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ISSUE # 1393 | 20-26 JANUARY 2020

A HAND UP, NOT A HANDOUT | EVER

£2.50 INSIDE Homeless in Davos Believe the hype:Britain’s best new musician The complete guide to current political party leadership elections that you didn’t know you needed

JOY ODE TO

The man who reinvented happiness says he can make the nation smile again

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contents.

BOOKS - P30 P13

JOHN BIRD

Forget most of what passes as news right now and let’s focus on the future

P18

LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

Maxine Peake thought she’d be typecast as a comedian – she was having a laugh

P20

THE POLITICS OF HAPPINESS

Hello,my name is David Welcome to this week’s Big Issue. I sell the magazine in Leicester – I came here to go into rehab after being addicted to heroin for years. Selling the magazine has really helped me with my recovery – I can earn money and as it’s flexible I can go to my support groups and visit my mum, who lives nearby.

Dealing with the general public has also helped me with my social anxiety, so life has got better in many ways. I’d like to do a bit of counselling in the future. Read more from me on page 46.

A HAND UP, NOT A HANDOUT

This magazine was bought by your vendor for £1.25 and sold to you for £2.50.

They are proudly working, not begging. Buy it, take it, spread the word.

If you can’t get hold of a copy of the magazine on a regular basis, you can subscribe to receive The Big Issue every week: bigissue.com/subscribe 20-26 JANUARY 2020

Vendor photo: hollisphotography.uk

P46

How we can do our bit to put a smile on everyone’s face

P24

HOMELESS AT DAVOS

While the super-rich are living it up, Andrew Funk is kipping rough beside them to highlight poverty

P30

BOOKS

Why we need to understand the spread of online fascism

P32

FILM

Armando Iannucci does Dickens in a way no one else has

P34

GUZ KHAN

The Man Like Mobeen star on how the hit comedy shines a light on the disenfranchised BIGISSUE.COM | 03

the big list.

01

What to do this week in England and beyond

Get on the page with Picasso’s love of paper

Whether Pablo Picasso was drawing on it, tearing it, burning it or making it three-dimensional, through experiments with everything from newsprint and napkins to wallpaper, many of his finest works began with humble bits of pulped tree. The Royal Academy’s new exhibition Picasso and Paper explores the Spanish surrealist’s passion for paper – through 300 works from embryonic studies for Guernica to a 4.8m-wide collage.

Royal Academy, London, January 25-April 13; royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/ picasso-and-paper

02

Shop for a selfcleaning hoodie and help the homeless

sounds too good to be true – especially to those one to spillages – but the Hope Hoodie is made om an innovative fabric that repels dirt, liquid d stains, according to its makers. It’s ideal for ople on the streets who are unable to wash their othes regularly. Vendors Unhoused promise that r every hoodie sold another will be donated to a meless person in the UK. nhoused.org/streetwear/hope-self-cleaningoodie

03

Listen to some pearls of wisdom from Lord John Bird

Taking a break from guiding the Future Generations Bill through Parliament, The Big Issue’s founder and editor-in-chief has been speaking to two podcasts about his journey from homelessness to social entrepreneur and life peer. In Media Masters he explains the origins of the world’s firs and biggest street paper; in Black Sheep he discusses breaking few rules in his mission to li�t people out of poverty. mediamasters.fm/john-bird; shows.pippa.io/blacksheep/ episodes/5-lord-john-bird-mbe-im-a-born-liar 04 | BIGISSUE.COM

04

Watch an intergalactic nishambles

aving seen his hit satirical political comedies e Thick of It and Veep begin to look almost nsible compared to the real thing in recent ars, little wonder that TV writer-director traordinaire and Big Issue guest editor mando Iannucci has blasted o�f into the capism of sci-fi in his latest work. Made HBO, Avenue 5 is an intergalactic tourism medy set 40 years in the future, starring ugh Laurie, Josh Gad and Rebecca Front. pect more omnishambles, but now in space. ky One, from January 22 at 10pm

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This week on…

BIGISSUE.

Host Joel Dommett on why we all need The Masked Singer in our lives

‘British politics has never been in a worse state’: Robert Carlyle on playing a PM

05

Watch gigs to help Nottingham’s homeless up off the streets

How the Australian bushfires are a�fecting homeless people Down Under

09

Local lad done good Jake Bugg makes a triumphant homecoming as part of annual multi-venue, one-ticket day festival Beat the Street. All proceeds from ticket sales, merchandise and bar revenues will be donated to local homeless charity Framework. Bugg is among 80 artists appearing on 10 stages alongside the likes of Eyre Llew, Grace Petrie, Lacey and Re�lekter.

Various venues, Nottingham, January 26; beatthestreetsuk.com

06

Support #SmearForSmear

As part of Cervical Cancer Prevention Week, Jo’s Trust is leading a campaign to smear the stigma and myths that exist around HPV viral infections – and ensure that all women and people with a cervix know how cervical cancer can be prevented. Help out by raising awareness, donating or leading your own fundraising initiative. jostrust.org.uk/get-involved/ campaign/cervical-cancerprevention-week

07

View a fashion show of clothes designed by homeless young people

Proving that even lawyers can have a heart, legal firm Bri�fa has teamed up with youth homeless charity Accumulate for a fashion show with a di�ference at London Art Fair. All the garments, as modelled by Bri�fa sta�f, have been made at workshops by Accumulate members – using material donated by fashion house Ted Baker – on the theme of updating lawyers’ wardrobes for the 21st century.

Goodbye boring pinstripe suits.

Business Design Centre, Islington, London, January 23; bit.ly/305ivrA

Give generously for bushfire relief on Australia Day

Typically a day for heading to your nearest Aussie theme pub to sink a few cold ones, Australia’s national day is imbued with grave significance this year following bushfires that have devastated 12 million acres. Join celebrities from Nick Cave and Nicole Kidman to comedian Celeste Barber – who alone has collected a record-breaking almost £30m through Facebook – by donating to disaster relief fundraisers. Be sure to do your research before contributing to make sure your cash goes where it’s needed most.

January 26

08

Drink your fill without breaking dry January

It’s not o�ten that you can go to a booze festival and enjoy a skinful without feeling worse for wear, but then neither is it o�ten that a booze festival is alcohol free. Whether you’re teetotal or just on a dry January, the Dry Weekender at the National Theatre’s cra�t beer pub in London has a range of draught drinks for you to savour across 10 taps, all of them zero per cent strength (or thereabouts).

The Understudy, London, January 24-26; nationaltheatre.org.uk/ your-visit/food-and-drink/ the-understudy

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10 Forget Blue Monday, make yours a #BrewMonday Ignore all that nonsense about January 20 being the most miserable day of the year and stick the kettle on instead. A campaign by the Samaritans is encouraging people to use blue Mondays throughout January and February as an excuse for a sit down, chat and cuppa with colleagues, friends or family members, both to boost morale during the dark months and to help raise cash for people in need of emotional support. samaritans.org/support-us/campaign/ brew-monday

BIGISSUE.COM | 05

platform.

Your views on the big issues

GET IN TOUCH @bigissue /bigissueUK

Cover stories

@bigissueuk letters@bigissue.com Editorial, 2nd Floor, 43 Bath St, Glasgow, G2 1HW

@MissKay01215842 Year 6 created these stunning Big Issue magazines today to conclude their study of The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis. Their articles were also so articulately written. #proudteacher @BigIssue @BreadwinnerThe

THIS WEEK WE ASKED YOU...

A crowdfunder was launched to raise money to make Big Ben bong on Brexit night. What sound would you like to hear chiming out across the land on January 31? @NealCassady64 A big raspberry. @auradanks

@Jen53038 We can all cheer and save money for the emergency services.

Iain Ross Wallace, Facebook The sound of Johnson and Gove’s heads banging together. Cos empty vessels make the most sound!

Simon Hill, Facebook The boing that Zebedee makes, or Reeves & Mortimer frying pan sound.

06 | BIGISSUE.COM

The icing on the cake As a long-time Big Issue reader and now living in Redhill, I have struck up a friendship with Vanessa who has a pitch in the town centre. A few days before Christmas I happened to give her a Christmas card. I had not been feeling very Christmassy at all and I thought that giving a card to somebody who might not expect one might make and them feel a bit more festive. A few days later on Christmas Eve as I was rushing around buying a few bits when she called me over. “I wanted to see you today,” she said.

She went over to her bag and pulled out a box containing...a chocolate cake! Which she then presented to me!!”Happy Christmas!” she said. I hugged her and walked off into the bustling town centre with the biggest smile on my face. I have to say I admire Vanessa’s attitude. She was not interested in being a charity case and so gave me something back. To this end, I feel that the some of the biggest things The Big Issue gives vendors are pride, tenacity, self-reliance and a mindset of ‘I am going to make it!’ despite circumstances. This bloody-mindedness and self-respect is key in getting people back on their feet. It’s been said often enough but a big ‘Well Done’ Big Issue and a genuine thank you to Vanessa – the cake was luscious!

AL Reed, email

Sign of the times It is a total disgrace that those on Jobseeker’s Allowance are not refunded for bus and travel fares on signing days. Someone I know has to pay £8 because they live miles from their Jobcentre. That’s a day’s food. With today’s sophisticated technology, surely signings could and should be done online. In effect, poor people are being charged to sign on.

Stefan Badham, Portsmouth

Scand and deliver My word, page nine of the Big Issue 1391 made for salutary reading. The Norwegian Government has taken such an active role in reducing homelessness, that Megafon, Norway’s happily now defunct version of The Big Issue, feels the need no longer to publish. How wonderful is that! And what have we here in ‘Great’ Britain? A government with such a driven policy of downright neglect. In every sense, it is shameful and shocking. What a secular, selfish society we have been moulded into.

D Grimmond, email

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Shelter from the storm In your most recent issue [January 6-12], Mark deBank criticised the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby for being “out of touch”, due to the way he raised concerns about homelessness from inside a “vast study inside Lambeth Palace”. Perhaps Mark is unaware that when the Syrian crisis hit its peak in 2016, Justin Welby volunteered to take in a Syrian refugee family and house them in a property within the grounds of Lambeth Palace itself. He did this long before anyone else came forward and offered to do the same. He doesn’t shout about it, because he isn’t one to boast. It was only reported briefly in the press at the time.

Another reality which is often underreported is how Christians are on the forefront of tackling homelessness and many other social issues. Almost every food bank in this country is Christian run, for example. According to the Cinnamon Network, 1.8 million Christian volunteers run 210,000 social action projects in the UK. And the value of the time given by the UK church and faith groups to their communities each year is worth an incredible £3bn.

Sam Hailes, editor, Premier Christianity magazine

Separate missions

Sarah Mitchell Wood [January 6-12] and David Sage [December 27-January 5] both write good sense from different points of view. It is true that the church has often failed (and I write as a committed Christian) but Christ’s teaching is absolutely right. Sadly our government has for some years fallen short in its care, hence the huge number of foodbanks and of people denied the help which they need. It was good to read the interview with Archbishop Justin [December 16-26], a splendid man who has been through a lot.

Juliet Chaplin, Cheam /bigissueUK

Smart art We are back!!! Alzheimer’s Society art therapy. This week landscape collages, using old copies of the The Big Issue Talking point, dance crazes; today in 1962 Chubby Checker’s The Twist was released.

Jamila Walker Visual Artist, Facebook @bigissueuk

Cashless mornings are sweet @landandgrow Racking up the smug points in my last week of freedom before I start my new job on Monday. I didn’t have the cash but @ bigissueuk take cards!

Not missing out with my vegan latte and apricot croissant. #celebratethegooddays 20-26 JANUARY 2020

EDITOR’S LETTER

Challenge empty bluster

C

hristmas is a busy time for The Big Issue. Don’t stop reading.

I’ll stop saying Christmas shortly. Not yet, though. At Christmas, we welcome new readers who may not be with us at all other times of the year. We see an increase in vendor numbers. There is a greater likelihood of people buying The Big Issue.

This Christmas was a belter. We don’t often talk about sales. It’s a curious thing to do, and, obviously, nobody is keen to do it when the figures are not great. But it’s worth noting for a few reasons. The first is the scale of the sales. In little over a week, we sold 335,603 copies of The Big Issue Big Christmas special. This is up eight per cent on the previous year. Our Christmas run of five big important mags was up almost six per cent from the previous year. That’s a lot of magazines.

It says a lot about you, as a reader. In these turbulent times the British public is more keen than ever to connect with the most vulnerable people in society. Our vendors, much of the time, are the face and clear frontline of the desperate, growing fractures and need in society. It’s hugely reassuring to know that wonderful, compassionate and wise readers – you have, clearly, impeccable taste – are so keen to help our vendors continue to work their way out of poverty.

This is the fundamental thing.

Our vendors are working to sell The Big Issue to change their lives.

I frequently remind people that we are not a charity. There is a charitable arm to us called The Big Issue Foundation. They do vital work. But we are a business, a social enterprise.

Vendors buy the magazine for half the cover price, then sell it for full cover price. The difference is what they earn. We are, as John Bird often states, a poverty prevention device.

We offer a live and viable alternative.

There is another key part. Increasingly the new Westminster government is making noises about one-nation Britain. The idea that we are a strong union of separate nations making one strong Britain is Boris Johnson’s big play. It’s built on the belief that we can get through whatever comes with a brash can-do attitude and self-belief. And if you challenge this, you are talking Britain down and are therefore some sort of enemy of the state. What’s wrong with you, damn it? Don’t you want bloody bongs! Traitor. This veers somewhere between a cult and a dash through Oz – tap the shoes three times and Brexit boon will boost everything, and fairy godfather Trump will make the world better.

But there must be a challenge. A positive attitude is all very well, but details about what is coming, truth about what is being done, is essential. Not platitudes and rictus grins but clear policies that are paid for to help those who need it most, to really deal with the environmental crisis we’re in, to be clear how we’re going to remain an open and inviting nation after Brexit.

The Big Issue will continue to ask questions, to speak for those without a voice and, with John Bird at the wheel, drive for legislative change that can build for the future.

We’re not just for Christmas. Though, we can all get our trees back up in 10 months’ time.

‘Our vendors are the face of the growing fractures and need in society’

Paul McNamee is editor of The Big Issue @pauldmcnamee Paul.McNamee@bigissue.com BIGISSUE.COM | 07

OFFICIALLY THE MOST

ETHICAL VITAMIN COMPANY ys m

news.

First-ever Children’s Food Insecurity Summit is ‘turning point’ in ending hunger Big Issue Changemakers played a central role in the first-ever London Children’s Food Insecurity Summit as campaigners and kids called on those in power to ensure every child can access a healthy diet.

A new briefing, based on figures from the Greater London Authority, revealed that 400,000 children in London experience food insecurity, while it is the reality for 1.5 million adults in the English capital too.

Last week, young representatives of the Children’s #Right2Food Campaign proposed a new independent Children’s Food Watchdog as well as asking for the introduction of universal free school meals which, for the first time, would include children in families with no recourse to public funds.

The charter also takes the crucial step of asking for statutory funding for free holiday provision to replace the loss of school meals outside of term time.

This builds on the work of the Mayor’s Fund for London’s Kitchen Social campaign, which currently supports over 100 holiday clubs across the capital to provide free food and activities for young people in their neighbourhood.

Kitchen Social programme manager Clara Widdison, who featured in our Top 100 Changemakers for 2020, told The Big Issue that the summit has been a “turning point” for tackling children’s food insecurity in London.

She said: “We know how many young people are out there suffering – I would argue that even one child suffering is too much – but the scale of the problem is something that just simply cannot be ignored.”

The event also brought together two other Changemakers – IFAN’s Sabine Goodwin and academic Professor Greta Defeyter.

Readers have bookshop owner covered If you are in any doubt about the country’s passion for independent bookshops, the heart-warming response to one owner’s plight will make good reading.

