Innholdsfortegnelse for 28-12-2016 i The Big Issue

On the buses John Sutherland’s article [November 28–December 4] on the old was an interesting read. There are good arguments for the old having bus passes, etc. Whether the needs of many elderly people are greater than, for example, a young family with the expenses of creating a home and having children may be a different matter. His support for bus passes for the old – by reference to disabilities that they can suffer – might confuse some. There is a separate category of bus passes for disabled persons. Any disabled person who wants to find out if they are eligible for this can contact the county or unitary council or London borough for the area they live in. Tim Jones, Rugeley Oh dear, John Sutherland is Mr Grumpy, big…

A bold new solution to homelessness in Britain borrows from our wartime past: the building of emergency prefabs. The prefabs – homes built quickly in factories and craned on to empty sites – were last seen at the end of World War Two to house the huge number of soldiers returning from battle. A striking new council scheme in Lewisham, south London, has used the latest factory construction techniques to deal with the contemporary housing crisis, creating 24 colourful prefabs for homeless families on the site of a demolished leisure centre in a matter of weeks. Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) for Lewisham Council, the PLACE project will house up to 96 people in all and has cost the local authority £5m. Council bosses believe it will…

How sad and how lacking in worth I felt when I read Lynne Rees’ letter [December 12-18]. I’m a pensioner in my mid-70s who felt well-enough informed to vote remain in the EU referendum and to be horrified at the election of Trump. I don’t want to write a list of all the voluntary and care work I have done and organised over many years; homeless, lonely, desperate people have been the motivation for my politics, philosophy and action. Is political expression in this country now at a level where people (and I won’t use ‘ordinary’, for none of us is that) who care a lot are belittled so often by those who have no idea of what we really think. I weep to be called a ‘so-called liberal’ who…

“Will the future not just be the logical, careful thing we thought it would be?” At year’s end a shock to the system seems to have hit people over the political election results of our American cousins and our earlier unenthusiastic Europeans in our home referendum. Because of the world-changing nature of both results you can see why a political iron bar seems to have whacked our collective heads – stunning us into confusion. As if the verities of old be dashed. And in history, there seems to be no equal. When I heard the referendum results, I immediately thought about the execution of Charles I, and the reported collective sigh that was given when the king’s head toppled into a wicker basket. People, it seemed, suddenly realised that whatever…

Just before Christmas we received an email from Donald Trump. “Thank you,” it read, “because of your support, we delivered a massive victory that the world will never forget.” Crumbs, we thought, what did we do?! Obviously, we don’t have Nigel Farage-strength links but it got us thinking, what part did we play in the biggest political shock of the century? Fear, disillusionment, jingoism – the signs were all there in the pages of The Big Issue throughout 2016. This distillation of quotes illustrates the evidence that was hiding in plain sight. Trump’s victory was never in doubt. Daniel Radcliffe, actor – September 14, 2015 Do you want to hear about my favourite political conspiracy theory? Donald Trump is running a false flag campaign for Hillary Clinton. If Trump was…

Over recent years Adam Driver has been hand-picked by Hollywood’s best directors: Steven Spielberg (Lincoln), Clint Eastwood (J Edgar) and the Coen Brothers (Inside Llewyn Davis). He rose to fame playing the emotionally unstable boyfriend of Lena Dunham’s character in Girls, and went interstellar as Kylo Ren in last year’s Star Wars incarnation, The Force Awakens. His spectacularly understated performance in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson means all eyes are eagerly anticipating his next role in Silence, from another directing great, Martin Scorsese. With Silence at the start of the year and Episode VIII due in December, Driver will be a dominant face of 2017. We’re in a belligerently garish Mayfair hotel in London where Adam Driver – tall, lean, floppy of hair, d’Artagnan of beard – is dressed in sombre greys…

They get to you, the Brontës. I grew up about eight miles from Haworth and there is something about the atmosphere at the Parsonage. Their personal story is compelling, they all died young – none reached 40 – but wrote work still hugely popular so long after their deaths. This is the first time I have written about real people. You feel a kind of pressure. You don’t want to misrepresent them, and I was keen to avoid the tropes of period drama. Writing about people you know are a lot cleverer than you will ever be is daunting. You have to make the imaginative leap and start inventing the language they speak. I remember so vividly first putting words in Charlotte Brontë’s mouth. The main thrust of the drama…

