The Big Issue does good things for good people every day.  People who are striving to better themselves and better their world.

The sellers turn over a portion of their scant money to buy these magazines, which are compiled by professional writers and discuss such things as current affairs, political issues and popular culture.

Sellers work tirelessly to make their business work. If magazines are left unsold at the end of the day they cannot be returned or replaced with fresh issues, it is a gamble in today’s cynical society.

Still, some people have a big issue with The Big Issue, and they turn their faces away from sellers, trotting past as if they were a suspicious package on a train, emitting puffs of smoke.

Yet they’re not begging; they are working an honest trade as much the newspaper seller standing at the entrance to the underground is. As much as the shopkeeper on the corner is.

Give it a chance, give them a chance, and know that you’re helping them ever closer to their goal of a better life.

Countless times they’ve tried to ignore

That lonely someone beyond the door

Magazines in hand, a hat on his head

Try hard not to see him; to them he is dead

“Merry Christmas!” he calls to a retreating back

Fighting for life to be free of the wrack

But they shake their heads, flee in disgust

Throwing off thoughts of society’s rust

He’s trying to change, or he wouldn’t be there.

But the good folks won’t let him.

Dead expressions and air.

©Amy Roskilly

I just can’t help myself.

Every time I walk past those spangling, festive window displays I just have to walk in.

The colours and smells draw me in, luring me on a chain of cherished and distant memories.

The shop smells like fun.  That special smell, reserved for theme parks, a smell that you can never describe and never recall, but you know it as soon as you smell it.

It’s exciting.  It makes you think of spinning around on the aerial swings… or whooshing around on the run away train… or of taking a shower on the log flume.

No two ways about it; with its volcano of colours, and its distinctive smell of fun, the Disney store is too good to walk past.

I never buy anything in there.  (I like to tell myself I’ve grown out of that habit.)  But I like to just walk around, browsing but never buying.  I probably resemble a shop lifter.  Wandering between the shelves, lovingly looking at the magnets, pausing in front of the giant TV screen to sing along to the Lion King.  Undoubtedly I look a little out of place.

The Disney store is my guilty pleasure -and we all have our vices.  Standing amongst the mountain of soft toys and watching the animated figurines move mechanically up near the ceiling, dancing in time to those feel good tunes we all love to sing along to -no matter our age.

It all conjures up memories. My memories of a small girl who couldn’t get enough fun.  Who couldn’t ride on the tea cups often enough, and who found King Kong utterly terrifying!

I discovered something new today, and it was only more questions.

As a writer, I’m not an advocate of poetry, although I have turned my hand to it on an occasional whim.  It’s an incredibly subjective art, and a true manifestation of the proverb: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I like poems that rhyme.  Rhyming poems have a purpose in life, and that purpose, if you will, is to rhyme.

A poem with no rhyming, and no structure is simply prose, decorated under another name.  It is a collection of coherent sentences which do not add up to being a coherent result.  A poem with no structure, and no rhyme, is a story with no beginning, no middle, and no end.  It has no destination, and thus cannot take the reader anywhere.  If it cannot move you, then what is its function in being?

Poetry, to my mind, can be one of two things.  It can be a raw, and a beautiful expression of the unadulterated human emotion.  Or it can be a quirky method of story telling.

Poetry that can be described as an expression of human emotion is difficult to place.  Without a structure to the poem, how can it be considered as anything more than a snippet of prose?  Arranging prose into verses on the page does not make it a poem.  But in adding a classified structure to constrain and to tame the prose into a form of poetry, inherently deprives it of its raw and primitive nature, and ceases its ability to be a reflection of the human spirit.

I went to a poetry reading this evening with my preconceptions ready in my bag. Poetry has no bounds. If publishable poetry can show itself in the form of a shopping list, or a snippet of everyday conversation, then everybody is a poet. Some of us are lucky and attain publication.  Some are dedicated and drive themselves unquestionably to success.  Some spend the rest of their days collecting their ‘art’ in a folder of scrap paper, never deemed to be more worthy than the next one.  Never deemed to be even equal in stature to the one that got published.