Portsmouth FC superfan John Westwood tweeted that he “hadn’t sold a single book” last Tuesday – a first in the 100-year history of Petersfield Bookshop. His tweet caught the

20-26 JANUARY 2020

attention of author Neil Gaiman, who shared the post and attracted more than £1,000 in orders from as far away as New Zealand and the USA. The Big Issue has continually championed the cause for independent bookshops and their power to boost literacy, open minds and forge communities. This is story is a prime example of why.

Soup bike start-up ‘like The Big Issue but tastier’ A social enterprise has bowled us over by vowing to name a soup after The Big issue.

Jonny Wright and Stu Trewhella are in the process of setting up Soupahero – a start-up that will see homeless people employed to sell soup from a specially made bike.

The duo, who both work in TV, cheekily suggested to potential donors “think The Big Issue, but tastier” in an online fundraiser that raised £3,000 in just 14 days before the new year.

Wright and Trewhella are now in the process of buying their first bike and experimenting with flavours for their vegetable soups, and even plan to acknowledge their inspiration by naming one after The Big Issue.

“The support that we have received has kind of blown us away a little bit,” Trewhella told The Big Issue. “It is giving us more focus to get out there as soon as possible and to really make this a sustainable business and not just a flash in the pan .”

Soupahero will launch initially in London food markets with a ‘buy one, give one’ model where a homeless person receives a meal for every soup sold.

BIGISSUE.COM | 09

fact/fiction.

Old news, truthfully retold

Does going to the cinema count as a light workout?

HOW IT WAS TOLD

Illustration: Miles Cole

It’s January, the pressure to shed the Christmas pounds is overwhelming and the cinema offers a sanctuary from the terrible weather.

But could it bring even more than that to the party (a good film aside)? Could it even help you shift the weight and improve your physical health?

In a plot twist fit for any blockbuster flick, reports in various UK media outlets last week suggested that going to the cinema could be counted as a light workout.

Mail Online kicked things off with the headline: “Sitting in the cinema ‘counts as a light workout’ because getting immersed in a film speeds up your heart rate, scientists find”.

That, more or less, set the tone for the rest of the reports with Yahoo!, the Evening Standard, The Times and Metro doing little to deviate from the script.

The online branch of the Daily Express did their bit to add some showbiz with their sensational effort of: “Scientists claim cinema trips as good as EXERCISE in heart and brain benefits – Here’s why”.

All of the stories stemmed from the University College London report, paid for and commissioned by cinema chain Vue, and the research received top billing abroad too. The New York Post and The Australian are just a couple of the outlets overseas which covered the story.

No doubt, the news was greeted with delight by film fanatics and reluctant gym-goers – but, once the credits roll, is there any truth in it?

WORTH REPEATING

FACTS. CHECKED The story is about as believable as an entry in the boxoffice-busting Fast and Furious series.

The headlines are based on a small part of the report entitled The Benefit of Getting Lost.

Researchers assessed two groups of volunteers – 51 film fans who watched the 2019 two-hour live action adaptation of Aladdin at the Vue Westfield Stratford cinema in East London and a control group of 26 people who read a novel for the same amount of time. Both groups were subjected to pre and post-performance questionnaires as well as wearing biometric sensors to measure heart rate, electrodermal activity and body temperature.

From here, academics noted that participants were in the “healthy heart zone of 40-80 per cent of maximum heart rate for 40 minutes” during the film. The report states that: “Thought very light, this level of stimulation can help to build cardio fitness levels and burn fat.”

It’s fair to say that pointing to this as evidence of a light workout might be slightly overestating matters.

And don’t take our word for it – one of the researchers behind the report, UCL neuroscientist Joseph Devlin, has distanced himself from the claims made in the stories.

10 | BIGISSUE.COM

He tweeted in response: “I don’t think @eyethinkdcr [fellow UCL academic Daniel C Richardson] and I would characterise this as light exercise, rather we observed heart rates to be in the ‘healthy heart zone’ as defined by the British Heart Foundation for about 40 minutes on average.”

Even in his discussion in the report, Devlin points to other areas of the report that earn more merit – namely how immersing yourself in the cinema can “promote sustained attention” and “strengthen our ability to concentrate and avoid distractions”.

So the mental benefits outweigh the physical and even a light workout would fall below NHS guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week or 75 minutes of intensive work. And that’s before you take into account the popcorn and sweets scoffed at a showing.

To be fair, the news outlets, on the whole, make it clear that the report was backed by Vue and the Daily Express warns that the small sample size means the findings “should be taken with a pinch of salt”.

But that doesn’t make up for the spurious headlines in this case – stick to sport or more strenuous exercise for your health kick.

The NHS recommends 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity for 19 to 64-year-olds

There were 177 million admissions at UK cinemas in 2018 – a 47-year high (UK Cinema Association)

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IF I HAD SOMEWHERE TO LIVE… I COULD GO ANYWHERE IN LIFE When Abi’s mum died, life got tough. She didn’t get on with her dad and the arguments became violent. Abi felt her only choice was to leave home. With just the clothes on her back, and no idea where to go, she ended up sleeping on the streets in the freezing cold.

Right now, you could give a homeless young person like Abi somewhere to start their future Abi’s life changed when she was given a room at Centrepoint.

A safe place to sleep and recover. A place to develop the skills and confidence she needed to rebuild her life – and leave homelessness behind for good. Now, Abi believes she can go anywhere.

Thousands of homeless young people like Abi are desperately trying to find their place in the world – but first they need a place to start again. You could help right now by sponsoring a room at Centrepoint for just 40p a day.

We know this support changes lives. 88% of the young people we help move on positively in life. So please, help someone like Abi today. Thank you.

Text PLACE to 78866 to donate £3 Call free on 0800 472 5798 Visit centrepoint.org.uk/place Or complete and return the form below

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opinion.

JOHN BIRD

I

The real story is how we plan for the future

found myself telling my daughter a story while we were stuck in a traffic jam recently. It was about the first time I ever got newspaper coverage. I was one of five teenage schoolboys who had told their mothers that we were going swimming in the River Thames by Wandsworth Bridge.

The entry, a day after we went missing, was two lines in the London Evening News. That was 60 years ago and so much has changed.

It is a great tragedy to have the threat of lost children. Increasingly I have noticed that I panic now over children more than anyone did in years past. I am more neurotic and more controlling, and more protective.

I role-played for my daughter the BBC going down to Wandsworth Bridge today pretending they had a story. The BBC cameraman and interviewer would go down and stand there and talk to someone who lived by the river. And talk up a story even though they may not have anything to say.

“So here we are at the river, and the bridge here is very old. And now we’re going to talk to someone who drinks in a local pub” etc.

After the news item, often about something tragic, you realise that nothing has been said. No information shared. Just that a BBC crew have stood there talking about ‘nothing’.

(Sorry BBC; I’m sure there are other channels that do this thing but I only watch and listen to you. So it is only your empty ‘pretence’ news I know anything about.)

There is a vast part of news that is exactly the same. The amount of times we’ve ‘gone over to Number 10’, or to Parliament, to listen to someone standing in the cold who has absolutely no information to share with us. It is embarrassing and the reporter must climb into bed at night wondering what the hell they are being paid for.

Of course there could be some real news going on but TV so often surrounds it with people with microphones asking inane questions; for instance saying to people flooded out, what’s it like? Is that news gathering, or trying to stir up empathy? Then don’t call it news. Call it ‘empathy time’. And we could certainly do with more of that.

News creating has probably been so much a case of injecting our life with a lot of adrenalin that we have become indifferent to the real news.

We are worn out by the emptiness of this breathless approach that gives us nothing for the long term.

Over Christmas I did not want to go on TV or radio to talk about homelessness because I knew that once Christmas was over, so would interest in homelessness be, for another year. The odd story, yes. But nothing really until the cold weather comes back next Christmas.

This is an abuse of the power of the media, choosing to tailor itself to empty comments on too many occasions. And embarrassing for those poor reporters having to stand around for hours before saying sweet

THIS WEEK JOHN WILL BE READING: Collected Poems by Les Murray WATCHING: World War II in Colour on Netflix

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LISTENING TO: New Boots and Panties!! by Ian Dury

MEETING AND TALKING TO: Parliamentarians and others about his Future Generations campaign

Forward thinker Roger Scruton was not everyone’s cup of tea, but he was dead right about future generations

Fanny Adams to the camera with great earnestness.

The slow devaluation of public TV is not simply about the big issues as to who pays for it, or how it is paid. It is also about why it is that it is often so much puff. If it is so much puff, is this because the masters of public service TV think that’s what the public want?

Isn’t there a sense still that public service broadcasting is about – also - raising all our games? Putting us in touch with thoughtfulness and things to argue about? Or are our TV planners simply going to be chasing stuff that anaesthetises us from the slog of daily life? While Rome burns we bring on the fiddlers?

But then perhaps it is too hard to live today and we all need to bury ourselves in distractions. The mind-numbing Brexit debate, which is still not over, took the wind out of many of our sails. I certainly have been thinking more about art and nature, almost as an antidote. How many times have I walked about near our local river recently and looked at some ancient tree and said “It’ll still be here come Brexit or not.” And looking at birds catching grubs and thinking stupidly “I bet you don’t give a toss about Brexit and the Irish backstop.”

But we have to be serious and stop wondering if blackbirds or

Photo: Mike Goldwater / Alamy

yellowhammers have an opinion on Brexit. My Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill awaits its second reading (the first was simply a nodding through). We begin the perhaps long process of trying to get policy and laws changed so that we don’t all act in the short term at the expense of the long term.

I leave you with a quote from Roger Scruton, the philosopher and historian who died last week: “Societies endure only when they are devoted to future generations, and they collapse like the Roman Empire when the pleasures and fancies of the living usurp the inheritance of the unborn.”

He was a right-winger, so not everyone’s cup of tea. But he did make you think. My only meeting with him was on The Moral Maze on Radio 4, when I kind of shut everyone up, including him. I was not elegant back then.

I’ll keep banging on about Future Generations because that’s what’s it’s all about.

John Bird is the founder and Editor in Chief of The Big Issue. @johnbirdswords linkedin.com/in/ johnbirdswords john.bird@bigissue.com BIGISSUE.COM | 13

changemakers.

The thinkers. The creators. The agitators

Rolling with the punches

HOW CAN YOU QUANTIFY THE IMPACT OF BOXING ON WELLBEING? At In Your Corner, young people set their own goals for what they want to get out of the project, which could Ĺ?Ĺ˛ÄœĹ§Ç€ÄŁÄŞ áĄˆS Ç?ÿŲƸ Ƹş łĪĪŧ ŰşƣĪ ÄœĹźĹ˛ÇżÄŁÄŞĹ˛Ć¸ ěĪĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ĂżĆŁĆ¸ şł Ăż ĹƒĆŁĹźÇ€Ć áĄ‰ şƣ áĄˆS Ç?ÿŲƸ Ƹş ǿŲģ ŊĪÿŧƸŊǣ Ç?ÿǣƍ Ƹş Ĺ°ĂżĹ˛ĂżĹƒÄŞ Ç?ŊĪŲ S łĪĪŧ ĆŤĆ¸ĆŁÄŞĆŤĆŤÄŞÄŁáĄ‰á ‡ hÿƍƸ ƍǀŰŰĪƣá ƸŊĪ ěşǢĪƣƍ Ç?ÄŞĆŁÄŞ łşǀŲģ Ƹş have made headway on a huge 94 per cent of the goals they set themselves.

Ç˝ÇťÉŻÇ˝Č 9 Dg Yy ǽǝǽǝ

Dr Kathy Adcock In Your Corner

şǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ç?ÿƣģ łşƣ ĹƒĆŁĂżĆŤĆŤĆŁĹźĹźĆ¸ĆŤ ĆŤĹźÄœĹ?ĂżĹ§á ľĂżÄœĆ¸Ĺ?şŲ Ć ĆŁĹźĹĄÄŞÄœĆ¸ĆŤá ‡ Later the organisation won a Ć¸ĹŠĆŁÄŞÄŞá ľÇŁÄŞĂżĆŁ ĹƒĆŁĂżĹ˛Ć¸ łƣşŰ şŰĹ?Äœ ŒĪŧĹ?ÄŞĹ‚á ÿŧŧşÇ?Ĺ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ĺ?Ƹ Ƹş ƍĪƸ Ç€Ć Ăż ŲĪÇ? Ć ĆŁĹźĹĄÄŞÄœĆ¸á tt/ Âźá Ĺ?Ų Ć ĂżĆŁĆ¸Ĺ˛ÄŞĆŁĆŤĹŠĹ?Ć Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ hşŲģşŲ şŰŰǀŲĹ?Ƹǣ şǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ÿŲģ ŽşǀƸŊÇ?ÿƣŤ Local Authority, which has been running since September 2018. Young Ć ÄŞĹźĆ Ĺ§ÄŞ ÿƣĪ ĆŁÄŞĹ‚ÄŞĆŁĆŁÄŞÄŁ Ć¸ĹŠĆŁĹźÇ€ĹƒĹŠ rNÂŽá social work and proactive schools, and ƍşŰĪƸĹ?Ĺ°ÄŞĆŤ ÄœĹźĹ°ÄŞ łƣşŰ ǣşǀƸŊ şdzłĪŲģĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒá ‡ £ÿƣƸĹ?ÄœĹ?Ć ĂżĹ˛Ć¸ĆŤ Ĺ?ŲĹ?ƸĹ?ÿŧŧǣ ǀŲģĪƣƸÿŤĪ Ăż á™ˇá™¸á ľÇ?ĪĪŤ programme, and are expected to attend as many sessions as they can. Later, they can stay involved in the graduate programme, on which they can attend sessions as and when they please. ᥆ŸŊĪ ƣĪÿƍşŲ S ÄŁĹ?ģŲ᥉Ƹ ÄŁĹź Ĺ?Ƹ ÿƸ Ĺ°ÇŁ ģÿǣ ťşě Ĺ?ĆŤ Ä›ÄŞÄœĂżÇ€ĆŤÄŞ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊĹ?Ų ƸŊĪ tNÂŽ ÿƸ ƸŊĪ moment there’s huge pressure on service delivery,â€? Adcock points out. “It’s hard to be creative in that context with the constraints that are on it at the moment.â€? ŸŊĪ ĆŤÄŞĆŤĆŤĹ?şŲƍ ÿƣĪ ÄŁĹ?dzłĪƣĪŲƸ łƣşŰ şƸŊĪƣ ěşǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ĹƒĆŁĹźÇ€Ć ĆŤá ‡ ŸŊĪǣ ÿƣĪ ÄœĹźá ľĹ‚ĂżÄœĹ?ŧĹ?ƸÿƸĪģ ěǣ Ăż ěşǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ÄœĹźĂżÄœĹŠ ÿŲģ Ăż ŰĪŰěĪƣ şł ÄœĹ§Ĺ?ŲĹ?ÄœĂżĹ§ Ć ĆŤÇŁÄœĹŠĹźĹ§ĹźĹƒÇŁ ƍƸÿdzłá Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ ƸĹ?Ĺ°ÄŞ ĆŤĆ Ĺ§Ĺ?Ƹ ěĪƸÇ?ĪĪŲ ƸƣÿĹ?ŲĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ÿŲģ ĂżÄœĆ¸Ĺ?ÇœĹ?ƸĹ?ÄŞĆŤ Ĺ‚ĹźÄœÇ€ĆŤĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ on emotional regulation. Coaches are expected to deliver training in a way that Ĺ?ĆŤ Ć ĆŤÇŁÄœĹŠĹźĹ§ĹźĹƒĹ?ÄœĂżĹ§Ĺ§ÇŁ Ĺ?ŲłşƣŰĪģá Ç?ĹŠĹ?ŧĪ ƸŊĪ psychologist gets in on the boxing. “We’re trying to highlight the ĆŤĆ¸ĆŁÄŞĹ˛ĹƒĆ¸ĹŠĆŤ ÿŲģ ĂżÄœĹŠĹ?ÄŞÇœÄŞĹ°ÄŞĹ˛Ć¸ĆŤ şł şǀƣ ÇŁĹźÇ€Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ÄŞĹźĆ Ĺ§ÄŞá ‡ ŸŊĪŲ Ĺ?Ƹ᥉ƍ Ųş Ĺ§ĹźĹ˛ĹƒÄŞĆŁá € áĄˆS᥉Ű Ăż ÇŁĹźÇ€Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ÄŞĆŁĆŤĹźĹ˛ Ç?ĹŠĹź Ç?ÿƍ ŤĹ?ÄœĹ¤ÄŞÄŁ şǀƸ şł ĆŤÄœĹŠĹźĹźĹ§áĄ‰ şƣ áĄˆS᥉Ű Ăż Ć ĆŁĹźÄ›Ĺ§ÄŞĹ° ÿƸ ĹŠĹźĹ°ÄŞá ‡áĄ‰ SĆ¸áĄ‰ĆŤá € áĄˆS᥉Ű ÄœĹźĹ˛ÇżÄŁÄŞĹ˛Ć¸ ÄŞĹ˛ĹźÇ€ĹƒĹŠ Ƹş Ƹƣǣ ŲĪÇ? ƸŊĹ?Ĺ˛ĹƒĆŤ and achieve when I do.’â€?

