Innholdsfortegnelse for 12-06-2017 i The Big Issue

Time never stands still. Unfortunately it often speeds up when you wish it would slow, and vice versa. As Albert Einstein put it: “An hour with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” Everyone has experienced fast hours and marathon minutes – from the five-hour chat at the office party, vainly sieving your boss’s monologue for wit, to the five-second night vaporised playing Grand Theft Auto. These time warps occur because time sense is a perception manufactured by your mind. If the pace changes it’s because something has shifted in how you pay attention. The brain estimates time’s passage by snatching temporal markers wherever it can. Just as we see a breeze…

In 1979, 42 per cent of people in the UK lived in social housing. Today that figure is eight per cent – with a waiting list of around 1.4 million. How did we get to this point? A new documentary, Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle, unravels the dark tale. The film, narrated by Maxine Peake, charts the decline and fall of public housing, razed to the ground over the last four decades by policies, failures and deals between developers and councils. “I wanted to look at the human cost of the housing crisis,” says director Paul Sng, who is best known for 2015’s film Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain, which followed the riotous rise of the UK’s angriest band. His new film – which he describes as “political but not…

“You end up with Netflix Pressure – that dead-eyed stress trance” Water-cooler conversations really are over. Officially. In fact, hands up anyone who has stood around a water cooler at all since 1995? Nope. It now sounds like something out of an ancient, yellowing Dilbert cartoon. You may as well send a fax or listen to the soothing ‘pssssskkkskskskskskhchakingchakingbingbing’ sound of a dial-up modem. Yet we still chat about TV when we’re in the office. We still feel an urge to use telly talk as social adhesive. But, in reality, we are rapidly becoming unstuck in weird, unknown territory. Ask people at work what they watched last night and you’ll receive answers that are bizarrely disparate, especially if your co-workers are at the younger end of the scale. “At the…

It’s clear now that Jeremy Corbyn’s rise was helped by a huge increase in young voters. Indications are that over 70 per cent of 18-24 year olds voted. Organisations such as Bite The Ballot and Rize Up UK helped galvanise. Not all these voters will have backed Jeremy Corbyn. But it’s clear that many did, defying all received notions on political parties needing to move to the centre ground. And while Corbyn may not have won, his leadership of a resurgent Labour Party is one of the primary stories of an incredible General Election. Before election day, Jeremy Corbyn gave his final broadcast interview to The Big Issue, when we hooked up with online youth media site UNILAD for a Facebook Live event last week. The broadcast, drawing on UNILAD’s…

By the age of 16 I was besotted with music; blues and trad jazz. I actually wanted to play the clarinet but I couldn’t afford one, so I bought a banjo from a school teacher for £2, 10 shillings and I paid him half a crown a week. I still have that banjo on the wall of my study. I then borrowed a guitar and practised playing quite a bit, trying to remember rock’n’roll tunes I’d heard on the Alan Freeman show on Radio Luxembourg – Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley. I joined a skiffle group that was actually making money going round working men’s clubs. Before that my own band had played youth clubs for a cup of tea and a biscuit. I first found out when I…

It was Rod Stewart who first mentioned the phrase ‘do as I say not as I do’ to me. We were chatting in a pub garden near his home in Essex. It was a lovely, sunny day, we’d had a kickabout in the car park, and he was having his photograph taken in a botanical garden of a Versace shirt for the front of The Times Saturday magazine. We were both essentially being paid for being there, and to be honest I couldn’t see too much of what he’d done that wouldn’t have been worth doing. True there are a few moments in his recording career which even he admits are worth skipping over and a period of spandex leggings most would consider criminal but as far as wine, women,…

As sci-fi is so good at pointing out, the world is full of weird coincidences. Chinese roots seem to make for the best contemporary sci-fi/ fantasy authors (see also Ted Chiang, Han Song, Chan Koonchung) but what are the odds that two of the very best should not only share Chinese origins but also a name? It’s enough to send Philip K Dick’s corpse spinning like celestial stardust under the influence of angular momentum (thanks Wikipedia). Hugo/Nebula award-winner Ken Liu must enjoy his nominal twinning with China’s bestselling giant Cixin Liu; as the leading translator of Chinese sci-fi into English, Ken hastranslatedagoodproportion of The Wandering Earth, this first English collection ofCixin’s mind-bending short stories. Probably unlike most readers, I found Ken before Cixin. Since reading the former’s terrific The Paper…

