…’ Abdo, 18, Sudan ‘I miss my mother’s cooking…’ Adnan, 17, Syria The number of refugees in the world is equivalent to the entire population of Britain. That’s 65 million displaced across the globe for reasons not of their choice. Very few reach the UK: Britain is not even in the top five European countries that accept refugees. As horrifying scenes emerge from Aleppo focusing our attention on the brutalities many face, a few of those who have recently arrived here tell Adam Forrest why they want to make the best of the new chance they have been given, and reflect on what they miss most about home this Christmas ‘I MISS MY BROTHER VERY MUCH’ Sozan Abdullah…

It is about people making the best of themselves and each other. And living in a society that encourages that across the board. The idea libraries are closing down and we can’t have access to all this fabulous inspiration and education is awful. It is not just about literacy. It is about learning. It’s about looking at art books and seeing fabulous reproductions of paintings. It’s about being able to find books that tell you how to do stuff. It is about history and literature. It is really important we should be pointing ourselves towards an enlightenment, and our young people – all people – towards learning more about the world and what they are capable of, both as citizens and as artists. It is their right. It is your…

A BIG YEAR WE HAD IT COVERED It has been an extraordinary year. At The Big Issue we marked our 25th anniversary, and vendors celebrated as we sold our 200 millionth copy in Britain alone. Along the way we’ve brought famous faces, special editions and an agitation to fight for a better society. Here are all our covers from 2016. If you missed any, they’re at bigissueshop.com. And whatever 2017 brings, our vendors will be on the streets with the latest mix of big names and big issues. This David Bowie-inspired background is by street artist Pure Evil, one of three artists who created bespoke Christmas wrapping paper for The Big Issue (pictured left). bigissueshop.com…

This was another wonderful year for foreign fiction, with great new novels by Big Issue favourites like Yuri Herrera (The Transmigration of Bodies), Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Waking Lions) and Cesar Aira (The Seamstress and the Wind). Other stand-out fiction included Booker winner Paul Beatty’s brilliant, bold and hilarious satire The Sellout, Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s poignant, evocative Days without End, and Sarah Moss’ soulful, ambitious The Tidal Zone. Booker shortlisted Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project – smart, sharp and engaging – also made a mark. Outside of fiction, Belarusian Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich’s polyphonic Second Hand Time wove together interviews with ordinary Russians to a hypnotic, almost musical effect, creating what felt like a new frontier in social journalism. Meanwhile, with the publishing world now surely at ‘peak map’ Atlas…

1. A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN Peter Nichols I loved this book about the first non-stop round-the-world solo yacht race and the tragic story of deluded competitor Donald Crowhurst. I’ve bought at least 10 copies to give to friends. 2. THE TRUE STORY OF TITANIC THOMPSON Kevin Cook A brilliant golfer (left AND right-handed), pool player and card sharp from the pre-TV era in America, who used his skills to travel the States proposition-betting. It’s an amazing tale of gangsters, gambling, girls and guns – about a true one-off. 3. WAR, BABY: THE GLAMOUR OF VIOLENCE Kevin Mitchell A stunning boxing book about the brutal 1995 Nigel Benn versus Gerald McClellan fight that left one man the victor and the other in a coma. Mitchell traces their life stories before and…

In 2016, I’ve spent more time sitting and watching in London’s Old Vic theatre than any other year of my life. I’ve seen monologues of anxiety in peat bogs and Dr Seuss made flesh and felt – but I have not had an eyeball fly at me from the stage and land in my gin. Such gory cocktail snacks were made possible by the recent production of King Lear. This is why I’ll listen to Radio 4’s Glenda Jackson and the Making of King Lear. Few people have the authority to cut through the hours of ginger wine on Christmas Day at 11pm but if anyone can do it, it will be Glenda Jackson talking about why she returned to the stage to tackle such a monumentally challenging role. This…