Illustration: rÿƸƸŊĪÇ? ƣÿǭĹ?ÄŞ ĆŁ

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hat happens when you invite the world of clinical psychology into London boxing gyms? It looks something like In Your Corner, a social enterprise created by Dr Kathy Adcock. Picking up where child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) struggle to intervene, In Your Corner gives vulnerable young people the chance to work through their ÄŁĹ?ÇłÇżÄœÇ€Ĺ§Ć¸Ĺ?ÄŞĆŤ Ĺ?Ų ƸŊĪ ĆŁĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ç?ĹŠĹ?ŧĪ Ĺ?Ų ƸŊĪ ÄœĂżĆŁÄŞ şł ěşƸŊ Ć ĆŤÇŁÄœĹŠĹźĹ§ĹźĹƒĹ?ƍƸƍ and local boxers. ǽƸĪƣ ÄœĹźĹ°Ć Ĺ§ÄŞĆ¸Ĺ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ăż ÄŁĹźÄœĆ¸ĹźĆŁĂżĆ¸ÄŞ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ ƸŊĪ ĂƒĹ˛Ĺ?ÇœÄŞĆŁĆŤĹ?Ƹǣ şł Plymouth in 2009, Adcock went on to work as a clinical psychologist with the NHS, specialising in the mental health şł ÇŁĹźÇ€Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ÄŞĹźĆ Ĺ§ÄŞ Ç?ĹŠĹź Ŋÿģ ÄŞÇ˘Ć ÄŞĆŁĹ?ÄŞĹ˛ÄœÄŞÄŁ ƸƣÿǀŰÿ şƣ Ç?ÄŞĆŁÄŞ ÄœĂżĆŁÄŞ ÄŞÇ˘Ć ÄŞĆŁĹ?ÄŞĹ˛ÄœÄŞÄŁá ‡ ᥆à Ī ǀƍĪģ Ƹş ĹŠĂżÇœÄŞ Ăż ŧşƸ şł ÄœĹźĹ˛ÇœÄŞĆŁĆŤĂżĆ¸Ĺ?şŲƍ ÿěşǀƸ ƸŊĪŰ á ˛ Ć¸ĹŠÄŞÇŁáĄ‰ÇœÄŞ şǽƸĪŲ ĹƒĹźĆ¸ Ăż Ĺ§ĂżĆŁĹƒÄŞ Ć ĆŁĹźĹ‚ÄŞĆŤĆŤĹ?şŲÿŧ ŲĪƸÇ?şƣŤ ÿŲģ we all sit round and talk about how concerned we are,â€? the łşǀŲģĪƣ ƸĪŧŧƍ ŸŊĪ Ĺ?Ĺƒ SĆŤĆŤÇ€ÄŞá ‡ ᥆ ǀƸ ÇŁĹźÇ€Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ÄŞĹźĆ Ĺ§ÄŞ Ĺ?Ų ƸŊÿƸ Ä›ĆŁĂżÄœĹ¤ÄŞĆ¸ ÿƣĪ şǽƸĪŲ ƸŊĪ şŲĪƍ Ç?ĹŠĹź ǿŲģ ÄœĹ§Ĺ?ŲĹ?Äœá ľÄ›ĂżĆŤÄŞÄŁ ĆŤÄŞĆŁÇœĹ?ÄœÄŞĆŤ ƸŊĪ ŊÿƣģĪƍƸ Ƹş ĂżÄœÄœÄŞĆŤĆŤá ‡ ŸŊĪƣĪ᥉ƍ ÿŲ Ĺ?Ĺ˛ÄœĹźĆŁĆŁÄŞÄœĆ¸ ĂżĆŤĆŤÇ€Ĺ°Ć Ć¸Ĺ?şŲ ƸŊÿƸ ÿŧŧ Ć ÄŞĹźĆ Ĺ§ÄŞ ÄœĂżĹ˛ sit down and talk. And many simply see themselves as a bit stressed or angry.â€? ŸŊĪ Ć ĆŤÇŁÄœĹŠĹźĹ§ĹźĹƒĹ?ƍƸ ÿŧƍş ĹŠĂżĆ Ć ÄŞĹ˛ÄŞÄŁ Ƹş ěĪ ƸƣÿĹ?ŲĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ÿƍ an amateur boxer at the time. It’s a sport that has “got ƍşŰĪƸŊĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ƹş Ĺ?Ƹ᥇á ĆŤĹŠÄŞ ƍÿǣƍá Ĺ‚ĹźĆŁÄœĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ĂżĆŁĆ¸Ĺ?ÄœĹ?Ć ĂżĹ˛Ć¸ĆŤ Ƹş ᥆ěĪ ÇœÄŞĆŁÇŁ Ć ĆŁÄŞĆŤÄŞĹ˛Ć¸áĄ‡á ‡ Ųģ ÿƍ Ăż ĆŤĆ ĹźĆŁĆ¸ ƸŊÿƸ ÄœĂżĆŁĆŁĹ?ÄŞĆŤ Ăż Ć¸ĹźÇ€ÄœĹŠ şł ĆŁĹ?ƍŤá ěşǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ĺ?ĆŤ şł Ĺ?ŲƸĪƣĪƍƸ Ƹş Ĺ?Ĺ°Ć Ç€Ĺ§ĆŤĹ?ÇœÄŞ Ć¸ÄŞÄŞĹ˛ĆŤá ‡ áĄ†ĂŚĹźÇ€áĄ‰ÇœÄŞ ĹƒĹźĆ¸ ƸŊĹ?ĆŤ ĹźĹ˛ÄŞá ľĆ¸Ĺźá ľĹźĹ˛ÄŞ ƸŊĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ĹƒĹźĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ şŲ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ ǣşǀƣ coach,â€? Adcock explains. “And boxing’s always had a really ĹƒĹźĹźÄŁ ĹŠĹ?ƍƸşƣǣ şł ĆŤĹźÄœĹ?ÿŧ ÄœĹŠĂżĹ˛ĹƒÄŞ Ć ĆŁĹźĹĄÄŞÄœĆ¸ĆŤá ěǀƸ ƸŊĪ ŲÿƣƣÿƸĹ?ÇœÄŞ ƸĪŲģƍ Ƹş ěĪ ÿěşǀƸ Ĺ¤ÄŞÄŞĆ Ĺ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ŤĹ?ÄŁĆŤ şdzł ƸŊĪ ƍƸƣĪĪƸƍá ťǀƍƸ ÿƍƍǀŰĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ƸŊÿƸ ěşǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć¸ÄŞĂżÄœĹŠÄŞĆŤ ĆŁÄŞĆŤĆ ÄŞÄœĆ¸ ÿŲģ ÄœĹźĹ˛ÇżÄŁÄŞĹ˛ÄœÄŞá ‡ S Ć¸ĹŠĹźÇ€ĹƒĹŠĆ¸ Ç?ÄŞ ÄœĹźÇ€Ĺ§ÄŁ ÄŁĹź ƍşŰĪƸŊĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ŰşƣĪ Ć ĹźÇ?Īƣłǀŧ ƸŊÿŲ ƸŊÿƸá ĆŤĆ ÄŞÄœĹ?ÇżÄœĂżĹ§Ĺ§ÇŁ Ĺ?Ĺ°Ć ĆŁĹźÇœĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ĪŰşƸĹ?şŲÿŧ Ç?ĪŧŧěĪĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ Ƹşşŧƍ łƣşŰ ÄœĹ§Ĺ?ŲĹ?ÄœĂżĹ§ Ć ĆŤÇŁÄœĹŠĹźĹ§ĹźĹƒÇŁá ‡áĄ‡ In 2016 she got to work. Approaching her local club, ÄŁÄœĹźÄœĹ¤ ƍĪƸ Ç€Ć Ăż Ć Ĺ?ŧşƸ ĹƒĆŁĹźÇ€Ć Ć¸ĹŠÄŞ łşŧŧşÇ?Ĺ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ǣĪÿƣ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ ŲĹ?ŲĪ young people. It went “very positivelyâ€? – so much so that Ĺ?Ƹ Ç?şŲ ƸŊĪ /Ç€ĆŁĹźĆ ÄŞĂżĹ˛ şǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ şŲłĪģĪƣÿƸĹ?şŲ᥉ƍ £ÿƍƍĹ?şŲ Fşƣ

£ÿƣƸĹ?ÄœĹ?Ć ĂżĹ˛Ć¸ĆŤ ÄœĂżĹ˛ ĪÿƣŲ ÄœÄŞĆŁĆ¸Ĺ?ÇżÄœĂżĆ¸ÄŞĆŤ Ć¸ĹŠĆŁĹźÇ€ĹƒĹŠ ĪǢÿŰ ěşÿƣģ ÂĽ ᥉ƍ ĆŤÄœĹŠÄŞĹ°ÄŞ łşƣ recognising achievement, which is a ĹŠÄŞĹ§Ć Ĺ?Ĺ‚ ƸŊĪǣ ÿƣĪ ĆŤĆ¸ĆŁÇ€ĹƒĹƒĹ§Ĺ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ĺ?Ų ÄŞÄŁÇ€ÄœĂżĆ¸Ĺ?şŲá and graduates can get involved in a ǿŧŰŰÿŤĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ĆŁĹźĹƒĆŁĂżĹ°Ĺ°ÄŞá ‡ ƸŊĪƣƍ ĹŠĂżÇœÄŞ ĂżĆ Ć Ĺ§Ĺ?ÄŞÄŁ łşƣ ťǀŲĹ?şƣ ǣşǀƸŊ Ç?şƣŤ ƣşŧĪƍ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ Ĺ§ĹźÄœĂżĹ§ ÿǀƸŊşƣĹ?ƸĹ?ÄŞĆŤ ÿǽƸĪƣ ƸŊĪĹ?ĆŁ ƸĹ?Ĺ°ÄŞ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ SŲ Your Corner. Ÿş ģÿƸĪ ᚂᙡ ÇŁĹźÇ€Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ć ÄŞĹźĆ Ĺ§ÄŞ ĹŠĂżÇœÄŞ ěĪĪŲ Ć¸ĹŠĆŁĹźÇ€ĹƒĹŠ ÄŁÄœĹźÄœĹ¤áĄ‰ĆŤ Ć ĆŁĹźĹĄÄŞÄœĆ¸á ‡ ŽşŰĪ ĹŠĂżÇœÄŞ ĆŁÄŞĆ ĹźĆŁĆ¸ÄŞÄŁ ƸŊÿƸ ÿǽƸĪƣ ƸŊĪ ÄœĹźÇ€ĆŁĆŤÄŞ ƸŊĪǣ ÿƣĪ ěĪƸƸĪƣ ÿěŧĪ Ƹş Ĺ°ĂżĹ˛ĂżĹƒÄŞ Ć¸ĹŠÄŞĹ°ĆŤÄŞĹ§ÇœÄŞĆŤá ’ łĪĪŧ calmer and less sensitive to triggers; are ĹźĆ ÄŞĹ˛ Ƹş ƸƣǣĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ ŲĪÇ? ƸŊĹ?Ĺ˛ĹƒĆŤ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ Ăż ěĪŧĹ?ÄŞĹ‚ that they are capable; get on better in ĆŤÄœĹŠĹźĹźĹ§ ÿŲģ ǿŲģ Ĺ?Ƹ ĪÿƍĹ?ÄŞĆŁ Ƹş ŰÿŤĪ Ĺ‚ĆŁĹ?ÄŞĹ˛ÄŁĆŤá ‡ ᥆ rNÂŽ Ĺ?ĆŤ Ăż Ć ĆŁÄŞÄŁĹźĹ°Ĺ?ŲÿŲƸŧǣ łĪŰÿŧĪá Ç?ĹŠĹ?ƸĪá Ĺ°Ĺ?ÄŁÄŁĹ§ÄŞá ľÄœĹ§ĂżĆŤĆŤ ĆŤÄŞĆŁÇœĹ?ÄœÄŞá Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ Ăż ŧşƸ şł Ç?şƣŤ Ƹş ÄŁĹź şŲ ÄŁĹ?ÇœÄŞĆŁĆŤĹ?Ƹǣ á ˛ ěşǢĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ĺ?ĆŤ a strongly masculine, traditionally Ç?şƣŤĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒá ľÄœĹ§ĂżĆŤĆŤá Ĺ§ĂżĆŁĹƒÄŞĹ§ÇŁ r/ Ĺ?Ų hşŲģşŲ ÄœĹźĹ˛Ć¸ÄŞÇ˘Ć¸á ᥇ ÄŁÄœĹźÄœĹ¤ ƍÿǣƍ şł ƸŊĪ Ä›Ĺ?ĹƒĹƒÄŞĆŤĆ¸ ÄœĹŠĂżĹ§Ĺ§ÄŞĹ˛ĹƒÄŞ ĆŤĹŠÄŞ Ŋÿƍ Ĺ‚ĂżÄœÄŞÄŁá ‡ ᥆ Ųģ ǿŲģĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒ Ăż Ç?ÿǣ łşƣ ƸŊşƍĪ ƸÇ?Ĺź Ƹş ĹƒÄŞĹ§ Ŋÿƍ ƣĪƢǀĹ?ĆŁÄŞÄŁ ÄœĂżĆŁÄŞĹ‚Ç€Ĺ§ ƸŊĹ?ŲŤĹ?Ĺ˛Ĺƒá ‡áĄ‡ ŸŊĹ?ĆŤ ǣĪÿƣ ƸŊĪ ĆŤĹźÄœĹ?ÿŧ ÄŞĹ˛Ć¸ÄŞĆŁĆ ĆŁĹ?ĆŤÄŞ Ĺ?ĆŤ expanding into two new boroughs, Camden and Westminster, and taking on more work with schools and services łşƣ Ć ÄŞĹźĆ Ĺ§ÄŞ ÄŞÇ˘ÄœĹ§Ç€ÄŁÄŞÄŁ łƣşŰ Ĺ°ĂżĹ?ŲƍƸƣĪÿŰ schools. “Working with young people is a challenge too, but a brilliant one,â€? ÄŁÄœĹźÄœĹ¤ Ĺ§ĂżÇ€ĹƒĹŠĆŤá ‡ ᥆Ìşǀ Ĺ˛ÄŞÇœÄŞĆŁ ƢǀĹ?ƸĪ ŤŲşÇ? what’s going to happen.â€?

Interview: Hannah Westwater @hannahjtw FIND OUT MORE inyourcorner.uk .&.]]g JC ʸ 15

the big picture.

BROTHERLY LOVE Sebastian and Santiago love to push their brother Christian as fast as they can in his wheelchair. It makes him smile, especially if it’s bumpy.