It’s Christmas come early for nosey parkers, as normally closed green spaces in the capital fling open their gates. Open Garden Squares Weekend (June 17 & 18, various locations, London; opensquares.org) makes some 230 private and secret gardens across the city – including roof gardens and the green spaces of historic buildings – accessible to the public. A rare chance to see a veiled London. Fans of pomp and ceremony will not know what to do with themselves this week. Well, they will, as there are two things that will float their metaphorical boats. Trooping The Colour (June 17, St James’ Park, London; householddivision.org.uk) has taken place since the reign of Charles II and runs in June to mark the Queen’s official birthday. More than 1,400 soldiers and officers of…

“I work hard. I’m smashing all my own selling targets” FACTS ABOUT ME... MY FAVOURITE HOBBY Hill walking. I love to get away on a long walk – no radio, no TV, no distractions. MY FAVOURITE PLACE Ben Nevis. The views are amazing – they really blow you away. I was up there once when a thunder storm started so I had to descend 600 feet as quickly as possible. I started selling the magazine in Bristol in October last year. Things were not going great for but The Big Issue gave me a way of earning money and working towards something better. I sell in a nice part of town and I work hard – I’m smashing all my own selling targets. I’m from the north-east of Scotland and…

Next month would have been the 150th birthday of AE Douglass. One-hundred-and-fifty years is a long time but not for the specimens Douglass studied, for he was the first to realise that trees wrote their stories in their rings, and founded the field of dendrochronology. Martin Bridge , a lecturer in the subject at UCL, is a specialist in dating timbers of medieval buildings, and is one of the few living people who can claim to “have worked on the Mary Rose”. He explains the wonder of wood and the information all trees, including this famous wedge of giant sequoia which crowns the main hall at the Natural History Museum, hold about our past – and future. This piece of a giant redwood puts into context a human life…

Social entrepreneurs once struggled when it came to raising money, perceived to be a risky bet. But that perception has changed. And Big Issue Invest has been in the vanguard of that change. The success of Big Issue Invest, the social investment arm of The Big Issue, shows the incredible impact financial investment can have on life-changing social projects across the UK. Over the past decade Big Issue Invest has established a formidable reputation as the country’s leading social investor – offering business solutions to society’s problems. It is a pioneering way to fund social businesses, charities and other ventures tackling poverty. Big Issue Invest harnesses the power of financial investment to help grow the organisations addressing some of the country’s most pressing social problems – making a major difference…

“His bright smiles were gradually replaced by a fearful, withdrawn expression” When I was 12, my grandfather began to act strangely. It started with inexplicable walks. When he was visiting, he’d leave the dinner table and we would find him, half an hour later, aimlessly wandering the neighbourhood. “Please stop doing that,” my father would say. “Bebakhshid” (‘forgive me’) was all Abbas ever replied in his native Farsi. His bright smiles were gradually replaced by a fearful, withdrawn expression, as if he’d lost something irreplaceable. Before long, he didn’t recognise his own family. He had been stricken by one of the most terrifying illnesses of modern times: Alzheimer’s disease. In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer’s presents the definitive portrait of Alzheimer’s disease – an illness that is rapidly becoming…

The subtitle of Whitney, a moving documentary about the singer Whitney Houston, is Can I Be Me. It’s a question she would ask her producers in the early stages of her career. Having won a high-profile recording contract, the young Houston was carefully packaged to reach as wide an audience as possible. The songs written for her were aimed squarely at pop – for which read white – fans. But at the time Houston longed for tracks that reflected the gospel and R&B she grew up with. “Can I be me?”, this impressionable woman, barely out of her teens, would ask the older men marketing her to middle America. Put this way, the phrase seems less like a question than a poignant plea. This sensitive, not entirely uncritical, documentary grows…