Will has written an introduction to this week’s 22nd birthday edition of the Big Issue. Do buy a copy:
“These accounts by Big Issue sellers of their favourite places do not read like conventional descriptions of ‘attractions’; they are the considered opinions of people who know a place bottom up – who’ve experienced it from the perspective of the pavement and cardboard-box-bash; who’ve filtered it through the harsh realisation that to be here, now, is all they have.
“This is the queered topography of people who for most of the time are simply not perceived by the great mass of moving in time-and-money motion, and for that reason they have a poignancy and evocativeness of their own.
“You might not wish to emulate the homeless by being … homeless but you would do well to emulate them in this way: by slowing down … then stopping … and taking the time for a long look around where you actually are, not where you think money might remove you to.”