Christian, pictured here with his siblings at Cramond Beach in Edinburgh, ǝÿƫ ěżƣŲ ǝŏƸŊ ' ¦® ®ǣŲģƣżŰĪ᠁ ÿ ƣÿƣĪ ĜżŲģŏƸŏżŲ ŏģĪŲƸŏǿĪģ ěǣ ƫĪǜĪƣĪ ŧĪÿƣŲŏŲŃ ģŏdzǿĜǀŧƸŏĪƫ᠁ ģĪÿłŲĪƫƫ᠁ ÿěŲżƣŰÿŧ Ųÿŏŧƫ żŲ ƸŊĪ ŊÿŲģƫ ÿŲģ łĪĪƸ ÿƫ ǝĪŧŧ ÿƫ ƫĪŏǭǀƣĪƫ᠇ Nŏƫ ŏƫ żŲĪ żł żŲŧǣ ƸŊƣĪĪ ĜÿƫĪƫ ŏŲ ƸŊĪ Ãf᠁ ěǀƸ ƸŊĪ łÿŰŏŧǣ ŏƫ żŲĪ żł ŰÿŲǣ ÿĜƣżƫƫ ƸŊĪ ĜżǀŲƸƣǣ ǝŊż ŧŏǜĪ ǝŏƸŊ ģŏƫÿěŏŧŏƸǣ ŏŲ ƸŊĪŏƣ ģÿŏŧǣ ŧŏǜĪƫ᠇ Our Human Condition is a photography project by Paul Wenham-Clarke ƸŊÿƸ ƸĪŧŧƫ ƸŊĪ ƠĪƣƫżŲÿŧ ƫƸżƣŏĪƫ żł ƫŏěŧŏŲŃƫ ǝŊĪƣĪ żŲĪ Ŋÿƫ ÿ ŃĪŲĪƸŏĜ ĜżŲģŏƸŏżŲ᠇ ¼ŊĪ ĪǢŊŏěŏƸŏżŲ᠁ ǝŊŏĜŊ Ŋÿƫ šǀƫƸ ǿŲŏƫŊĪģ ƫŊżǝŏŲŃ ÿƸ ƸŊĪ Ǣż ŃÿŧŧĪƣǣ ŏŲ hżŲģżŲ᠁ ǝŏŧŧ ŰżǜĪ Ƹż ƸŊĪ ®ĜżƸƸŏƫŊ £ÿƣŧŏÿŰĪŲƸ ŲĪǢƸ ŰżŲƸŊ᠁ ÿŲģ ÿ ģĪģŏĜÿƸĪģ ǝĪěƫŏƸĪ ǝŏŧŧ ěĪ ƫĪƸ ǀƠ᠁ ĪŲĜżǀƣÿŃŏŲŃ żƸŊĪƣƫ Ƹż ƫĪŲģ ƸŊĪŏƣ żǝŲ ƠŏĜƸǀƣĪƫ ÿŲģ ƫƸżƣŏĪƫ᠇ wenhamclarke.com

SANTIAGO, 12 ᡆS ƫżŰĪƸŏŰĪƫ łĪĪŧ ǝżƣƣŏĪģ ǝŊĪŲ ŊĪ ŃĪƸƫ ƫĪŏǭǀƣĪƫ because they could be ěÿģ᠇ àŊĪŲ ŊĪ Ŋÿģ Ƹż Ńż Ƹż ƸŊĪ ŊżƫƠŏƸÿŧ łżƣ ÿ ǝŊŏŧĪ ŏƸ ģŏģŲᡉƸ ÿŧǝÿǣƫ łĪĪŧ ƣŏŃŊƸ᠇ Family is like a jigsaw ƠǀǭǭŧĪ᠁ ǝŊĪŲ ƫżŰĪżŲĪᡉƫ not there it’s like a piece żł ƸŊĪ ƠǀǭǭŧĪ Ŋÿƫ ŃżŲĪ missing and you can’t complete it without ƸŊĪ ƠŏĪĜĪ᠇ᡇ

SEBASTIAN, 14 ᡆSŲ Űǣ ŊżŲĪƫƸ żƠŏŲŏżŲ᠁S ģżŲᡉƸ ĪŲšżǣ ŧŏǜŏŲŃ ǝŏƸŊ ŊƣŏƫƸŏÿŲ᠇ ¼ŊĪƣĪ ÿƣĪ ƫżŰĪ ěĪŲĪǿƸƫ ƫǀĜŊ ÿƫ ƠƣŏżƣŏƸǣ ÿŲģ łƣĪĪ ƠÿƣŤŏŲŃ᠇ S ŤŲżǝ ƸŊŏƫ Űÿǣ ƫżǀŲģ ŏŲƫĪŲƫŏƸŏǜĪ ěǀƸ ŏƸ ŏƫŲᡉƸ ǝżƣƸŊ ŲżƸ ŊÿǜŏŲŃ ÿ ŲżƣŰÿŧ ěƣżƸŊĪƣ᠇ He doesn’t annoy me personally, unlike my other brother but it must be hard on my mum and dad ƫż S ģĪǿŲŏƸĪŧǣ ƣĪƫƠĪĜƸ ƸŊĪŰ łżƣ ƠżǝĪƣŏŲŃ żŲ᠇ᡇ

16 ʸ .&.]]g JC

ǽǻɯǽȁ 9 Dg Yy ǽǻǽǻ

ǽǻɯǽȁ 9 Dg Yy ǽǻǽǻ

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M

letter to my younger self.

usic was my big passion at 16. I wore big green patch dungarees that I got from Afflecks Palace in Manchester and German paratrooper boots with red and white fly agaric mushrooms painted on the side – I was into all things psychedelic at that point. I went to X-Records in Bolton and got a couple of Gong albums. Anything psychedelic or trippy. I was trying to get dreads at the time. I was all over the place – fads would come and go and I’d jump around trying to find my tribe.

Maxine Peake

I had just started a diploma in performing arts at Salford College of Technology when I was 16. Going from a smaller town to a city can be a culture shock. Manchester was the centre of everything at the time and Bolton, even though it was only 15 miles away, in some respects was 15 years away. Salford College was a 10-minute walk to Manchester. There was a lot of clubbing – I started around 14. Being slightly larger of figure, I could get in. Although sometimes you’d not be let in and have to go to the back of the queue and try again.

Northern powerhouse

Photo: RADA

I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I’m not that good at accents – what was I thinking? It sounds weird, but sometimes you know your destiny.

And that is why I stuck at Salford Tech. I knew if I didn’t follow this path, I wouldn’t get what was meant for me. I sort of knew I would have a career – I just didn’t know what the career would be. My younger self would be surprised that I haven’t been typecast as I expected to be.

1998

Graduating from RADA aged 24

Photo: Radio Times / Getty

Everyone told me I would do comedy – the big, funny girl. And that was fine by me. Victoria Wood and Julie Walters were massive influences. Then my first job out of drama school was dinnerladies, with Victoria, who is one of the best writers this country has ever produced. You are so spoiled after that. I realised you can be the best actor in the world, but if the writing is not there, forget it. I wonder why I didn’t make more of an effort with Victoria. But I was so overwhelmed and socially awkward. I was in awe of her. I am still not good at absorbing things when they happen. It is only when I look back that I take it all in.

My ideal was to get a comedy troupe going and write sketches, but I never found my gang. I met Diane Morgan when we were auditioning for Manchester Theatre School. We didn’t get in, but she has done alright for herself. We said we’d write stuff together – because we couldn’t imagine what we wanted to do would be on offer. If I could whisper in my younger self’s ear, I would tell her to stick at that. At Christmas, when I watch Morecambe and Wise, I get a real pang: why didn’t I stick with comedy? I would have had more control.

As an actor, you are at the mercy of roles that come along. Sometimes I think I’m a bit of a mug still doing this.

1998

A first big role alongside Victoria Wood in BBC sitcom dinnerladies

Photo: Leon Neal / Staff / Getty

2019

Peake speaks at the launch of Labour’s £1bn Arts for All policy charter

18 | BIGISSUE.COM

I knew I wanted to perform in some way. After two weeks at Salford Tech they took nine of us to one side and told us we wouldn’t stay the course. I was told I wasn’t an actor because I was too quiet, too introverted. Anybody who I’d been to school with would have laughed at that. I was just sussing it out and it wasn’t quite what I had expected. Everyone was in sweat pants and jazz shoes – I had no idea what all that was about.

My mum and dad split up when I was eight. It is not a sob story but it had an effect. My mum struggled to bring up two daughters and my dad wasn’t paying child maintenance. It was a real struggle but I had fantastic grandparents. I learned about self-sufficiency. As soon as I could get a Saturday job or evening jobs I always worked. I cleaned old people’s homes and me and Paddy McGuinness were lifeguards at Horwich Leisure Centre. He used to say, ‘I’m going to do a bit of that acting that you do, me and my mate Peter.’ And look at him now.

We were Thatcher’s children. That was all we knew. And the politics opened me up to the arts world – I was 10 or 11 in the mid-Eighties, so there was the miners’ strike and Red Wedge. The 1980s had a huge effect on me. Then one of the first actors I performed with was Vanessa Redgrave. There was an actress speaking out, whose political agenda was to the forefront in her work and fuels the work she chooses. I thought that was really exciting.

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1990

THE YEAR MAXINE TURNS 16 • Glasgow becomes European City of Culture • Driving Miss Daisy wins the Oscar for Best Picture • Iraq invades Kuwait

Photo: Camera Press / BAFTA / Iona Wolff

When I did See NoEvil I was dipping my toe into straight acting – and now I’m synonymous with gritty drama. That role [as Myra Hindley] took me in a different direction. My younger self would never have thought Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Miss Julie or playing the middle-class wife of a barrister in Criminal Justice were for her. One reviewer said, ‘When I saw Maxine Peake getting into a 4x4 I thought she’d robbed it.’ I know it was meant as a gag, but be careful what you say in jest.

Who in their right minds would get me to do Hamlet? I’m so lucky to have collaborators like [theatre director] Sarah Frankcom. There were female Hamlets before and Frances de la Tour had done it 30 years before, but we kickstarted it again. I am proud that Sarah and myself revitalised that.

Not only a woman playing Hamlet, but a northern, working-class woman – that has opened doors. It is about being brave. Sometimes I feel I didn’t do enough, that I just selfishly went for what I wanted. But it is flattering when people say I broke down walls. I get a lot of correspondence from young women. It is about visibility. We all need somebody where you can go, ‘You look like me, you sound like me, so I can do it.’

I would tell my younger self to have some more self-worth and tell people to jog on earlier. The best thing a friend said to me about relationships was, ‘Yes, but do you like them?’ And I went, ‘Oh, interesting, never thought about that.’ Young men definitely need to be educated about acceptable behaviour, but young women also need to be taught much earlier about self-awareness, self-fulfilment and self-love.

Politics has always been a big part of my life but when I was younger, nobody was interested in what I was saying, as a young woman. I was never shy about it. My grandad Jim spent his life being fired from factories because of his politics and used to say it would impact my career. Maybe in some ways, once he passed away I felt I could speak out more without upsetting him. I can see why people say ‘Shut up, you are just an actress.’

But if somebody wants my opinion, then why can I not voice it like any other citizen? If you don’t like it, don’t read it.

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I would tell my younger self that she is entering a business where there’s a lot of bullshit. I wish I had tackled it head on more. The way I was spoken to in rehearsal rooms, the issue of how you are seen as a young, working-class woman – talking to actresses I am working with, I am just appalled about experiences they are having today. It happened to me but I thought we had moved on. I am not talking about inappropriate physical behaviour, I am talking about bullying and the presumption that if you look or sound a certain way you must lack intelligence.

If I could go back in time, I would speak to my mum and find out more about what made her tick. You slightly dismiss your parents when you are young. When I had to draw something at school, my mum did it for me and it was great. She said she would have liked to have gone to art school but she grew up on a council estate, was pregnant at 21, and didn’t think it was for her. I think I talk so much because we are a family that didn’t communicate. Everything was buried. It wasn’t that we didn’t care, we just didn’t express ourselves.

People think all actors are totally in love with themselves. But I think most of us act because we are not. So I would tell my younger self to be a bit kinder to herself. But that is something I could also say to my 45-year-old self. It is a constant battle – but if you don’t like you, nobody else is going to.

My last advice to my younger self would be to dig deep and figure out what you want to do, admit it to yourself, and go for it. It has taken a long time to admit what I want to do. So I would like to plod along doing good independent British films with juicy scripts, good telly, good theatre.

People don’t believe me because they think every actor wants to go off to Hollywood. Could you imagine me in a Marvel film? Northern Woman!

Maxine Peake stars in the The Welkin at the National Theatre until May 23. nationaltheatre.org.uk Interview: Adrian Lobb @adey70 For more interviews see bigissue.com/letter-to-my-youngerself BIGISSUE.COM | 19

cover story.

THE MAN WHO REINVENTED HAPPINESS Words: Steven MacKenzie

As Blue as our Monday was this week, there are 141 countries that endured a deeper shade. The United Kingdom is 15th on the World Happiness Report, a measurement of wellbeing published via the United Nations. The survey spans thousands of people around the world and using fancy metrics – it’ll improve both your happiness and mine if I avoid trying to explain exactly how numbers are crunched – has produced an annual league table since 2012, the top slots more or less consistently dominated by Scandinavian nations.

The economist Richard Layard is the c0-founder of the measurement, drawing upon a lifetime studying happiness and its impact on society. He has long called for the happiness of the population to replace economic growth as the measurement of a country’s success, an idea he introduced to the heart of government. He helped develop New Labour’s social welfare strategy in the 1990s and was behind David Cameron when 10 years ago the then prime minister announced that the government would start taking note of the nation’s wellbeing.

Oh, what an idyllic decade followed!

Image: Nigel Rogers At the age of 85, Layard is a life peer in the Lords and directs the Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics. In his new book, Can We Be Happier?, he outlines the evidence that proves what a more wonderful world it would be if a focus on improving happiness was the driver behind government policy and our own day-to-day decisions.

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The Big Issue: Can we be happier – is there an easy answer to that question?

Richard Layard: First, we have to be clear that that’s our objective. The way we should judge the progress of our societies is whether people are having lives they enjoy. If we could agree on that, we could move on to the second stage – using the evidence now available on a large scale about what makes people feel fulfilled and satisfied. Some of those factors are external: human relationships, work and whether we're feeling comfortable in the community where we live. There’s also income, but actually when you look at the evidence, once people have an adequate income you won't find a large variation in happiness due to differences in income. Then there are internal factors: our health, physical and mental, and also our general philosophy – how we manage our mental life.

You want happiness to be the measure of a country’s success. How did we end up in a world where happiness is seen as less important than economics?

A terrible mistake we've got sucked into over the post-war period is ever-increasing competition between individuals.

Ask what young people are being told they should strive for and it’s largely in comparison with other people – getting better grades, a better job, better income and so on. What everybody’s trying to do is just something better than other people. For every winner, there's a loser. Obviously, it’s not good for the losers but it’s actually not great for the winners because engaging in that struggle is very stressful.

Competition between organisations is a good thing – it keeps them on their toes – but competition between individuals in most cases is destructive. Radically reordering the objectives of our society is critical if we're going to have a happier one. We need to get away from the objective of personal success to a situation where our objective is to create happiness for other people – which of course is a very good way of making yourself happier.

How can you measure something as objective as happiness?

The most common method is to ask: "Overall, how satisfied are you with your life these days?" Ten means extremely satisfied, zero means extremely dissatisfied. And it turns out that the answers to these questions make a huge amount of sense. They correlate with measurements you can make on brain activity. They correlate with many forms of behaviour that you might expect.

For example, the answers predict pretty well whether somebody’s going to walk out of their job or their marriage and also predict things like how productive they are at work.

You might expect people who are feeling satisfied to vote for the existing government, for example, and indeed that's what they do. That's why politicians should take serious note. It’s more important than the state of the economy.

What if a person’s happiness comes at the expense of others? They might think “I would be much happier if there were fewer people of a certain race or religion in my neighbourhood” and that leads to them making certain decisions.

That’s a very important question and is part of a bigger one: when we say we should judge society on how happy people are, do we mean the average or the happiness of those who are least happy? I strongly believe it’s the latter. The most important kind of progress we need is getting rid of misery.

A decade ago David Cameron called for a happiness index. I remember the launch but not much about what happened after that.

