Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/19/2022 i The Big Issue

My grandmother loved Victoria. She’d be mourning Elizabeth’s loss too My grandmother believed passionately that the 20th century went wrong when Queen Victoria died in 1901, aged 81. She left the century and the country in the lurch. According to my gran, the First World War came out of the incompetence of Victoria’s son Edward VII. He did not know how to handle Victoria’s grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Second World War had just finished when she told me these things. She believed that World War II was simply a continuation of the First World War, and that it all flowed from the stupid King Edward. Mrs Mary Ann Bird was almost 15 when Victoria died. Later, as a 65-year-old granny, she constantly rued the day the great Queen passed…

COVER FEATURE Big Issue vendor Dave Martin, who sells the magazine at Tesco in Hammersmith, West London, met Prince William earlier this summer (below right) as the royal sold the magazine to mark his 40th birthday. Martin said: “It’s sad news, not only for the royal family but for the people of this country. She was well-liked and will surely be missed. I was glad to have met William earlier this year. I feel sad for the royal family right now.” Bridgette Sibley, who sells the magazine at Waitrose in Southsea, Portsmouth, said she was “very, very distressed” at the news, adding, “She’s been an icon. What more is there to say? She reminds me of a graceful swan, floating along, full of grace. She has done a brilliant, fantastic…

The 240 Project is a London activity centre supporting vulnerable adults through services such as art workshops. Several of its members are regular contributors to Big Issue Street Art, and later this month they will stage their annual exhibition of affordable art, 240 Artworks, at The Tabernacle in London. All are welcome to attend and to purchase original artworks, with the profits helping to support the 240 Project in its important work. The colourful artwork pictured is titled A Change From The Norm by Rene Robbins, a long-time contributor to Street Art who is in her nineties and suffers from arthritis and a degenerative eye condition. Rene will be exhibiting as part of 240 Artworks, alongside the likes of John Sheehy, Sean Griffin, Lui Saatchi and more. Open preview Thursday,…

The name’s Flatley. Michael Flatley. He’s known by other aliases, of course. Lord of the Dance, the Celtic Tiger. The Bostonian who revolutionised Irish dance via the vote-counting gap at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994 (which Ireland went on to win for a third year in a row), broke records by tapping 35 times a second and had his feet insured for around £50 million. After Riverdance leaped and drummed and pummelled its way into popular culture, a cavalcade of blockbuster Flatley shows followed, which collectively have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, euros, pounds, yen and plenty of other currencies, as they tour and tour again, crisscrossing the globe. And now, Michael Flatley has written a spy thriller, Blackbird, directed by Michael Flatley, starring Michael Flatley, funded by…

ROB, 52 Things are not good at the moment. No one’s got any money because the price of gas and electricity has gone through the roof and the trains have gone on strike for four days this month. I’m coming from Faversham, and it means I have to go down to three days a week because I can’t get to my pitch. It’s more than £20 a day for the train fare. When I first started getting a weekly ticket it was £80, now it’s £90. It’s a lot of money, and when you don’t buy a ticket they nick you for it. I try and explain the situation and that I don’t have any money. I want to keep selling in Longfield because I like it. I’ve been there…

HOMELESSNESS How you can use your spare room to tackle homelessness this winter The cost-of-living crisis is likely to see more people fall into homelessness and you may be wondering how you can help. You’ve already bought a Big Issue magazine but how else can you take direct action? If you have some spare space then the Nightstop service could be for you. The service allows volunteers to sign up to offer young people experiencing homelessness a place to stay for the night. Volunteers sign up and then, after background checks have been carried out, they are asked to make themselves available to provide a bed, an evening meal and breakfast to a youngster referred by a charity, college or social services. All hosts receive expenses for offering up accommodation.…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Good feline Really enjoyed the book reviews in the latest Big Issue, however, the Top 5 talking cats [Issue 1529, September 5] missed out my favourite cat Midnight, who first appeared in Last Chance Hotel, a young adult murder mystery by Nicki Thornton. Midnight also features again in further books, which is brilliant. Could I also make the point that not all of us have a smartphone, so I am unable to access the pasta recipe [Dispatch, September 5]. Wish folk wouldn’t make rash generalisations. Pam Bennett, Dorset Wheels of misfortune Thanks for highlighting the issue of poor bus services [Issue 1526, August 15]. I live in Guildford, which is a…

Standing beside a polytunnel in the middle of a farm in rural Devon, I’m holding a cucumber I’ve just plucked from the vine. It’s more compact and firm than the long, watery kind you’d usually find in a supermarket, but as I take a bite, the only words I can conjure to compare the enhanced taste to these standard varieties is: “more cucumber-y”. My unrefined palate is hardly surprising. Like millions of other Brits, I grew up in an urban environment that left little room for thought about where my food came from, let alone how it was grown. Ed Scott, the man who lovingly grew the organic cucumber I am now eating, admits that he used to be the same. “Before I came to work at Riverford Farm, I…

REVIEWS A safety blanket for the marginalised There’s a war on, but only some of us know it’s happening,” writes Morgan M. Page in her introduction to Morbid Obsessions: On trans and sex worker bodies and writing fiction from the margins, the latest chapbook from the radical queer publisher Cipher Press. The war that Page is referring to is the one that positions trans people and sex workers on one side and everyone who thinks they represent everything that’s wrong with modern society and culture on the other. Most level-headed people (and thankfully, according to recent polls and surveys, that is most of the British population) do not think that trans people and sex workers are a hazard to the fabric of British society. There is, however, a very small…

How the new King could help stop the rot The closure of some foodbanks to mark the Queen’s funeral should not be the main concern. It is a concern, of course, for those who rely on food-banks. But the much bigger issue, the thing that should really get us angry, is that there are so many foodbanks at all, and that people need to rely on them. THAT is a shame on Britain. In the months before he became king, Charles visited foodbanks at either end of Britain, notably in Wandsworth and another in Caithness. Around the time of his visit to the Wandsworth project the Trussell Trust revealed that their network of 1,300 foodbanks handed 2.5 million emergency food parcels to people in crisis over the last year. They…

At 16, I was living in Pretoria, and we had just moved from a Black area to a very white area. South Africa was open, so Black people were allowed to move into certain parts and my parents were always against boundaries, so they pushed those limits. They wanted a better life for their kids. That was the aim, but it also meant we moved into a very hostile area. We were the only Black people in the area, so there were no neighbours or kids we could play with. Our parents wanted us to be safe, which meant if we wanted to visit friends they would need to drive us. Because if we got the bus, big white boys would attack us. When Nelson Mandela was released [in 1990]…