Notes from a city life: no 2

The Big Issue is 10 years old. It feels like it has been run­ning for longer — like it’s always been there, in fact. It seems as integ­ral to my exper­i­ence of Lon­don life as trav­el­ling on the tube. I don’t know if that’s good or not — shouldn’t we be striv­ing for the ideal, for the day when the magazine and The Big Issue Found­a­tion no longer needs to exist, because home­less­ness itself has been eradicated?

In a report on the BBC News site, two of the magazine’s news team make clear that the pub­lic­a­tion is not about home­less­ness — it just hap­pens to be sold by home­less people. True enough — The Big Issue is a bloody good, inform­at­ive weekly read, which has broken some major stor­ies in its time. But the very fact that it is sold by home­less people is ines­cap­able. Cel­eb­rat­ing ten years of the magazine’s exist­ence, what I remem­ber aren’t the big news stor­ies, but some of the people from whom I reg­u­larly bought a copy.

Dur­ing 1993/94, I was liv­ing in east Lon­don, hav­ing just returned from uni­ver­sity. Patrick had a pitch on the High Street in East Ham, where I did most of my local shop­ping. He could talk the hind legs off a don­key, and he would start a con­ver­sa­tion with each and every per­son who stopped to buy a magazine. This seemed to rather alarm a num­ber of his cus­tom­ers, who would reply with a sheep­ish greet­ing, slap a pound coin in his hand, grab a magazine, and then scurry off — with Patrick call­ing loudly after them: “Thanks for stop­ping by. I’ll see you next week then, eh?” But if you took the time and trouble to stop and chat to him, you would be rewar­ded with details of the latest events at the hostel he was liv­ing in at the time (some of which soun­ded rather scary, but which he described with cas­ual humour), his opin­ions on the local shops and the con­ges­ted roads, his plans for the future, and the naughty antics of his dog (who faith­fully accom­pan­ied him to his pitch each day). Once he’d fin­ished chat­ting about him­self, he would then enquire about you — and before you knew it, half an hour had passed.

A couple of years ago, there was an unnamed vendor who set him­self up out­side White City under­ground sta­tion for a few months. He had his pick of the hordes of BBC work­ers spill­ing out across Wood Lane every morn­ing, lunch-time and even­ing. I hope that some Exec­ut­ive Pro­du­cer from BBC Enter­tain­ment spot­ted him, because this guy put con­sid­er­able effort into selling his cop­ies of the magazine. One week he would sur­round him­self with humor­ous plac­ards (often con­tain­ing scur­ril­ous com­ments about dear old Auntie Beeb); the next week he would be wear­ing some bright and out­land­ish hat or shirt; the week after that, he would have some scrip­ted pat­ter to deliver to all the people passing by. He would cer­tainly have been a far bet­ter act than any of the dire comedi­ans who try their hand at host­ing enter­tain­ment shows, in the waste­lands that cur­rently make up the Sat­urday night TV schedules.

So maybe it’s just too damn ideal­istic to ima­gine that The Big Issue won’t need to exist in another 10 years. How­ever, it would be good to think that when the magazine does come to cel­eb­rate its twen­ti­eth anniversary, it will enjoy a less front­line role in soci­ety because there will be fewer people without some­where to call home. I hope so.