Well, I think your memory is very good, actually. We got

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caught up in the austerity programme then we got caught up in Brexit and we took our eyes off the ball. But that said, there has been a lot of progress. Wellbeing has been promoted as a goal in different government departments and a lot of policies are now being evaluated that way so things have been moving in the right direction.

The most dramatic change abroad has been New Zealand’s wellbeing budget [in 2019 the government announced hundreds of millions of New Zealand dollars to tackle mental illness, domestic The World Happiness Report surveys citizens and violence and child poverty]. If our ranks countries using six factors: levels of GDP, life government adopted this it would expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom have a huge impact on how money and corruption. was spent.

Think about the things that The top five happiest countries: really matter to people – their 01. Finland mental health, the wellbeing of 02. Denmark their children. These are things 03. Norway that were hit very hard by the 04. Iceland austerity programme. We have 05. Netherlands been dismantling the social infrastructure of the country. Now The five unhappiest countries: we’ve got some money I find it 152. Rwanda very depressing that people say 153. Tanzania we could spend it on improving 154. Afghanistan the physical infrastructure – more 155. Central African Republic roads, more railways – whereas 156. South Sudan an absolute priority is improving the immediate circumstances of people in their personal lives.

The financial market takes physical infrastructure seriously because they think it’s an investment. Social infrastructure is an investment too. Mental health provision pays for itself. I've been involved in improving access to psychological therapies and we can show conclusively that has completely paid for itself. These things are much less expensive than grandiose projects like HS2, and we need to focus on them.

HAPPY NATIONS

Why is Scandinavia so happy?

The factors are often social and personal in their nature. Questions like: do you think you can trust other people? If you are in trouble, do you have anybody that you can rely on to help you? These are very good at explaining the order of countries in the ranking.

Scandinavian countries are much less focused on competition between individuals.

They stress more than we do the importance in finding things we share with other people rather than always trying to show how different we are from others.

In Britain today, more than one million people haven’t spoken to anybody in the last five days. It doesn’t feel like we’re in the midst of a happiness revolution.

Social media is a growing problem. It encourages everybody to compare themselves to others – a guaranteed source of unhappiness – but there are positives. Crime is much lower than it was 30 years ago and there is a new element of gentleness creeping in. We’ve become more sensitive and aware of issues like child abuse and sexual harassment. Even the royal family has less of a stiff upper lip and is more open about issues to do with mental health.

Living in today’s world is better than any other point in history but life is tough for a lot people. Happiness is tied to family, friends, job security – if you don’t have those things how can you be happy?

Those for whom life is a struggle can learn better mental habits. We are not just prisoners of our feelings. We experience a circular process whereby our feelings affect our thoughts but also our thoughts affect our feelings. The most powerful way to break into that circle is by deciding to adopt new forms of thinking. Notice all the negative thoughts you have, put them to one side and act more on the positive things you can think about and do. We have founded a movement called Action for Happiness, a group of people committed to the promise that they will try to create as much happiness as they can in the world for themselves and others. I would urge anybody reading this article to go to the website and find out if there are Action for Happiness groups in their neighbourhood.

Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics by Richard Layard (Pelican, £22) is published on January 30. actionforhappiness.org

BIGISSUE.COM | 21

>

THE SMILE HIGHCLUB..

‘Purpose over profit’ is a phrase increasingly at the heart of big business. Liz Cook, a Cisco employee and Big Issue volunteer, makes the case for the wider benefits of corporate benevolence

Apple committed £1.9 billion ($2.5bn) last year to combat California’s housing crisis. Sure, this is one per cent of the company’s yearly revenue, but it’s been thoughtfully siphoned into several projects, including a £38.3m ($50m) pledge to Silicon Valley’s sustainable housing and homeless prevention organisation, Destination: Home.

Destination: Home’s board, most notably its CEO Jennifer Loving, have spent their lives working to end homelessness. They carry the clout needed to help Santa Clara County’s 7,394 homeless.

Apple refers to the partnership as “working closely with leading experts” and Loving says Apple’s contribution allows her organisation to “scale two proven strategies”. Apple may have reinvented the phone, but they are leaving the wheel well alone here. No gimmicks, or Apple Watches

for the homeless, just correctly channelled support. What’s more, companies who consistently top employee-led surveys such as Great Place to Work and Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work are those that score highly on mission (read: purpose), values and trust. The happiest employees – for example those at Cisco, Hilton, Salesforce, Mars, EY – are working for companies who have made big commitments to giving back to the community.

As Richard Layard outlines in his book Can We Be Happier?, top markers of a happy individual are good mental health and a sense a purpose in their work. The happiest countries – Finland, followed by the rest of Scandinavia – were more trusting, more generous, had adequate social support, freedom, health and income. So, giving employees the chance to make an impact, act generously, exercise and earn at work results in a deliriously happy workforce.

I, readers, am one of the delirious. For eight years I’ve been working for technology firm Cisco (voted 2019’s Best Workplace in the World), and I’m spending my five allotted days a year volunteering my writing skills with the editorial team at The Big Issue.

That’s a bit of a stretch, I hear you say. You could be building water pumps, teaching code or serving in soup kitchens. But I’m also seven weeks away from having a baby, so tapping my fat fingers on a keyboard to help get a brilliant magazine into the hands of vendors is one way I can sensibly make a difference.

Of course, next week I will still have a sales target to deliver, remaining no more important than my 70,000 colleagues, but my sense of contribution to a cause will absolutely make me more productive, because I will be grateful, inspired and refreshed.

So, how can the contribution of soft-handed office workers truly make a difference?

We’ve learned from the billionaire Elon Musk that trying to help the world by doing things your way (cave submarine, anyone?) isn’t always useful or welcome.

It comes back to sensible partnering with the experts. Heavyweight Goliaths teaming up with focused and victorious Davids.

When volunteering last year in my local Trussell Trust foodbank, it was clear that the Cisco-Trussell Trust relationship is symbiotic. Where Trussell Trust has developed a unique programme for Cisco employees to volunteer in clear and useful ways, Cisco helps with issues such as GDPR, cybersecurity and, crucially, with helping translate and analyse Trussell Trust’s vast data on foodbanks. Cisco and Trussell Trust can fight food poverty better working together rather than separately.

Another Goliath teaming well with David, Legal & General has leapt into affordable housing projects, making a £44.6m investment in housing homeless families last year by partnering with Croydon Council. Working with the council’s frontline team means accommodation is correctly managed and given to those on Croydon’s waiting list, which currently numbers more than 2,000. In turn, Croydon Councillor Alison Butler said L&G’s investment saves them around £20m in loan costs, helping more families in the long term. That’s a huge win for the public and big business. No wonder almost 70 per cent of L&G employees say they would refer a friend.

Purpose-led doesn’t have to mean a drop in profits, it means making profits ethical. As businesses move towards the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit, all three should hold equal value.

It’s a brave step for older companies, but look at Unilever, whose 26 sustainable living brands grew 46 per cent faster than the rest of the business, delivering 70 per cent of overall turnover growth in 2017. Consumers and employees welcome the change – they want their hand soap and their workplace to align to their values.

It’s right to be sceptical when altruism is so good for reputation. The key to sustainability is upkeep. It’s not acceptable for Goliaths to give charitably but ignore the wages of factory workers. It’s not enough if you’ve banned disposable coffee cups but your supply chain is oozing carbon emissions. There’s no shame in profit sitting alongside people and planet – just make it a good deal for your client as well as suppliers. Distribute wealth fairly. Improve the world with your product.

Get this right, and you really are making the planet a happier place. @thatlizcook

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… BUT GREED REMAINS GOD

Political economist Anastasia Nesvetailova says that rather than an anomaly, fnancial malpractice is an intrinsic feature of how the market operates

In June 2016, in the wake of the fallen Gaddafi regime, the Libyan authorities sued a leading global bank, Goldman Sachs, for nine trades the bank advised on and executed for the Libyan sovereign wealth fund between January and April 2008. The new Libyan government claimed that Goldman Sachs gained more than £153 million ($200m) in profits from the trades, whereas the Libyans lost almost all of their investment.

As it would transpire during court proceedings, Goldman paid for prostitutes, private jets and five-star hotels to win the business from a Libyan investment fund. Goldman’s internal documents describe its Libyan clients as having “zero-level” of financial sophistication. The bank’s documents advised that “it is important you stay super-close to clients on a daily basis”.

One Goldman Sachs employee described how he “delivered a pitch on structured leveraged loans to someone who lives in the middle of the desert with his camels”.

Libya lost the case. In October 2016 a High Court judge in London found that the relationship between Goldman Sachs and the Libyan Investment Authority “did not go beyond the normal cordial and mutually beneficial relationship that grows up between a bank and a client”. In the judge’s opinion, Goldman’s fees in the disputed trades were not excessive given “the nature of the trades and the work that had gone into winning them”.

Neither Libya, nor Goldman, nor even the prostitutes or the camels, are exceptions in the story of the financial system we tell in Sabotage. While individual cases of misdeeds, abuse or negligence have hit headlines over the recent years and, in particular, in the context of the 2007-09 crisis, the question that interests my co-author Ronen Palan and I in this book is not about individual misdeeds. Instead, we asked a different, and very simple question: how come that the financiers make so much money, whatever their geographical or political context?

A related question is this: is there a link between the now notorious criminal and legal cases brought against the banks and other financial institutions, and the very fact the financial industry continually makes so much money?

In our search for an answer, we reached the conclusion that mainstream economic theory is, actually, correct in its core assumption.

If the market is competitive – and the global financial system is a highly competitive industry – then big or small financial institutions could not have made the amount of profits that they have. One basic law of economic theory is that in a competitive market, it is impossible to make super-profits.

Working on the book, we spoke to many people in banking and the financial industry, as well as clients and customers of large (and not-so-large) financial institutions. We have looked back carefully at the history of economic thought. In particular, at those cases that were at the heart of the financial crisis of the 1920s.

Our conclusion is that the inexplicably high degree of profitability in finance – back then and today – was the result of a systemic attempt of financial businesses to control the market, or, in other words, to sabotage the market. They did so in three main ways. One – and probably the easiest way – was by sabotaging their own clients. Sabotage is full of cases from very recent history, showing how institutions such as Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK or Wells Fargo in the United States used their power to take advantage of clients, including those who are dead.

The second way financiers sabotage the market is way more sophisticated.

Financial institutions have managed, in one way or another, to sabotage the state.

In other words, to make sure that either the state subsidises them by reducing tax or bailing them out in times of trouble, or – in better times – by using sophisticated techniques of tax and regulatory avoidance.

Finally, the third way of sabotaging the market is by sabotaging each other.

One of the cases we discuss in the book includes a high-profile financial institution in the UK which, under the guise of helping another bank out of trouble, in fact depleted and destroyed the bank in question, benefitting enormously in the process. In an ironic twist of fate, or hosticide, as we call it in the book, the offender was eventually eaten up by another institution.

“I don’t like the word ‘sabotage’,” a former Goldman Sachs trader admitted to us.

“It’s just harsh … Though, frankly, how else do you make money in this business …

I mean, real money …?”

Sabotage: the Business of Finance by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan is out on January 30 (Allen Lane, £20)

20-26 JANUARY 2020

BIGISSUE.COM | 23

davos.

SLEEPING ROUGH NEXT TO THE SUPER-RICH The world's elite are heading to the Swiss ski resort this week to shape the global agenda.

But back among the rich and powerful will be campaigner Andrew Funk, kipping in a tepee, to ensure people living in poverty are not left out in the cold. Words: Liam Geraghty We all know about Davos. It’s the World Economic Forum annual meeting that is so often painted as a champagnefuelled jolly for world leaders, titans of industry and the superrich to discuss current issues facing the world.

Take a stroll around the lavish Swiss ski resort and you won’t see poverty or homelessness. You’ll only hear about them in speeches and debates at the event.

Andrew Funk wants to change that. The American will brave the bitter cold to sleep out at Davos this week – the third time he has done so – to ensure the voices of homeless people and those shackled by poverty are heard among those of the bigwigs.

It’s no annual one-off either. As head of the Barcelonabased charity Homeless Entrepreneur, Funk has participated in a monthly sleepout for the last 41 months, taking in everywhere from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding in Windsor, to Finland, the Skoll World Forum in Oxford and the More World conference in Berlin.

“We go around all over the place and we have been doing it for a very long time,” he tells The Big Issue. “It’s part of our commitment to give homeless people a voice in these larger events and it works, but it takes time. You have to be patient and you have to find out who cares and make sure what you do aligns with what their interests are.”

Oddly enough, US President Donald Trump can take some credit for inspiring Funk’s tireless efforts at Davos. A conversation with his father about Trump’s impending trip to the forum in 2018 saw Funk make the impulsive choice to head to Switzerland.

Four days later, he and the co-ordinator of the Homeless Entrepreneur programme were sat in a Davos bar at the end of the night desperately trying to find a place to stay.

Bizarrely, a tepee proved to be the pair’s salvation.

“We went there and we didn’t know what to expect,” says Funk. “We didn’t have a place to stay because it is €3,000 per night for the cheapest place. And then when we got there it was like 1.30am and we went to a bar to try to keep warm. They were closing so I asked the owner: ‘Do you have any idea where I can stay?’ He told me of this one tepee, and since then it has been the base of what we use when we’re in Davos.“It’s the safest place and the warmest place in the area.”

That’s not to say that sleeping out in Davos is an easy task.

While it could be generously described as a bit nippy in the daytime, overnight temperatures head well south of freezing.

Home discomfort This will be Funk's third visit to Davos

'I put it out on LinkedIn, asking who people would like to see sleep out, and a lot of them said Boris Johnson'

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But Funk sees braving the cold as an act of solidarity with the people he tries to help in his everyday role creating opportunities for homeless people to work their way out of poverty.

“It gets down to -20C – that’s dangerous levels of cold,” he says. “If you’re not prepared it can kill you – literally – and you don’t sleep at all. Let’s just say that Davos is an unfriendly place for people who don’t have money.

“There is no place to rest, it’s snowy, it’s cold, and the only places you can go to rest are coffee bars with €5 coffee. After three nights of sleeping out on the street you are completely destroyed and feeling the sleep deprivation. There is a point when you just kind of get upset because you see the contrast of what it is like to be on one extreme and then you see the other side. What you realise too is that everybody slips on an icy street – it doesn’t matter how rich you are.”

It's that ethos that keeps Funk going. He describes his efforts as “picking away at the rock” as he looks to become an accepted part of “his favourite” event.

He has already made waves. In his first year at Davos, Funk was invited to speak about poverty with Cisco and IBM. In the second year that grew to chats with Bourne actor and campaigner Matt Damon as well as former KPMG chief and peer 20-26 JANUARY 2020

Image: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Power yap Theresa May and Donald Trump at Davos in 2018

DIVE IN TO DAVOS Positive action Andrew Funk (left) and team grin and bear it

WHAT IS IT? It’s the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a not-for-profit foundation based nearby in Geneva.

Started by German economist and engineer Professor Klaus Schwab in 1971, the event is known as Davos after the ski resort where it is held.

WHO AND HOW MANY PEOPLE GO? Around 3,000 people attend every year.

Davos attracts an elite crowd with 900 chief executives or company chairs and 70 world leaders also stopping by.

Boris Johnson won’t be one of them this year – he’s “delivering for the people, not champagne with billionaires” – but Donald Trump will be back after skipping last year.

Lord Hastings.This year Funk will be a fixture at fringe events as well as hosting midnight debates to sound out a clear action plan to end homelessness globally.

Trump, too, will return to the forum in 2020 – he skipped Davos last year, citing the US government shutdown. Greta Thunberg, fresh from her showstopping speech last year, is among scores of youth activists who will confront the US president and other leaders on fossil fuels.

But, for Funk, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the top choice out of all the world leaders to come over to the tepee for a chat about ending poverty.

“I put it out on LinkedIn, asking who people would want to see sleep out, and a lot of them said Boris Johnson,” he says. “It shows people in England care about their leaders representing them in Davos and believe they can make a difference.