If poetry is about the people, then surely the science and precise code of writing poems distracts from the true purpose of the exercise.  If Prose tells the story, then poetry tells of the inspiration.

… Take care what picture you see!

Mamma Mia was good.  I didn’t think it was that spectacular as it was going along, but I couldn’t help but notice my left foot tapping to the beat, my lips mouthing the lyrics and the odd tear of happiness in my eye.

Meryl Streep was fantastic, throwing all her weight and soul into the performance.  The fun just oozed from the screen, not processed, scripted fun, but the obvious passion and enjoyment of the cast.

But the clincher for me was that I actually quite liked Pierce Brosnan.  All through his James Bond days I’ve stayed as far away from the man as possible.  I took into consideration that, when playing James Bond, he was portraying a womanising male chauvinist, and that this was most likely why he irritated me so much. But then along came Daniel Craig, and the James Bond movies became entertaining again, and against all the odds, I’m actually looking forward to Quantum of Solace later this year.

Walking into the cinema to see Mamma Mia, I cringed knowing that Pierce Brosnan would be in it.  But despite all my pre-conceived ideas, he was actually very good.  He’s not a fantastic singer, but neither am I, and I respect his throwing so much into the movie.  A brave step after playing the world famous super spy extraordinaire!

Hellboy II on the other hand…

I have never regretted spending money on a movie trip before, and likewise I have never contemplated walking out of a cinema mid performance.  But Hellboy II is a movie that inspires both regret and a swift escape!

It follows the ill thought out exploits of some “superheroes”, the main player having apparently been released from Hell itself, hence the name. He’s big, chunky, ugly and red, with a giant papier-mâché toilet roll on his arm, for some unknown reason.  The most imaginative names the writers could give this big red monster were…. you guessed it…. Red and Hellboy.

The film attempts to be a humorous romp through a world of fantasy and fairy tales, but leaves your skin creeping at their attempts at humour and what can loosely be described as romance.

Its one saving grace was the fancy, martial arts footwork of the Elf Prince, played by Luke Goss, which was quite breath taking in places, and was the one element of the movie that inclined me to remain in my seat.

As they sang in Mamma Mia…”Honey, Honey, he nearly kills me!”

China has so far excelled itself during the 2008 Olympics which it is hosting.  The hot topic of discussion and jokes at the moment is just how Britain can possibly out do, or even match,  the Chinese opening ceremony when 2012 comes around.

The pride the Chinese feel for their nation is quite staggering.  Not only did they pull off one of the most breath snatching firework and dance spectaculars I’ve ever seen, but they’re topping the medal tables by a long shot too.

One could suggest that the amount of effort put into it was a necessary price to pay, what with their questionable ethics having increasingly been brought to light over recent months.  So determined are they to put forward an image of perfection and national unity that they would not allow a little girl to sing before the masses because she wasn’t deemed ‘cute enough’.

The girl in question, with a voice brilliant enough to sing the national anthem to the world, was allowed to sing but was not filmed doing so.  Instead a girl with the face to fit but not the voice was enlisted to lip-sing the anthem, thus creating the “perfect” voice/face combination.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Britons are making a mockery of their own Island in front of the rest of the world.  British tourists have been labelled as the most violent and most drunk of all nationalities at popular tourist destinations.  More arrests are made of Britons, more Britons are killed by excess alcohol and the accidents resulting.

With such a deplorable lack of patriotism and unity being displayed by the British, I hope for the sake of our pride and our egos that we do have something truely spectacular up our sleeves come 2012.  We will need something amazing, just like the Chinese, in order to recover our reputation from being the laughing stock of Europe to a position of more standing.

Okay… so it’s rather obvious that I haven’t quite grasped a thorough understanding of web blog jargon yet. But recently, some entries to my blog have been automatically snipped from my pages and super imposed into some mechanical blog elsewhere.

This, I’m told by my blogging colleagues, is a bad thing; I’ve read countless posts of fellow bloggers condemning anyone that would dare to do such a thing.

But with exploration of the pages owned by these blog bandits, I found that on every occasion there was a link back to my original post displayed.

How very kind of them to provide my humble blog with a tiny glimmer of publicity. As those tycoons at Tesco would say; “Every little helps!”