Thank you to Damian Barr for the article on homophobia in football [December 5-11] – I couldn’t agree more that this is what is at the heart of the problem. It brings to mind the discussion surrounding Donald Trump’s justification of misogyny by pleading “locker-room talk”. This is a phrase that has always troubled me and I was appalled to hear everyone suddenly taking offence when it is a concept so widely accepted in our society. In fact, a year ago while studying at Oxford University, I was chatting with some people at a party about football managing. One female student had an impressive knowledge of the business and bemoaned the almost complete lack of women in managerial positions. The response from several male students was to argue that women…

“You have equalised two people who are in a sense unequal in the world” I applaud your good sense in buying this copy of The Big Issue. I hope you continue with your buying. I hope that the experience of buying fulfils some of your needs. Your need to be kept informed, titivated, enticed, entertained, questioned; and engaged with one of the biggest looking, seemingly unsolvables of modern times. The figures grow of more and more people living a temporary accommodation life. That is, people who do not control where they live. That where they live is at the whim of some helping agency or is actually nowhere in particular; down the back of some car park, warehouse or ensconced in a frosty sleeping bag in a doorway. When you…

JULIE WALTERS, national treasure Meeting Victoria Wood was like a gift. From the moment we met, we just laughed at the same things. We would look at people and laugh – not in a nasty way – but we’d see the human frailty and how funny it is. I knew I’d met someone very special. I thought, “If I could write, this is what I would have written.” It was like she could see inside my head. This year has been hard. I still can’t get my head around the fact that Vic is gone. I can’t get my heart around it. TOM HOLLANDER, actor and former choirboy I had blond hair when I was 16. I dyed it with Sun-In; I thought I looked prettier with blond hair and…

I’m kvelling about We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, says Michael Rosen. It reminds us that we miss people at Christmas but we can get through Sometimes we go to bed at night and we are dreading waking up the next day. Sometimes it is the very worst thing to think, as you shut your eyes, that when you wake up you have to go through the next day. There have been times in my life when it has been like that. Call it Christmas, call it something else – some of my forebears have Hanukkah – but it is a moment that is joyous. Silly things happen. Nice things happen. We can indulge, in my case, in Christmas pudding. It is something to look forward to and something to…

Fiona 13 13 year old Fiona ran away from home with no phone, cash or bank cards following an argument from her parents. Due to her young age and the fact that her parents had no clues as to where she had gone, the family became ever more concerned and desperate for her safe return. Missing People launched an immediate appeal online, using their website and social media pages, and circulated posters around Fiona’s home area. Thankfully, Fiona returned home within 48 hours having seen the appeal on social media. Christopher 20 Christopher was due to visit his relatives. When he never showed up, his parents became very worried. Along with online publicity, briefings were sent to members of the charity’s ‘support partner network’ - organisations who offer to display…

1. LOLITA Vladimir Nabokov  “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo.Lee.Ta.” Paints absolute love in its purest form, beyond rule and convention. 2. LORD JIM Joseph Conrad  “Jim waited awhile, before Doramin, and then said gently: ‘I am come in sorrow.’ He waited again. ‘I am come ready and unarmed,’ he repeated.” In Conrad’s lyrical and metaphysical writing, Jim’s quest for honour is a deep dive into the human soul. 3. SYMPOSIUM Plato “But who then, Diotima,” I said, “are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?” Love of wisdom, in its lightness and shining…

1. TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY John le Carré An obvious choice but there’s a reason for that: this tale of the search for a mole at the heart of Britain’s intelligence service – based partly on the Kim Philby story, and as much an elegy for a tarnished imperial past as a spy thriller – has been imitated but never bettered. 2. LEGENDS Robert Littell Littell is best known for The Company, his epic fictional history of the CIA, but it’s this novel that showcases his manifold talents, as its hero’s cover stories are peeled away, until a spy’s life – and heart – is left bare. 3. WOLF HALL Hilary Mantel Not a spy story as such but Mantel’s novel contains as much skulduggery, political machination and scheming in…