“It would mean that a world leader is actually making that consideration and putting themselves into the shoes of the people who voted for them.

"It would mean the world to those of us sleeping out and would be a 20-26 JANUARY 2020

gesture to those who are living in poverty in England.”

Johnson is no stranger to Davos – he attended twice as Mayor of London as he looked to drum up investment for the English capital.

But it was announced in December that he would be skipping the 50th Davos summit, a Downing Street source telling the Evening Standard: “Our focus is on delivering for the people, not champagne with billionaires.”

While a blow for Funk, he is determined not to be left out in the cold.

“It’s easy to criticise Davos because there is just so much money and power flowing around there,” he says. “But we’re not going there to tell people that they are killing the planet or taking advantage. We’re going there to say, ‘Hey, what can we do together to improve the current state of the world?’ That’s our objective.

“They’re not including people living in the poverty they speak about. So it’s easy to criticise but it is more difficult to come up with the better solution, which is what we’re trying to do.”

WHAT HAPPENS THERE? Talking, networking and a fair bit of partying. The WEF bills Davos’s mission as “improving the state of the world” and hails itself as the “foremost creative force” for setting global agendas. Long story short, elites discuss the big issues of the day and every year is themed – this year’s 50th iteration has seven, including fairer economies and how to save the planet.

BUT DOES DAVOS ACTUALLY CHANGE ANYTHING? The event is more known for reframing issues than tangible change, a big point of criticism for Davos’s detractors.

However, a meeting between thenTurkish prime minister Turgat Özal and Greek leader Andreas Papandreou at Davos is credited with preventing a war in the Eighties.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO GO? If you’re invited it is free but companies have to fork out a lot to attend. It costs companies 27,000 Swiss Francs (£21,426) per person to send an employee to Davos on top of annual membership, which can range from 60,000 to 600,000 Swiss Francs (£47,620 to £476,205) depending on the tier.

@Lazergun_Nun BIGISSUE.COM | 25

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20-26 JANUARY 2020

Centre of Labour, Corbyn critic Best known for being from Birmingham and a bit gobby, Phillips – who is from Birmingham and a bit gobby – has based her campaign on honesty, community activism and her reputation as a straight-talker.

May not be popular with Corbyn’s fans though.

Jess Phillips

Pro-European, centre of Labour Starmer faced questions over whether he was “too middle class” to be leader, possibly because he looks like the sort of person you’d cast as PM in a TV drama. The son of a toolmaker and a nurse, the attack may seem odd given the party enjoyed some success under Fettes-educated Tony Blair.

Joint favourite with Long-Bailey.

Sir Keir Starmer

Round three: Party members, trade union members, members of affiliated societies and registered supporters vote on the winner (one vote each), ranking them in terms of preference. Voting takes place between February 21 and April 2.

If there is no winner after the vote then, in true socialist style, votes will be redistributed and candidates kicked out, until someone hits more than 50 per cent.

Left of Labour A close ally of Jeremy Corbyn and, as a result, one of the favourites for the leadership, Long-Bailey recently ended months of speculation by confirming there is indeed a hyphen in her name. Could this be the sort of bold leadership needed to win back power? Possibly.

Pro-European, Labour centre Thornberry promised to step down if it looked like Labour couldn’t win – this usually happens anyway - and more recently gave Jeremy Corbyn “0 out of 10” for his performance during the general election. Given he is stepping down, her system seems to work.

Rebecca Long-Bailey Emily Thornberry

Round two: To reach the final shortlist they also need to gain nominations from at least 33 constituency Labour parties or three affiliates (two of these must be trade unions), representing at least five per cent of affiliate membership. If that sounds complicated, it’s beca

Round one: Candidates have to gain the nominations of 22 MP and MEP colleagues.

Centre-left Brexit supporter Nandy’s pitch is based in winning back Brexit supporters and investing in the UK’s towns. In fact, the cofounder of the Centre for Towns, Nandy loves towns so much she has started generating memes on them.

A northern MP, whether she can broaden her appeal to take in cities, villages and hermits is unclear.

Lisa Nandy

Never a party to keep debate over its strategy internal, Labour’s contest will run until April 4 to give candidates as much time for falling out in public as possible.

There are now five candidates in the running to replace Jeremy Corbyn, after Clive Lewis failed to reach the required number of nominations and Barry Gardiner didn’t have enough support to even try. Well, it’s not a popularity contest – wait, no sorry, that’s exactly what it is.

UK LABOUR LEADERSHIP

Party leadership contests are sort of like dreams – despite being full of significance, no one really ever wants to hear about them.

But if politics is showbiz for ugly people, this is essentially the Oscars. So how does it work? Words: Liam Kirkaldy @HolyroodLiam

The complete guide to British political party leadership elections you didn't know you needed

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BIGISSUE.COM | 27

Under party rules, a leadership contest was triggered the moment then leader Jo Swinson lost her seat in December’s general election.

The good news for her successor is that with Boris Johnson winning a comfortable majority there is unlikely to be another election for a few years, which means they should be able to at least hold on to the position longer than Swinson did.

In previous contests, candidates had to be an MP and have the backing of at least 10 per cent of the Parliamentary party – though given there are only 11 of them, it should be pretty easy to get one other person’s backing. They also need support from at least 200 members spread across at least 20 different local parties.

The contest will take place some time this year, and no one really knows who will run. It will use the alternative vote system – the one the UK had a referendum on, back when referendums were boring.

Attracting attention Moran was elected in 2017 before becoming a rising star in the Lib Dems – though it’s worth keeping in mind that, with 12 MPs, she didn’t have to rise that far. Her recent announcement that she is pansexual and that Parliament is a "weird, backward place" has certainly got her noticed.

Layla Moran

Liberal and democratic Already rejected by Lib Dem members who went with Jo Swinson last time round, the question is whether he would take on the leadership if the party comes grovelling. Of course it’s not a particularly difficult question, because he almost certainly would.

Corbyn ally, left of Labour Burgon rose quickly in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, though in fairness that was largely because most of the people above him quit in a mass resignation. From the socialist wing of the party, supporters will worry he splits Dawn Butler’s vote.

Richard Burgon

Delayed because of the general election, the Scottish Tory leadership contest is essentially a two-horse race, except instead of horses they are Tory MSPs. Under party rules, contestants – sorry, candidates – need to be nominated by 100 members who have been paid-up supporters for at least three months.

If there is only one candidate they are the new leader. Congratulations!

If there are two candidates who each win at least 100 votes, then members will vote in a secret ballot to choose.

Candidate spending is limited to just £20,000.

SCOTTISH TORY LEADERSHIP

Centre left The favourite in round one, Rayner got a boost with Rebecca Long-Bailey’s decision to back her for deputy – possibly because she is seen as having cross-party appeal, or possibly just because, given the two are flatmates, it would be very, very awkward at home if she hadn’t.

Angela Rayner

Sir Ed Davey

Corbyn ally, left of Labour Butler faced criticism from giraffe biologists after claiming “90 per cent of giraffes are gay” at an after-dinner speech. Still, more effective as a politician than a zoologist, she gained publicity following some assured performances alongside Jeremy Corbyn. But is she head and shoulders above her rivals? Who knows.

Dawn Butler

UK LIB DEM LEADERSHIP (MAYBE)

Scottish Labour's only MP Murray recently described himself as “the cockroach after the nuclear holocaust” at the Labour deputy leadership hustings, and, although it may not be the most flattering comparison, given how badly things have been going, his skills in political survival could certainly come in useful in future.

Ian Murray

UK LABOUR DEPUTY LEADERSHIP

Economically and socially conservative Former nurse Ballantyne loves Thatcher and thinks poor people on benefits need to realise they “cannot have as many children as they like”. This may not sound like a particularly good way to win friends, but then keep in mind the people voting are Tories.

Michelle Ballantyne

Centre-right, pro-BoJo Despite approaching public speaking with the air of a best man whose speech has bombed, Carlaw’s time as interim leader gave him the chance to show he could also do the serious stuff. A series of strong performances in FMQs helped the Eastwood MSP bolster his reputation. The clear favourite.

Jackson Carlaw

Elected in 2016 and toed party line A&E doctor Allin-Khan went viral before the general election with a Love Actually-themed campaign video, before Boris Johnson saw it, liked it and stole it for his own campaign. She may be an outside bet to win the love of the party, but then so was Jeremy Corbyn...

Rosena Allin-Khan

BOOKS Why we need to keep tabs on the new web of fascism Jeff Sparrow

FILM Armando Iannucci takes a fresh and inclusive approach to Dickens Cath Clarke

BROADCAST

Just how much do psychics get right when predicting the future?

Robin Ince

STREET ART

Extraordinary Responses In a project organised by visual arts charity Project Ability and supported by The Heritage Lottery Group, for the last year a group of “outsider” artists including Richard Anderson, Sian Mather, Morag Macgilchrist and Stuart Lo have been researching Glasgow’s art galleries.

On display now until February 22 at Trongate 103 in Glasgow, Extraordinary Responses is an exhibition of work inspired by their visits – from pottery to sculptures and large-scale paintings. project-ability.co.uk/exhibitions/ extraordinary-responses

The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here.

To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com At least half of the profit goes to the artist.

20-26 JANUARY 2020

BIGISSUE.COM | 29

CULTURE | BOOKS

AUTHOR FEATURE

Web of fear Recent tragic events indicate online fascism is a growing threat. Jef Sparrow believes to fight it we need to understand its allure

I

n the manifesto published online before the murder of 51 people in two New Zealand mosques last year, the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre included a strange FAQ about his ideas.

“Are you a fascist?” he asked rhetorically.

“Yes,” he answered himself. “For once, the person that will be called a fascist is an actual fascist. I am sure the journalists will love that.”

As soon as I read that passage, I knew I wanted to write a book. For, in fact, most journalists didn’t “love” his confession. It was far more common to read media descriptions of the perpetrator as an ‘extremist’, ‘radical’ or ‘anti-Muslim activist’ than a ‘fascist’.

In some ways, that was understandable.

Immediately after the killings, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern pledged never to say the perpetrator’s name. Many commentators thought that his manifesto, like the footage of his murders, should be ignored, not dignified by study. I disagreed, partly because the perpetrator’s writing offered a window into an ‘actual fascism’ usually hedged behind layers of irony.

In his first courtroom appearance after the killings, the alleged perpetrator posed for the cameras with his shackled hand making the ‘OK’ symbol. At one stage, internet trolls had tried to prank anti-racists by claiming (falsely) the common gesture represented ‘white power’. Later, fascists began themselves using the sign, deploying it simultaneously as a joke and as a real emblem of hatred.

It was typical of the strategy that allowed far-right ideas to spread from sites like 4chan and 8chan, where a humour based on supposedly apolitical transgression helped normalise fascist memes.

But the circulation of these memes – like the growth of the online right more generally – also depended on the inability of ‘normies’ to understand internet culture.

That was another reason, it seemed to me, for the media to talk more, not less, about fascism, so as to help the community recognise what they were seeing.

When I read the perpetrator’s manifesto, I was shocked by the sophistication of his strategy. We know that he’d followed closely the attempts by other fascists to build offline movements following Donald Trump’s victory, a win facilitated by alt-right publications like breitbart.com – but, after the murder of activist Heather Heyer at Charlottesville in 2017, he recognised that, in the Englishspeaking world, fascists would struggle to turn their online support into a mass movement. His solution was terrorism –

30 | BIGISSUE.COM

Illustration: Joseph Joyce

but a particular kind of terrorism. In the past, gun massacres, in the form they take today, were vanishingly rare. The forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen says that they “do not even begin to appear until the 20th century and only emerge as a recurring theme in the last 30 years”.

No consensus exists to explain that spread. But it seems plausible to me that, in an economic and social environment in which many feel alienated and impotent, violence allows damaged individuals to experience a power and intensity absent from their everyday life.

Certainly, unstable men now turn, in a way that their fathers and grandfathers did not, to a particular psychological script: one in which a would-be killer stockpiles guns and ammunition, assembles a uniform, writes a list of grievances and then opens fire in a public place until he’s killed or (more rarely) captured. That, I realised, was key to the Christchurch perpetrator’s plan. Just as earlier fascist activists had recognised troll culture as a milieu from which to recruit, he identified the gun massacre as a vehicle for fascist politics. With his own attack, he followed the traditional script but gave each element a distinctive, didactic twist.

When he posted pictures of guns, he displayed fascist slogans on them; when he wrote a document, he didn’t complain about workmates or family but outlined the history and philosophy of fascism. He livestreamed his murders in footage itself studded with 8chan memes. The ghastly

clip was designed to fascinate young men already attracted to violence, encouraging them to believe that if by carrying out a similar atrocity they’d be transformed from hapless losers into fascist supermen, going out in blaze of glory to save the white race. It continues to circulate in far right forums, alongside his manifesto.

That’s why I think we need to keep talking about fascism.

The Fourth Reich will not come to power through small-scale acts of terrorism committed by young men recruited from the internet.

Nevertheless, the Christchurch murderer has now directly inspired similar killings in California, Texas, Norway and Germany – precisely as he had hoped. He has established, it seems to me, a durable model for self-replicating terrorism, a pattern that we should expect to repeat, including here in the UK. There’s no simple way to prevent the lone-wolf terror that begins with a young man reading memes online. But, after writing about Christchurch, I’m more convinced than ever that power requires knowledge. Online fascism constitutes a genuine threat. We need to understand it to fight it.

Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre by Jeff Sparrow is out now (Scribe, £9.99) 20-26 JANUARY 2020

REVIEW

Jonathan Rowson

Back to the future

Top 5 unconventional self-help books

Chris Deerin Š ½Þ ̊ Ăš ÌêÚÄ Ă‹ÂŁ Ăź Ú×êĺ ÂŁ ̊ Ăš s½½ Ăƒ &ÂŹ ÞËÄ ܊ËÞ ½ ĂŚ ÞÌ Ă„Ă‹Ăľ ½ Ă‹Ä… ÚÞ Ăś ÚďĤ ÂŁĂšĂ‹Ăƒ ̊ Ă„ ÝÌ ÄÌêÚß

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Ç˝ÇťÉŻÇ˝Č 9 Dg Yy ǽǝǽǝ

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On Becoming a Person

by Carl R Rogers “What is most personal is most universal,â€? says Rogers. We’re all unique, yet we share our uniqueness. When we take the ƸƣşǀěŧĪ Ƹş ÿƣƸĹ?ÄœÇ€Ĺ§ĂżĆ¸ÄŞ ƸŊĪ ĆŤĆ ÄŞÄœĹ?ÇżÄœĹ?Ƹǣ of our story, readers can feel their ĹźÇ?Ų ĆŤĆ ÄŞÄœĹ?ÇżÄœ ƍƸşƣǣ ÄœĹźĹ°ÄŞ ÿŧĹ?ÇœÄŞá ‡

the book as intellectually stimulating as it is a compulsive page-turner. Kudos too for chapter names that might be song titles from the next Radiohead album, such as App Whisperer, Area 51 Shit, Churchill’s Waistcoat Pocket and Open Plan Anxiety.

Where Agency is a window, Peter Stamm’s ČƒÄŠ ÂŽÇœÄŠÄŠĆˇ SŹĢŎDzŠĊƢĊŹěĊ ŝŠơʼnĊ à ŝƢŌĢ is more like a mirror. Its main character, a middle-aged writer called Christoph, meets a young woman called Lena who appears to be a doppelganger for his lost love Magdalena, and who has a writer boyfriend called Chris.

As the pair talk, they discover that their lives appear to replicate each other’s – are the younger couple fated to repeat the mistakes of the elder? Translated by the great Michael Hofmann with his usual perfect pitch, this novella raises some challenging questions about memory, individuality and free will, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

ɔɖ

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

by Robert M Pirsig The best self-help books are accidental self-help books. Pirsig illustrates this point in the way he grapples with a personal inquiry into fatherhood, sanity and education; culturally resonant in the Seventies and still prismatic for life as a whole.

