Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/27/2021 i The Big Issue

Maria Cirpaciu, 24 M&S, Morningside, Edinburgh Work hard to support your family. You will move to Scotland when you’re 18 for work and it will be great. The Big Issue will help you be part of a community and you will meet nice friends in Morningside. Mary Daly, 47 opposite WH Smith, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset At 16 I left foster case, so I’d say to the young Mary: don’t mess with the wrong people because things will end up going wrong. Then later on if people see you selling The Big Issue and tell you to get a job you should just ask them what they think you’re doing. But I’d also tell her she will have kids and a great friend called Den who will really want her around. Martin…

There’s a major issue with climate change hitting us smack in the face, even though we’ve had years and years of warning. When I was a kid, for example, we’d have bees all over the place. Now I’m running around trying to rescue them. All the answers to life are here on this Earth but we’re killing it all. Take the rainforests. If they’re removing out so many acres a day it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that sooner or later you’re going to run out of rainforest. Which means animals are chased out of their habitat. We have to replant, but it’s taking centuries. I think action will have to come from the people rather than their leaders, but not everyone understands it or is educated…

For Big Issue seller Dave Campion, video games are about escape – whether it was playing at his friend Matt’s house while homeless or to overcome problems when he was in accomodation. But what if Dave had the power to bring the two worlds together to create a video game about ›e Big Issue? We passed him the controller to figure it out You see homelessness in a lot of video games, particularly ones with an open world, but because it’s in a fictional world, you oǼten don’t really pay attention to it. You see it, but you don’t really focus on it. You don’t think about characteristics of those homeless people. What are their personalities? There is even a game where you can sell something like The Big Issue…

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 22 or 23 and it was a life-changing moment for me. I’d thought I just had depression but that was when they told me I had bipolar as well. Living with it is awful. Your moods go up and down and you cry at silly things. Then the things people say to you can affect you in such a bad way and make your day go horrible. Sometimes I can’t face the day and I have to push myself to go out. Most of the time I can feel it coming on and I want to hide away, but it’s difficult when you have to be out in public. That’s why selling The Big Issue is quite hard for me sometimes.…

Lionel Hegarty is probably our oldest vendor. At 77, he loves selling the magazine. Instead of offering his younger self words of wisdom, he wrote the following poem: I am a happy Big Issue manI love going to work when I smile at all the publicThat makes me happyI love what I am doing so muchI am a cheerful man at all timesI’m glad to be a Big Issue sellerMy pitch is Botley WestwayThis is me on my pitchHope you like itHappy days are here againHere to stay Lionel Hegarty PITCH: Tesco, Botley, Oxford…

Ed Byrne: Where are you right now? Richard Cotterill: I’m sat in the Job Centre in lovely Newton Abbot. Walking has been my passion for years and I discovered your Ed Venturing podcasts. It’s interesting when people are out walking. They interact differently. EB: Part of it is the fact you’re not looking at each other. I know that sounds strange but conversation is slightly different. RC: People consider whatever the subject they’re talking about a lot more. EB: When I take people out walking who haven’t done it before, I always find they can go a lot further than they thought they could. RC: I used to work as a trekking guide. If you said, “Right, we’re going to do a 10-mile walk,” a lot of people, if they’ve…

I come from a railway family and within three weeks of being born I was going around the network with my dad in my little carrycot. My dad used to be a guard and then he was a driver, so I was kind of brought up on the railways. When we were kids living in Bristol, if we wanted to see something different we’d go somewhere like Birmingham New Street. That was the place to be on a Saturday. You’d see all the electric trains up from Euston going to Manchester, Liverpool and Preston. And you’d see the cross-country trains. There are a couple of sidings in the middle of the platforms and back in the day they used to be lined up with locomotives waiting to go on their…

Antiques are more than just a hobby for Norwich vendor Simon Gravell – they are a path out of homelessness. Simon was homeless for a decade, living in a tent near the All Saints Antiques Centre in the Norfolk city that piqued his interest in wheeling and dealing. When he was finally housed, Simon started watching antiques TV programmes to pick up tips and even had a small cameo on the BBC’s Antiques Road Trip in 2018 when he made a sale to presenter Philip Serrell. But the pandemic has set back Simon’s plans to move into antiques full time. The vendor was saving his Big Issue sales to cover a vehicle so he could transport his wares around until his income plunged during Covid. “There’s no point having a…

Rich Rowe has been selling The Big Issue for years. So Big Issue staff in the main London distribution office were surprised and delighted when he revealed a talent for art this summer. Rich, a popular vendor who sells the magazine near Angel tube station in London, came in with a collage created from unsold copies of The Big Issue. The artwork was an instant hit. “Richard has been a vendor for many years now, and he often speaks about interesting hobbies he has,” says service broker Natalia Stevenson. “But he never mentioned his talent for collage until he arrived in our office one day with a piece he had recently made. “When coming to collect his weekly magazines he surprised us with his piece, and said it was made…

SCENE ONE: FROM THE FACTORY TO THE STREET Christopher Eccleston: What would you like to talk about today? Are you happy to talk about what initially led to you being homeless? Clive: I’m happy to talk about anything you like. When I was 16 or 17 I went into factories. You start off as the lad making the tea and eventually, by the time I was 26, I started my own factory. It was doing all right for about three years and then in 1991 there was a recession across the UK. That was a massive hit. One company owed me £28,000 for work when they went bankrupt. I did everything I could to survive but it was a downward spiral. Sometimes I was working three days without stopping, trying…

When John Bird launched ›e Big Issue he wanted to give opportunity to people who didn't have any. It allowed those with nothing to have a means of making a legitimate income. In a series of revolutionary acts, this was, in many ways, the most simple and radical. The means to income has remained a constant, even though the driver to it has changed. Even before Covid lockdowns we noticed a changing demographic to The Big Issue vendor sales force. Increasingly, people who were finding themselves out of the jobs market, particularly those from retail, were stuck in the no-man’s-land of a six-week wait for universal credit (UC) and therefore at risk of dire poverty and losing their home. They came to The Big Issue. We offered a solution to…

From zebras to guinea pigs, Carmarthen vendor Slavi Slavov can capture them all. We first featured Slavi’s artwork The Big Issue earlier this year. Soon afterwards he was delighted to receive emails from as far afield as Canterbury and Newcastle asking if he did commissions. “It was so exciting, I just couldn’t believe it,” Slavi said. “I appreciate everything and it’s really great. The people are lovely. We just emailed each other, they sent me a picture, I did my work and in a couple of days and I sent it back to them.” In his younger days, Slavi spent a year in art school in Sofia, Bulgaria. He couldn’t afford to study for longer but the love of drawing and painting never left him. And it’s not only people…