How do you explain 2016 to an alien? Start with Bowie – there is a connection there, surely – and busk it. Trying to make an ordered list would prove tricky. Picking through the bones of the year may not be instructive. The political earthquakes still tremor and echo. If we’re honest, though, we can identify at least a fixed point when the motion started to bring us to here. The financial crash of 2008. It was not the bailouts of the banks that did it. They were necessary. The problem was a fracturing of trust in institutions we had seen as permanent, and the cost that the poorest in society paid. At the very moment when governments should have built for the future, they cut and cut and those…

TV YOU NEED TO WATCH Much as we love them, there’s more to Christmas than festive specials of Doctor Who , GBBO (the gang’s last hurrah before Paul Hollywood packs up the tent), Strictly Come Dancing (Len Goodman’s last waltz), Call the Midwife , Grantchester and Mrs Brown’s Boys. Quarry (Sky Atlantic) December 21 The answer to box-set fans’ festive prayers, with all episodes available on Sky and Now TV. Logan Marshall-Green leads a fine cast – including Peter Mullan and Nikki Amuka-Bird – as a Vietnam veteran returning home to 1970s Memphis with his reputation and mental health in tatters and getting involved in a shady crime syndicate.…

Jo Adamson, a former Big Issue vendor, is registered blind. Earlier this year her life took an extraordinary twist. After losing her eyesight in a car crash a decade ago, Jo rediscovered her love of drawing. “After I lost my sight, I didn’t think I could draw any more,” she says. “I hadn’t drawn for years but I was encouraged to give it a go recently at a women’s support group I go to, and I’ve not stopped since. I still struggle to see but I use bright coloured wax, which reflects in the light, and get very close to the paper. It makes me so happy. It’s my life now.” Jo’s incredible success is all the more remarkable given the limitations her disability brings. She has no sight out…

We have teamed up with Audible audiobooks to offer each Big Issue reader a free download of one of Neil Gaiman’s best-loved fables, The Sleeper and the Spindle. Gaiman is the bestselling author of Stardust, adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro, as well as Coraline (turned into an animated film in 2009) and American Gods, his mythological road-trip epic which hits TV screens in a lavish adaptation next year, starring Gillian Anderson, Ian McShane and Crispin Glover. In captivating and darkly funny tale The Sleeper and the Spindle, Gaiman and Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell twist together the familiar and the new, as well as the beautiful and the wicked, to tell a brilliant version of Snow White’s (sort of) and Sleeping Beauty’s (almost) stories.…

Alejandro Zambra: I am so glad you selected Multiple Choice as the Book of the Year. Thank you, Big Issue! I want to share this honour with Megan McDowell, who did a terrific job with her translation. I didn’t think this weird little book would travel so far. I was halfway through a long story about the time I took the Academic Aptitude Exam but I didn’t really like that story. So one night I started playing around with the original exercises of the exam and I felt the joy of parody and stuck to it. Later things turned way sadder and bitter, but to begin with, writing this book was pure joy. I think Multiple Choice is about how those structures mark you; against the illusion of a single,…

STEVE SILBERMAN My selection for the best book of 2016 is David France’s How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids. It’s a soul-shattering, magisterial and ultimately uplifting history of the scrappy, irreverent young cultural provocateurs who launched ACT UP (the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) to pressure the medical establishment to develop effective treatments for HIV in the shadow of a ravaging pandemic that former US President Ronald Reagan refused to mention in a press conference until thousands of people had died. Deeply reported and powerfully written, it shows how marginalised people can band together to achieve the seemingly impossible, and should be a leading contender for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction this year. Honourable mentions: I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong;…

THE BIG PICK Celebs love to dish to The Big Issue. Can you pick the right ones from these 2016 nuggets? 1. Hollywood silver fox Richard Gere spoke to The Big Issue to promote his new film Time Out of Mind. Who does he play in that film? a) A dashing young navy officer who falls in love with a prostitute b) A prostitute who falls in love with a duplicitous, smooth-talking lawyer c) A homeless man called George 2. “I’m more of a woodwork man myself” – which Labour politician past or present gave this insight about what they get up to in their spare time? a) Ken Livingstone b) Ed Balls c) Jeremy Corbyn 3. Which childhood toy did Trolls star Anna Kendrick say she would like to…