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ἔěʼnƢŎƪĢĊĊƢŎŹ

The Case for Working with your Hands

by Matthew Crawford The best unconventional self-help ěşşŤƍ şǽƸĪŲ łĪÿƸǀƣĪ Ăż Ć ĂżĆŁĆ¸Ĺ?ÄœÇ€Ĺ§ĂżĆŁ personal crisis overcome that is symptomatic of a societal opportunity more broadly.

Crawford’s journey from scribe to mechanic compellingly highlights the vitality we risk losing in a world of desk jobs and smartphones.

łĊŹěǢ ĚǢ à ŎŌŌŎÞů GŎĚƪŝŹ is out on January 23 á §ÂŁÄŠĹąĹ‚ĆżĹŽĹąá „ ᢖ ᚇá ?â€ŤÚ˜Ú˜â€Źá ¨ Č„ÄŠ ÂŽÇœÄŠÄŠĆˇ SŹĢŎǹŠĊƢĊŹěĊ ŝŠơʼnĊ à ŝƢŌĢ ĚǢ £ĊơĊƢ ÂŽĆˇĂžĹŻĹŻá „ ơƢÞŹƪŌÞơĊĢ ĚǢ rŎěʼnÞĊŌ NĹťĹ ĹŻĂžĹąĹąá „ ĹŽĆŞ ŝƿơ ŝŹ FĊĚƢƿÞƢǢ áš… á §GƢÞŹơÞ ᢖ ‍ڑ‏á ?â€ŤÚ˜Ú˜â€Źá ¨

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The Harry Potter Series

by JK Rowling Harry Potter books are bildungsromans or ‘education novels’ and self-help in disguise.

Aldous Huxley said “experience is not what happens to you but what you do with what happens to youâ€?. The same is true of reading. ÂźĹŠĆŁĹźÇ€ĹƒĹŠ şǀƣ Ĺ?ģĪŲƸĹ?ÇżÄœĂżĆ¸Ĺ?şŲ Ç?Ĺ?ƸŊ ƸŊĪ characters major questions about what living well means arise, but only if we remember to ask them.

ɔə Illustration: Matthew Hollings

ơ ĹŽĆŞ ĹąĹťÇœ áš‚áš… ǢĊÞƢƪ ƪŎŹěĊ à ŎŌŌŎÞů GŎĚƪŝŹ ƿŹŌĊÞƪʼnĊĢ tĊƿƢŝůÞŹěĊƢ ĆżĆ&#x;ŝŹ ơʼnĊ ÇœĹťĆ˘ĹŚÄ˘á ? ČƒĂžĆˇ Ĺ‚ĹŚĹťĆ˘ĹŽĹťĆżĆŞá „ seminal work, astonishingly his debut novel, birthed the cultural movement that would become known as cyberpunk – Gibson is credited with inventing the term “cyberspaceâ€? – and instantly placed its author at the Ć&#x;ŎŹŹÞěŌĊ ŝŠƪĆ&#x;ĊěƿŌÞơŎǛĊ ȀěơŎŝŹá ?

Twelve novels on, Gibson, now in his 70s, remains essential – each new work is a big deal for readers like me, who adore his coupling of super-intelligent ƪěŎĊŹěĊ ȀěơŎŝŹ ÞŹĢ ŌŎơĊƢÞƢǢ ƪůÞƢơƪá ?

Gibson is in essence a superior thriller writer and a science geek who sets his books in a wholly plausible near-future.

His dystopian cyberworlds, with their augmented humans, powerful AIs and droolingly tantalising tech-kit are brilliantly worked through, recognisably evolved extensions of today’s emerging digital reality. Ĺ‚ÄŠĹąÄ›Ç˘á „ his latest, slots perfectly into the Gibson canon. It is a sort-of-prequel, sort-of-sequel – let’s call it a companion – to his last book, Č„ÄŠ £ĊƢŎĆ&#x;ʼnĊƢÞŌ. It shares many of the same characters and the same technological developments and rules. In short – and precis can never do justice to the sophisticated tendrils of his work – humans in the 2100s are able to communicate via technological means with people in the present ĢÞǢá ? ČƒÄŠ ŠƿơƿƢĊ ʼnƿůÞŹƪ ÞƢĊ ơʼnĊ survivors of a close-run species annihilation, and seek to guide their predecessors towards better decisions, in the hope of avoiding calamity.

In Agency, a Trump presidency has somehow been avoided, Hillary Clinton is in the White House, and Brexit never happened. Here, Gibson allows his liberal tendencies to show, but to his credit and for the book’s credibility, the point is never laboured. A nuclear war, beginning in Turkey, is looming, which will be the beginning of the end – the race is on to stop it.

Agency, like Č„ÄŠ £ĊƢŎĆ&#x;ʼnĊƢÞŌ before it, does two smart things: it allows us to look into the near future and see what we might yet become, and it provides a window back onto our own time ŠƢŝů ơʼnÞơ ŠƿơƿƢĊá ? ČƒĹŽĆŞ ĢŝƿĚŌĊ perspective, along with plenty of Ä›Ĺ‰ĂžĆŞÄŠĆŞá „ ÄŠÇĄĆ&#x;ŌŝƪŎŝŹƪ ÞŹĢ Č€Ĺ‚Ĺ‰ĆˇĆŞá „ Ć&#x;Ōƿƪ a healthy dollop of humour, makes

The Velveteen Rabbit

by Margery Williams And good self-help starts even younger, through stories of reciprocal belonging. The Velveteen Rabbit is about how we bring things to life by loving them.

Jonathan Rowson’s Č„ÄŠ rŝǛĊƪ ơʼnÞơ rĂžĆˇĆˇÄŠĆ˘á ‰ ʼnĊƪƪ GƢÞŹĢůÞƪơĊƢ ŝŹ ơʼnĊ GÞůĊ ŝŠhĹŽĹ ÄŠ is out now (Bloomsbury, ÂŁ20)

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CULTURE | FILM

REVIEW

Novel take Armando Iannucci’s witty Dickens adaptation should also be lauded for its inclusive casting, says Cath Clarke

T

heatre has been doing‘colour-blind casting’for years,but until now film has had a‘keep out’ sign on the door, barring actors of colour from appearing in bonnet and breeches dramas.

Now, with his inclusive Dickens adaptation The Personal History of David Copperfield, Armando Iannucci cheerfully sticks two fingers up at the backward-looking tradition of all-white casting.

The ethnicity of the actors in the film is completely irrelevant. Which gives us the heaven-sent casting of Dev Patel, a Londoner of Indian heritage, as Copperfield. I can’t think anyone better suited to Copperfield, an orphan making his way in the world and finding himself as a man, than Patel, an actor with a puppy dog-warm screen presence.

Though he is very nearly eclipsed by pint-sized moppet Jairaj Varsani, who portrays Copperfield as a small boy with irresistible mischief; he’s not on screen for nearly enough time.

That, in a nutshell, is my beef with this David Copperfield. The script by Iannucci and Simon Blackwell snips and clips away at the story, cutting to the dramatic quick with the precision of an expensive Japanese knife, blade glinting. It’s a briskly-paced, good-natured adaptation, but left me with a pang for the novel’s richly enjoyable detail, the shades of feeling, its emotional ache for an unhappy boyhood.

THE REAL DEAL Even if you don’t know the band, you know the chorus of their biggest hit: “You to me are everything, the sweetest song that I could sing, oh baby.” In 1976, Liverpool’s The Real Thing, once described as “the black Beatles”, became the first all-black British band to have a number one song.

At the time it was hard enough for a black man to walk down the street or get a job, a commentator tells the camera dryly in this interesting, informative documentary about the group.

Everything – The Real Thing Story is in cinemas from January 24

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Bag of delights Dev Patel makes for a likeable David Copperfield

It opens with Copperfield (Patel) as a young man, a successful novelist reading from his autobiography on stage before literally walking into scenes of his early life. We see him as a bystander at his own birth, watching his mother, young widow Clara Copperfield (Morfydd Clark) in labour. When she marries abusive Mr Murdstone (Darren Boyd), young Copperfield is humiliatingly put to work at a bottle factory (as Dickens himself was at 11). Peter Capaldi is Mr Micawber, the lad’s feckless London landlord, a man in a constant state of financial embarrassment. As a teenager, Copperfield runs away to his eccentric aunt Betsey Trotwood (Tilda Swinton, wonderful). Ben Whishaw is that great villain Uriah Heep, revoltingly obsequious and ever so humble. Whishaw plays him so well you can almost see smarmy Heep leaving grease marks on the furniture.

It’s perhaps churlish to complain about a film with Dickens’ famous characters played to such perfection by a premier-league cast. And this really is an intelligently adapted and bracingly modern period drama. The script corrects Dickens’ fondness for an insipid female character; Copperfield’s true love Agnes (Rosalind Eleazar) has become the prime mover in uncovering loathsome Heep’s heinous crimes. Even drippy Dora, another love interest, is funnier and wiser. Still, the film is in a constant rush, cantering along, often switching to a gallop. I longed it to slow to a trot. As Dickens himself wrote in the novel: “Trifles are the sum of life.”

Still, it’s a very funny film, and the casting is brilliant. The inclusivity doesn’t feel at all odd or jarring. The white Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard is Copperfield’s swaggering boyhood friend Steerforth while Nikki Amuka-Bird, a Nigerian-Brit, portrays his mother, arrogant Mrs Steerforth. They play the dysfunctional emeshed mother-son relationship beautifully. Now that the glass ceiling has been smashed, more casting like this please.

ThePersonal HistoryofDavid Copperfield is in cinemas from January 24 @CathxClarke 20-26 JANUARY 2020

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CULTURE | BROADCAST

INTERVIEW

OPENING A KHAN OF WORMS Cult comedy Man Like Mobeen is back – and star Guz Khan wants to lift the lid on the reality of life in a working-class community

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uz Khan is in demand. The creator and star of Man Like Mobeen has been busy between series two and three of the comedy hit. He’s been around the world, starring with Idris Elba in Netflix sitcom Turn Up Charlie, Sean Bean and Billy Zane in high-octane Sky drama Curfew and Mindy Kalling in the US TV version of Four Weddings and a Funeral, as well as joining the Spice Girls in an advert for a well-known crisp manufacturer popular with fellow Midlander Gary Lineker.

But home is where the heart is for Khan, who grew up in the Hillfields area of Coventry, which he has described as a “melting pot of ethnicities, bounded by poverty”. And when we meet at the BBC in Central London, he explains that he is very much in demand in Coventry right now, having recently welcomed his fourth child.

Khan’s commitment to representing the stories of his local community is clear as he speaks with care about how he uses a comedy following the misadventures of Mobeen, Aks, the younger sister he Man of dotes on (Dúaa Karim) and hapless misadventures pals Eight (Tez Ilyas) and Nate (Tolu Mobeen with Ogunmefun), to delve into issues (l-r) Nate, affecting the working-class.

Eight and Aks “What influences me is what has been going on, what is taking place in Small Heath, where the series is set,” he says. “Unfortunately in the last year it has continued to be reports of youth-related violence. It is easy to say, ‘Oh, dangerous kids with knives’ – but there are always structural issues as to why these things are taking place and we try to explore that.

“It is plain to see that there is a lack of opportunities for our young people up and down the country. And if you have a tough working-class area and the young people don’t have proper access to education… you can’t blame it on the kids.”

The new series also sees Mobeen and co visiting a local foodbank. The idea was brought in by his co-writer Andy Milligan.

Former humanities teacher Khan, whose journey to TV comedy began with short YouTube videos, was keen to explore the different cultural resonances of foodbanks.

“Andy was telling me how the rates at which people are utilising foodbanks is increasing incredibly,” he says. “I was like: hold up a second. As a British Pakistani in this country, I’ve never had a conversation or seen or thought about people I grew up with from the South Asian community using a foodbank. It got this cog

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Photo: Tiger Aspect/Alistair Heap

20-26 JANUARY 2020

ticking in my head. And it turns out from the statistics that use of foodbanks transcends all demographics, all races. I thought it would be interesting to see how a British Pakistani in Small Heath might react to having to use a foodbank. Because in the British Asian community there’s a culture of people bringing food to each other’s houses.

“We also wanted to dispel myths around foodbanks.

Unfortunately there are people who say, ‘Hold on a minute, you are using a foodbank, but you’ve got an iPhone. Couldn’t you just sell it?’ So we talk about payday loans and how debts continue to cycle.

Yes, you might sell your phone one month – but next month you’ve got the rest of loan to pay and you don’t have a phone.”

Khan is a compelling conversationalist. He switches between booming jokes and serious sociological explorations – his discussion of his own relation with class as he grows more successful a case in point.

“It’s weird that as we progress as individuals from this project, how quickly other [non-working class] people are saying, ‘You can’t be working class any more because I saw you on a Walkers Crisps advert, Guz. And that must have paid for small island in the Bahamas.’

“I’m like, shut up, bruv – the Spice Girls took all the money, let’s get this straight. I’m out here with a bag of crisps and a little bit of change.

But I have been struggling with that over the last year.

“I always regard myself as working class – I am still in the house I started out in, we are in the same area, my friends are the same. But what is true is that I am no longer waking up at 4.30am and marking school books to get in for a deadline. I am not starting at a factory at 12pm to do a 12-hour shift. So it is important to reflect on my life and how it has changed.”

Two-thirds of the increasingly large and devoted audience for Man Like Mobeen are under 35. As well as bringing topical issues to this underserved demographic, Khan is keen to increase opportunities to join him in the television industry to young working-class Midlanders and has set up a trainee scheme.

“Man Like Mobeen is, I feel, one of the best shows serving people in terms of representation and the stories that it tells,” says Khan. “We have a wonderful behind-the-camera team. They work so hard and have from the beginning. And they are all white British dudes, pretty much. That is still the way it is.

“So it’s about drawing in a new set of blood to learn from them. Our focus puller Matt had one of our trainees learning the ropes of what it’s like to do a camera setup, and another was behind the camera giving input on the scenes.

“All of them turned up on time every day, and these are mad hours. Seeing these young people grow was amazing. And some of them have gone on to get other jobs in the industry immediately.”

It’s a way of working Khan plans to continue – paying it forward, sharing his success. And he is determined that other productions follow suit.

“If this tiny project wanting to make this change can do it, I look at productions which have huge budgets and think it is something we can implement on every film set, on every television set. It’s not hard, bro.”

Season three of Man Like Mobeen is available to watch on BBC Three via the iPlayer from January 26. Interview: Adrian Lobb @adey70 20-26 JANUARY 2020

BROADCAST

Universal truths There’s lot of scientific debunking to be done out there. Robin Ince knows just the place

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odcasts have changed the sort of recorded conversation we have access to. Radio requires a pacing and attitude to content, as well as a need to fit Psychic warfare in a very specific time slot The Skeptics maintain a healthy for listings magazines. This cynicism when it comes to soothsayers can lead to podcasts being woolly, unfocused and selfindulgent. Sometimes that self-indulgence can also lead to something rather wonderful.

The Skeptics’Guide to the Universe is one of those podcasts where the chemistry and fascinations of the hosts comes together. It is a perfectly curated eavesdrop on science and scepticism. It is a family affair – Steven, Jay and Bob Novella are The Osmonds of evidencebased thinking, joined by Cara Santa Maria and Evan Bernstein. Steven Novella is a neurologist whose campaigning work has been particularly focused on the medical pseudoscience behind the anti-vaccination campaign and alternative medicine practitioners.

The podcast will soon approach its 800th episode. Sadly, they are never short of stories and ideologies to debunk and discuss, though they are not purely attached to dealing with more negative human ideas – they explore the latest scientific ideas and anecdotes too. This year starts lightly with their annual psychic predictions round-up.

Which psychic of 2019 most effectively distorted the laws of spacetime and burrowed forward in the block universe?

Unsurprisingly, the team are not keen on psychics. In seeking a collective noun they settle on “a scam of psychics”. The predictions intended for last year vary from the pointlessly broad – “the stock market is going to go up and down” to entertainingly odd – “the way we approach farming will change radically”. One psychic offers a vegan alternative to the old soothsayer tradition of finding the future by interpreting the steaming offal of a freshly slaughtered beast. This psychic drops asparagus instead and, depending on how it lands, predicts the future with his spear of destiny.

