Innholdsfortegnelse for 15-05-2017 i The Big Issue

On his first day as newly elected Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham announced a plan to end homelessness in the city by 2020 by launching a fund to tackle the problem. And in addition to donating 15 per cent of his £110,000 mayoral salary to the Homelessness Fund, he also announced a crowdfunding drive so that the public can donate to the campaign too. As we went to press more than £10,000 of the £100,000 target on the Gofundme page had been met. Shelter estimates that more than 3,200 people are homeless in Greater Manchester, and rough-sleeping has grown 11 per cent in the last year – on top of a 10-fold increase in the previous decade. “Greater Manchester has been fortunate enough to witness some of the fastest…

“ Father Ted went some way to changing Irish society in a healthy way. We lanced a boil” At 16 I was lonely and insecure, bullied and unhappy. I was obsessed with science fiction, comics, music and comedy. I had an existential crisis every day. I was very tall but I worried about losing my temper so I tried to keep out of trouble by reducing my height, which gave me a permanent slouch. School was all-male and violent, like living in a really bad area for 12 years. It’s interesting to me that one of the first things we do as parents is prepare our children for life in a prison yard. The relief I felt leaving school was unbelievable. I was around 16 when I…

PHOTOGRAPHY INSIDE THE ARK This place could save us all. With nuclear armageddon imminent, here is a rare peek inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. With close to a million species of plant seeds stored in this remote outpost, somewhere between Norway and the North Pole, it should be the first port of call for any post-apocalypse survivors. Photographer Dornith Doherty gained access to document Svalbard and similar facilities around the world, which will preserve life on Earth no matter how hard the rest of us try to destroy it. Let’s just hope someone leaves a map. Archiving Eden by Dornith Doherty will be published later this month…

‘Unlikeable woman’ is a charge that is becoming something of a dog whistle in contemporary fiction – a subtle and nasty shorthand for a woman seen as improper or distasteful. Yet Claire Messud, Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins and others have seen success with ‘unlikeable’ female narrators. According to the bestseller lists, we love to indulge in their unladylike behaviour. Joining their ranks, Helen McClory’s Flesh of the Peach opens with an appropriate dedication: “To all the unlikeable women in fiction and outwith it.” This debut novel doesn’t ask – what makes a woman like this? But instead, what can grief do to us, and do we even notice? Do we realise what we are becoming as we become it? For the main character Sarah, the answer is no. Having lost…

Fittingly, as we get the first faint glimmerings of summer, there are plenty of outdoor activities this week to pick from. The Chelsea Flower Show (May 23-27, Chelsea, London; rhs.org.uk) has been running in west London since 1912 and is a huge event – so leave plenty of time to see everything and prepare for enormous crowds amid genteel greenery. Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre (May 19 to September 23, Regent’s Park, London; openairtheatre.com) returns and has four major productions this year stretching across the summer months – On the Town, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Jesus Christ Superstar – in one of the capital’s most handsome parks. Should you favour the nocturnal, Museums at Night (May 17-20, various locations, London; museumsatnight.org.uk) lets you explore the capital’s…

I’ve been selling the magazine in Newcastle city centre for the past couple of years now. I’ve got a good spot at Grey’s Monument. Although it’s busy with buses and metro commuters, I get some really good banter going with people – I try to make them laugh and put a smile on their faces. In the evening I’ll move to the Theatre Royal to catch the theatre crowd. The Big Issue has helped me out when things have got tricky. I’ve sold it for spells over the past five years whenever my housing situation has been difficult. For a while I moved to Birmingham, and I also gave London a try, but I decided to move back to Newcastle. I was born and bred here. I’ve stayed in hostels…

The Big Issue's recent exposés showed how arrears can spiral and ultimately lead to homelessness.Peter Dean explains how Council Tax Advisors can help before the debt collectors come calling Rachel, a 37-year-old single mother, was living in fear of enforcement agents pursuing council tax debt and on the brink of suicide when her family intervention support worker sought help from Council Tax Advisors (CTA), a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing free expert advice and assistance to people in crisis over council tax arrears. A mother of two with a history of mental illness and reliant on Employment and Support Allowance, Rachel* was struggling to cope with daily tasks let alone enforcement agents. Before CTA stepped in, Rachel could see no way out of the crisis that resulted from her council…