This post is bound to cause some consternation amongst those from across the duck pond of the Atlantic, so my apologies in advance. But what the heck, let’s blame George Bush.

My friend from Colorado has informed me that Americans have realised that their reputation isn’t exactly at its peak right now. She’s also told me that Americans have realised that George Bush, as the figurehead of American culture, is to blame for the international disillusionment towards them.

But I had to suggest that some Americans don’t exactly help themselves…

On a Greyhound bus from Vegas to Denver this time last year, our bus driver commenced our 14 hour journey with the ground breaking announcement that:

“There will be a number of stops on this trip, beginning with the first stop.”

Damn, I didn’t want to go to the First Stop; I must be on the wrong bus.

A day or so later in Denver I picked up a bottle of ‘Suave’ shampoo, the blurb on the back of the bottle confidently stated:

“Get better results from Suave shampoo for less than more expensive brands!”

A rather bold statement I thought. I hope their market researchers did their jobs correctly and confirmed that Suave did indeed cost less than the more expensive brands.

The year previously, as I had joined a seething mass of hundreds of people lining London’s Oxford Street in the chance of meeting German Rock band Rammstein, an American tourist trotted across the road and looked up and down the line of people and demanded:

“Oh my God, are you guys, like, queuing for something?”

Goodness me, no! We’re British; we just like to stand in a line for our own unadulterated entertainment.

It’s not that Americans are stupid; to generalise a nation of millions would be idiotic. It’s just that some of them, a select few, have this fantastic ability to make themselves appear so unbelievably dim, and I’m not entirely sure we can blame George Bush for that. Although I’m sure they’d have a damn good go at it.

I learnt a valuable lesson today, one that some day or another, any nervous driver must learn: Motorways really aren’t that scary.

Thanks to a sat-nav of course. It’s sad that we rely so blindly on technology today, when hundreds of years ago people could travel the globe without so much as a map. Yet, without this little piece of taken-for-granted technology I would have been hopelessly and irretrievably lost on the London Orbital.

I had barely had time to panic about being behind the wheel on the motorway for the first time in my life, when I was pulling into the hotel car park to the sultry sounds of “You have reached your destination.”

On arriving in the hotel, again my first time in a hotel on my own, excitement got the better of me and I’m ashamed to say that I did a Dylan Moran.

“Bouncing up and down on the bed, wearing the shower cap and thinking, ‘what can I do in here?’”

Within minutes of dumping my bags I’d pilfered the complimentary biscuits, tested the shower, boiled the kettle and tinkered with the air-con machine.

Five minutes later the novelty wore off and it was back out the door and off to find some real food to sate the appetite that the ginger biscuits had failed to control.

There’s a strong possibility that our building has just been struck by lightening, or at least came very close to it! Having never been struck by lightening before it’s difficult for me to say.

At risk of spouting a cliché; a cannon went off right above our heads. It was the kind of explosion that jolts your bones and leaves your head pounding,  not exactly something you’d expect in the south of the England.

Well the alarms are whirring away and doing their job downstairs and we’re stuck up here peering sheepishly out of the window and trying not to touch anything metal!

People used to stay together in the good old days.

While the baby boomers are divorcing, their parents and grand parents are celebrating their golden and diamond aniversaries.

But how did Love develop such a short shelf life?

An intriguing article in one of the national weekend supplements thinks equality is to blame. Today women have it all; careers, independence and the privilege of bringing new life into the world.

Yet, by having it all are we sacrificing our chances of enjoying an enduring relationship like our ancestors used to?

Relationships used to be balanced by the fact that men and women brought very different things to the family relationship.

Traditionally, men brought the money and the material goods, whilst the women gave stability and emotional enrichment. An equal exchange of commodoties. Each taking something they needed from the other.

Today, these traditional values have been blown out of the water. When couples no longer rely upon one another the affection and the attraction seems to slip away.

I’m not advocating a return to Victorian values and principles. But having come from a broken home, the suggestion that the slippery slope to divorce is not only one way, is hopeful.

The mutual gain of stability and emotional satisfaction could be the key of a lasting relationship.