Hot on the heels of their small screen revival, Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill return to Glasgow’s state-of-the-art SSE Hydro for Still Game Live 2: Bon Voyage. Following their staggering 21 sell-out nights at the Hydro in 2014, where they performed to in excess of 210,000 eager fans, the guys will be back at the Hydro February 4-16 with a spanking new live show that promises to be their most ambitious one yet! Last time around, the phenomenal stampede for tickets put online ticketing sites into total meltdown, unable to cope with the overwhelming demand for what was possibly the biggest ticket scramble in Scottish showbiz. Tickets are on general sale now via thessehydro.com / 0844 395 4000 and ticketmaster.co.uk / 0844 844 0444. We have 10 pairs of tickets…

There should be no predictions for 2017. None. At Christmas last year you could still get odds of 8/1 for Donald Trump becoming US president. Given that he was already at that time frontrunner for the Republican nomination, albeit fancied by NO pundits, this was pretty generous for a two-horse race. Last Christmas, it was still worth a good punt on Brexit. And Leicester, though a bit shorter than the 5,000/1 they started the season on, were still getting very, very generous odds to win the English Premier League. The thing they all have in common is that predictions placed them nowhere. And we know what happened. All these systemic shocks were identifiable, had we paid attention rather than seeing the reality as we wanted to see it. Trump, or…

SOUP QUEUE BY MOCSARI GERGELY Mocsari moved to London from Hungary in March this year and now lives in a hostel in Bayswater. He attended art school for two years in Hungary. “On the street I watch people, their faces, and later paint and draw what I remember of them. At art school I did precise figure drawings and paintings but now I prefer more abstract representations.” IN THE LAND OF ETERNAL YOUTH BY ANNA JANULIN This body is not the young, But the soul, and the heart. True love never dies, and will never grow old. Love knows no boundaries, Jealousy or pain Beauty is in your heart and soul The body never punish Beauty is not eerily life But love, joy, happiness Beauty is thy sensitive, open heart.…

Chav, Sudoku, bovvered, carbon footprint, credit crunch, simples, big society, squeezed middles, omnishambles, selfies, vape, tears of joy emoji: these are all the WOTYs since WOTYs began. The Word of the Year is an annual opportunity for the tweedy lexicographers of The Oxford English Dictionary to encapsulate the spirit of the year past. With each of these WOTYs we swell our vocabularies by learning the meaning of an additional word we all already knew the meaning of, so more of a communal one-word conversation on what this year was all about. And what was 2016 all about? Brexit, Trump and Lies, which the OED summarised as post-truth. Of all WOTYs, post-truth seems the least frothy. “Post-truth,” they say, “is an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts…

Put down the Christmas pud, step away from the selection box. It’s time to walk it off. Courtesy of Walkingworld.com we bring you fascinating hidden gems around the UK, plucked from our Hidden Britain pages in 2016. City or country, easy or strenuous, there’s a route for every curious stroller. You can download each of these walks – with an Ordinance Survey map and illustrated step-by-step guide – to your phone (ditch Google Maps!), your GPS or to print off and take with you. Get those boots on...…

HAMILTON: AN AMERICAN MUSICAL Victoria Palace Theatre, London, from November; hamiltonthemusical.co.uk Given a huge extra boost of publicity, were it even needed, by inviting the ire of Donald Trump following a cast member’s speech against his policies at a performance in New York in November, Broadway’s most talked-about new show Hamilton: An American Musical is coming to the UK at last. After a near year-long drum-roll, the hip-hop musical about the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution will reopen a revamped Victoria Palace Theatre in November. DRAKE Various UK dates, January 25–February 23; drakeofficial.com Having racked up 4.7 billion Spotify plays in 2016 – equivalent to everyone alive streaming one of his songs 0.64 times – it’s safe to say that…