About a year ago, on a quiet day at the office, I started posting postcards on Twitter. Not for their collectable beauty or even for their historic interest but simply because I had one or two knocking about the house and the messages intrigued me. I could see that, presented this way, the messages on the most ordinary old postcards were loaded with a humour and poignancy that, despite their age, is startlingly fresh. Something like gold glitters behind the faded ink and smudged postmarks. And so began a strange, between-doing-proper-work mission to gather a hoard of abandoned postcards and bring them to a new, digital audience as Postcard From the Past, a rolling anthology of micro-stories, misshapen one-liners and cries for help. Who wouldn’t be beguiled by messages as…

“The Jews worked as slave labourers for the Nazi occupation, most of whom never saw sunlight again” When I was a boy, my father would suddenly emerge from our house, call out “Tommy, wanna see something”, then wave me toward his dusty old flatbed truck. Off we’d go, always toward places where something weird had occurred. A truck lifted by wind, then set down on top of a house. A bed hanging precariously in a tree. Water flowing anywhere it shouldn’t. For my father, these were works of surreal art, nature’s way of painting Dali’s melted clocks. Such was, I think, the origin of my attraction to dark places, and it was one I later extended beyond the acts of nature to include the terrible works of man. Following this…

An early warning sign for problem drinking is waking up and remembering things you’d done you wish you hadn’t. Here’s a new addition to the familiar regrets: trashing an entire section of downtown Seoul underfoot. As drunken misdeeds go, it’s a tad more cataclysmic than a 3am text to your ex. Still, such is the burden poor Gloria, the hard-drinking young woman (played by Anne Hathaway) at the centre of Colossal, must bear. The premise of this film, from Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo, is a real head-scratcher. Having been dumped by her nice-guy boyfriend for her boozy ways, New York resident Gloria returns to her drab home-town in the sticks. There she starts work at the bar owned by an old friend: not the greatest choice of employ for a…

THAMES This artist, who prefers to remain anonymous, submits her work via London homeless charity the 240 Project. “I used to draw at school but not since, so this is like continuing on from my memories… bridging two periods in my life, playing again. The process of painting is therapeutic, joyful.” STITCHES BY JOHN SHEEHY An exhibition of works by Irish-born ex-homeless artist John Sheehy – a regular Street Art contributor – is taking place at Studio Voltaire gallery in London. Selections from a vast body of work created over 18 years – including printmaking, ceramics and sculpture, playwriting, poetry and music – will be presented on a large-scale display system, with works changing and evolving throughout the show’s duration. The exhibition runs until June 18. studiovoltaire.org BUY STREET ART!…

I take an extraordinary number of photographs in my garden.It isallvery well going on safari to the Serengeti or the Antarctic but it is extraordinarily expensive, you won’t be spending a long time there, it is an unfamiliar environment and you won’t know the species as well as you know the squirrels and blackbirds. Plus, if you fail in your venture, you won’t be going back there in a hurry, whereas you can go back into your gardentheverynextday. In my garden and my local woods, I know the environment. I know when the sun is going to be in the right place. I know when the trees look best. I have been photographing blue tits out of my kitchen window for years. Blue tits in winter go to 92 per…

King Arthur, according to legend, is not dead. He’s only sleeping. Depending on which version of Arthurian mythology you adhere to, the warrior king renowned for his round table, chivalrous knights and nobility is currently slumbering beneath Hadrian’s Wall, Arthur’s Seat, Mount Etna or Glastonbury Abbey. He will return to reclaim his title when the nation needs him most. As if by magic, with the UK on the brink of leaving Europe and in the midst of an election campaign with grave implications for the very future of the kingdom, King Arthur comes back from the dead. All banter and swordplay, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is more superhero origin story than faithful exploration of the legend, with Charlie Hunnam as the unsuspecting muscular wide-boy geezer…

“I like my prison dramas to be one extreme or the other: either completely comic or utterly horrendous” “There is no theatre so sublime as prison,” said Shakespeare. Well, he didn’t, but he should have done. It is strange that Shakespeare never wrote a play set inside chokey, given that it is such a perfect stage for all of the drama, mystery, raw humanity and rollicking LOLs that he specialised in. Mind you, perhaps one of his plays is set in the nick. How would I know? I only ever did A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Macbeth and Hamlet at school. They were all cracking stories but none were a patch on, say, The Shawshank Redemption or Scum. It is no coincidence so many of the greatest stories ever told –…