The general rule is things that are happening now will happen to a vaguely greater-to-lesser extent the year after. The trick for the psychic is to throw out enough predictions that, when just one of them hits, they can glory in their prescience. It doesn’t need to be too exact, but if it is dramatic enough the rest of your psychic career is sorted. If you got one right you’ve got a publishing deal and YouTube ad revenue for life.

Episode 757’s engram story is of particular interest as engram is a word that has drifted into pseudoscience – “I think of scientology and I think of bullshit” sums up the reaction. Engrams in scientology are unconscious memories of traumatic events, but the term is older than L Ron Hubbard’s ideology. One hundred years ago, Richard Semon pondered the idea of what our memories physically are. Are there fundamental units of memory and can old memories that are no longer apparent be stimulated back to life? As usual, mice are bearing the brunt of this work at the moment, going so far as having artificial memories placed in their brains. This leads to a discussion on ideas in science that lie dormant until the necessary technological leaps are made.

There is no shortage of podcasts trying to rebalance the plethora of misinformation in our world with evidence-based thought. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe is one of the best, but who knows what the future may hold for it. I will get my asparagus from the kitchen to find out. theskepticsguide.org @robinince BIGISSUE.COM | 35

CULTURE | MUSIC

Believe the hype Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s new album was launched in lavish style. But Claire Jackson reckons the youthful cellist is deserving of all the fuss

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Photo Credit: Theo Wargo / Staff/ Getty

any of us have daydreamed about our own launch parties, where groundbreaking new tech or an era-defining book is unveiled as the champagne flows.

The truth is, few projects today can justify such a fanfare. That is particularly true for classical music albums, which are increasingly self-funded and crowdsourced. Patrons deserve reassurance that their contributions will be spent on studio time, rather than over-priced snacks for journalists. Most classical recordings are therefore released digitally or alongside a scheduled concert.

But Sheku Kanneh-Mason isn’t your average classical musician. To trail the cellist’s latest album – a collection of works curated around Elgar’s cello concerto, performed with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle – record label Decca Classics arranged for a photograph of Kanneh-Mason to be projected on to landmarks in London, New York, Sydney, Beijing and Berlin. Then, the night before the release, there was a special screening of footage made during the recording sessions at Abbey Road – plus a live performance by the cellist. The Elgar album – which we spoke to him about in The Big Issue recently – was officially launched in Kanneh-Mason’s home town Nottingham, at the Royal Concert Hall.

It’s a lot for any artist to live up to, not least a 20-year-old student (Kanneh-Mason studies at the Royal Academy of Music).

Repeated listening to his Elgar concerto (on vinyl, another marketing win for Decca Classics) shows that the young cellist lives up to the hype. Of course, his style will develop over time (he has hinted that he

20-26 JANUARY 2020

may record the work again in the future) but it’s worth remembering that one of the most beloved versions of the piece, made by Jacqueline du Pré in 1965, was also recorded when the cellist was 20.

Kanneh-Mason’s first album topped the classical charts and, unusually, the US iTunes pop chart. Of course, it helped that the cellist had just played one of the biggest gigs of 2018: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding. This followed on from success at the 2016 instalment of BBC Young Musician of the Year, where he became the first black musician to win the competition. He’s just been appointed MBE in the New Year’s Honours list, and has been named as an ambassador of inner-city music charity, London Music Masters. Kanneh-Mason – along with his six musical siblings – is doing much to inspire young people to take up an instrument. The cello world finally has its own Lang Lang.

When you reach a certain level of stardom, all rules are there to be broken.

Coldplay recently published details of their latest album Everyday Life in the classified section of the unsuspecting North Wales Daily Post. Radiohead famously made

In Rainbows available as a pay-whatyou-want download in 2007; a strategy virtually unheard of before the recession.

It’s exciting, then, to see what Radiohead instrumentalist and composer Jonny Greenwood will do with his new record label Octatonic, which is dedicated to classical music.

“I stand in awe of classically trained UK musicians: a 20-something carrying a cello case will always be more impressive than someone with a guitar. It’s just harder to do,” writes Greenwood on Octatonic’s website. “It takes more commitment, and the sounds they make are so limitless – for all that the instruments they play are ‘traditional’.”

The first releases include violinist Daniel Pioro performing JS Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor on one album, and Michael Gordon’s Industry and Jonny Greenwood’s Three Miniatures from Water on the other.

Both are available on vinyl and in digital format. New recordings of music by Steve Reich are in the works, as well as more of Greenwood’s own unrecorded material. @claireiswriting

Listen to…

Finding Harmony by The King’s Singers explores vocal music that has shaped identity, often through shared suffering. The American civil rights movement is represented through This Little Light of Mine, while S’Dremlen feygl (Birds Are Snoozing in the Branches) is dedicated to Lithuanian Jews who were murdered in the holocaust. The album – released on January 31 – also features arrangements of Ariana Grande’s One Last Time to commemorate those lost in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, and to mark the subsequent unity across the city.

BIGISSUE.COM | 37

CULTURE | VENDOR CITY GUIDE Illustration: Megan Reddi

Our guides this week Georg and Eveylne Aigner sell Austrian street paper Apropos

Salzburg, Austria Street secrets revealed by the people who know them best

01

Why we like living in Salzburg Georg: We grew up here and I love every stone of Salzburg. For a long time now we did not go away for holidays, because we like it here as it is. Most of the people here are friendly, peaceful and always ready to help.

Evelyne: It is a beautiful city where living is pretty good, and it is not as big as Vienna.

02

What every visitor must do Georg: What Salzburg is most famous for is Mozart, Festspiele [a classical music festival] and Mozartkugeln [a chocolate ball].

On one side it is an accurate image of the city, because the portrait of Mozart is omnipresent in the city, but this glamorous image belies that there is poverty in Salzburg as well. Every visitor should go is Mozart’s birthplace [Hagenauer Haus], the Salzburg fortress and the old town by day and by night.

03

What to do without spending money Evelyne: Walking along the river Salzach is free and beautiful in every season. From Makartsteg, which is a bridge, you can enjoy the famous view of Salzburg with all the huge baroque buildings and the fortress above them all.

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Georg: A very nice thing to do is walk up the beautiful mountains Kapuzinerberg and Mönchsberg. On days with clear weather you can even see far out to the countryside and to the east of Germany. With the mountains we have nature in the midst of our city; from the Apropos office, which is located at the foot of the Kapuzinerberg, we sometimes see chamois, squirrels and lots of different birds.

04

Our favourite place in Salzburg Georg: We live in Lehen. It is more quiet than the city and everybody knows and supports each other.

Evelyne: It is also perfect for walking our dog, because there are more parks than in the city. Lehen is sometimes known for being a problematic district, but we do not think so.

05

Best place to eat Georg: There is a restaurant called Schmankerl, which means “speciality” in Austrian dialect. You can eat inexpensively, which is not common in Salzburg. Our favourite café is the bakery Resch & Frisch.

“It has turned my life around,” says Georg. “My wife and I visit schools and universities to talk about the street paper and poverty in Salzburg.” Eveylne adds: “My selfconfidence was built up with the help of Apropos, and we are somehow a little famous now in the city.”

Evelyne: You can borrow a book in the library next door and then read it while drinking good coffee in a warm atmosphere.

Georg: Salzburg is also known for its culinary delicacies. Some of them are known around the world…

Both: Wiener schnitzel, salzburger nockerl, sachertorte, kasnockn, kaiserschmarren and bosna.

06

How to escape city life Evelyne: We do not have to go far, we walk around the Lehener Park. If we want to go a little bit further away from the city we drive to DaxLueg with our moped. It is a restaurant on a hill 10km away from Salzburg.

07

Our favourite time of the year Georg: In spring you can feel how the trees live and the plants start to grow again.

I like that very much. And autumn because the fruits on the trees become ripe and the leaves change their colours. Both times are also good to drive with the moped. apropos.or.at BIGISSUE.COM | 39

CLASSIFIEDS

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CROSSWORD 1

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Across 1. Be relieved from anxiety (7,5) 9. Decree (9) 10. Uncooked (3) 11. Body of an aircra�t (7) 12. Model-making wood (5) 13. Join the military (6) 15. Treat stingily (6) 18. Caper (5) 20. Call in question (7) 22. Can (3) 23. Selfish user (9) 24. Loose garment (8,4)

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FOUNDERS John Bird and Gordon Roddick GROUP CHAIR Nigel Kershaw MANAGING DIRECTOR Russell Blackman EDITORIAL & PRODUCTION Editor Paul McNamee Managing editor Vicky Carroll Features editor Steven MacKenzie Senior reporter Liam Geraghty Sta�f reporter Hannah Westwater Books editor Jane Graham News & entertainment Adrian Lobb Radio Robin Ince Music Malcolm Jack and Claire Jackson Art director Ross Lesley-Bayne Production editor Sarah Reid Production journalist Alan Woodhouse Designer Gillian Smith Junior designer Matthew Costello Digital brand editor Sarah Howell ADVERTISING: 020 3890 3899 Dennis Publishing, 31-32 Alfred Pl, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7DP Group advertising director Andrea Mason Advertising director Helen Ruane Deputy advertising manager Rebecca New Classified and recruitment: 020 3890 3744 Account director Jenny Bryan Account manager Imogen Williams VENDOR COMMENTS vendor.comments@bigissue.com THE BIG ISSUE GROUP 020 7526 3200 113-115 Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, London, N4 3HH Group finance director Clive Ellis Group marketing & communications director Lara McCullagh Group HR director Elizabeth Divver Director of sales and operations Chris Falchi-Stead Head of partnerships and programmes Beth Thomas Big Issue Invest CEO Danyal Sattar BigIssueFoundationCEO Stephen Robertson

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Down 2. Revolutionary (7) 3. Entry in chronicle (5) 4. Clothes’ storage device (6) 5. Bitter (7) 6. Month (5) 7. US state (3,9) 8. Neutralised (12) 14. Favourable outcome (7) 16. Agitated (2,1,4) 17. Japan (6) 19. Metric weight (5) 21. Tine (5)

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17 23

22 21 24

CRYPTIC CLUES Across 1.Having a superior smile? (6,6) 9. Nice Noel’s turning the other cheek! (9) 10. Long time spent in another age (3) 11. Set on fire to arouse passion (7) 12. Language spoken by a thousand in the end (5) 13. Removed his rag that was gaudy (6) 15. Firm cultivated moss over an enormous area (6) 18. They can be pointed out in the desert (5) 20. Senseless to have a fool in charge (7) 22. Eggs not completely ground in London (3) 23. Pliable meal Bella prepared (9) 24. One may help in certain cases (5,7)

Down 2. To the extent that it is fashionable up to now (7) 3. Henry and mother have a game (5) 4. Rodney came from over there (6) 5. Conductor kicks up a storm about Elgar’s First (7) 6. Old engine driver (5) 7. It is fatal to let this out (6,6) 8. A�ter lessons its pupils should stay on (6,6) 14. Melissa troubled as it’s caused by earthquakes (7) 16. Fickle Greek character on board (7) 17. Satisfied that it had occupied the whole area (6) 19. Tribe with force produced a loud resounding sound (5) 21. Old Britons �loundering in ice (5)

SUDOKU To win a Chambers English Dictionary, send completed crosswords to: The Big Issue Crossword, second �loor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 1HW by Jan 28.

Include name, address, phone and issue number.

1 9 7 6

5 6 3 5

3 7 2

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EDITORIAL editorial@bigissue.com 0141 352 7260 2nd �loor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 1HW @bigissue

AWARDS PPA Scotland consumer magazine of the year, 2019, 2017 Paul McNamee PPA Scotland editor of the year 2019, BSME British editor of the year 2016 Ross Lesley-Bayne PPA Scotland designer of the year 2019 Jane Graham PPA Scotland writer of the year 2018 BSME cover of the year 2017

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QUICK CLUES

Issue #1392 answers

CRYPTIC: Across – 1 North wind; 6 Tab; 8 Retirement age; 9 Enrol; 10 Strikes; 11 Viands; 13 Beadle; 16 Longest; 18 Debra; 20 Put the lid on it; 22 Due; 23 Stamp duty.

Down – 1 Nor; 2 Rotor; 3 Hurtled; 4 Inmost; 5 Donor; 6 Tracked; 7 Beersheba; 9 Enveloped; 12 Annette; 14 Ended up; 15 Stella; 17 Ethos; 19 Bantu; 21 Try. QUICK: Across – 1 Bedazzled; 6 Hog; 8 Decompression; 9 Bilge; 10 Sidecar; 11 Tactic; 13 Past it; 16 Enjoyed; 18 Shard; 20 Collaboration; 22 Pad; 23 Set on fire.

Down – 1 Bid; 2 Ducal; 3 Zambezi; 4 Lyrist; 5 Dosed; 6 Haircut; 7 Generated; 9 Buttercup; 12 Cajoled; 14 Abstain; 15 Adroit; 17 Yeats; 19 Alibi; 21 Nae.

8 4 8 2 6 7 5 9 4 3 1

3 7 1 4 8 2 9 5 6

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BIGISSUE.COM | 45

MY PITCH

DAVID BAILEY, 50 Leicester train station, every day except Wednesday and Sunday

Dealing with the public daily is helping me with my social skills

For the last 25 years, pretty much all my adult life, I’ve had problems with heroin addiction.

A couple of years ago I went into rehab so I’m sort of in recovery at the minute. It started around 1994 but I was a functioning addict for quite a long time. I was holding down a job, driving seven-and-a-half-tonne lorries around London and living a semi-normal life. But when I took the chance in rehab to look at myself – properly look at myself – I realised that it was all a mess really.

My recovery’s not 100 per cent because I lost my partner to addiction nearly two years ago and I had a relapse after that. So I’m on the medication at the moment.

Before rehab, I’d split from my partner for a little while and my life went completely out of control. I just couldn’t live alone. I was homeless in Reading for the whole of summer 2017 and I overdosed a couple of times. It was pretty scary.

My friends could see I was really reckless and that I was going to die, so they contacted my mum and we spent £20,000 of my gran’s inheritance money on rehab. Even though I had a relapse because of my grief, rehab has been a fantastic experience. It’s changed the way I think and it will be my salvation in the long run.

My mother lives in a village near here and once a week I see her and look after her garden and stuff like that. I only came to Leicester three years ago when I started rehab and I stuck around because my mum was here. There’s also a really good recovery scene, especially a place called Dear Albert, which is a community rehab centre I’ve volunteered at. They give me the support I need.

I couldn’t have survived as long as I have without

Dear Albert. The beauty of The Big Issue is I can go to these groups in the daytime and it fits around them. It’s flexible. It gives me two things; it lets me earn money and it fits around whatever I’m doing recovery-wise or with my mum.

One of my underlying issues was really bad social anxiety but dealing with the public daily is helping me with my social skills. When I was driving lorries I used to choose jobs where I’d be out on my own because I hated dealing with people and I wasn’t very good at it. But selling The Big Issue is definitely helping. I’m naturally polite, and saying ‘good morning sir’ and ‘good morning madam’ can help. Just before I started selling the magazine I’d got myself a flat but before that I was rough sleeping. It wasn’t great. The first night I woke up and somebody had been through my pockets and stolen my phone. It’s not safe at all.

I love animals, but I’m not allowed to keep any pets in my flat. I’d always had dogs, but when I was with my partner we had cats for 18 years. I trained at college doing animal care and I’ve worked with animals – guide dogs, and I also ran a clipping and grooming salon down in Truro many years ago. In the future though, I’m hoping to get myself sorted then go back to volunteering and maybe enrol on a counselling course. I’ll see what the future holds, but I’d like to work with addicts. All the best counsellors are the ones who’ve been there themselves, I find. I’ve also very recently got a new partner, so things are looking up. It definitely feels like my life has turned a corner.

Interview: Sarah Reid Photo: hollisphotography.uk

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46 | BIGISSUE.COM

20-26 JANUARY 2020