Stop avoiding The Issue

I love magazines.

I love their versatility, the way you can browse through, buffet-style, and find just the right thing to suit your mood: tired and skittish? Flick the pages and nibble the headlines. Right brain muscling in on the left? Enjoy the illustrations, the photos, let your discerning eye roam around the typesetting. Settled and thoughtful? Roll up your sleeves, fold back the cover and tuck into the feature editorial. Magazines are like that: skilfully designed to suit your fickle psyche and busy modern lifestyle.

My enthusiasm for magazines is thoroughly frustrated, however, by the choices available. I enjoy New Scientist from time to time, and before I lost my taste for cricket I could often be spotted trotting down the street with a copy of Inside Edge* tucked under my arm. It's a rare thing, though, if I step into a newsagent and find a rag that tempts me remotely. I have as much interest in the dizzying highs and gut-wrenching lows in the lives of the glitterati as I have in eating shards of glass. My need to be informed of which must-have garment is the new black this season is limited only to ensuring that I don't inadvertently wear one. Cross-stitching; dog breeding; being a beautiful bride; making furniture out of matchsticks; the latest plot by the CIA and their aliens cohorts to suppress the perpetual motion machine/cure for cancer - nup! They don't ring this gal's bell. So I'm in the strange position of running a magazine but not actually reading any.

Or I was until about a year ago.

For it was, gentle reader, around that time that I first stepped up to a fluoro-vested chap in Adelaide Street and exchanged $3 for a copy of The Big Issue. Have you ever read it? You really should. It's just like a magazine, but good. Printed on a flat stock, the layout is stylish and friendly and manages to avoid the self-consciously cool look I find faintly embarrassing in more pretentious publications. They employ illustrators, too; real, live artists, who use actual paints and inks, giving it an earthy humanity. No look-Mum-I-can-use-Illustrator graphics here. And the articles are fabulous! Witty, clever, well-crafted, socially conscious, intelligent and funny. Do you ever wonder what the delicious Helen Razer is doing these days? (Well, I'm not going to tell you - shell out $3 and find out.)

The Big Issue "provides people experiencing a range of disadvantages with an immediate opportunity to work, earn an income and rebuild their lives so that they can participate in a positive way in community life". The magazine is sold by people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, thereby providing them with a means to generate an income; the entire operation was founded specifically to assist people in this situation make genuinely positive changes in their lives that would otherwise have been extremely difficult.

A dear friend of mine - who is a cynical prick - asked me once if I bought The Big Issuefor any reason other than guilt. While I could see the point he was making, it fairly got up my nose. This is not about treating someone like a pathetic charity case, giving them a shiny bauble so you sleep better at night. There is so much more to gain from employment than money: social contact; satisfaction; personal development; stimulation; dignity; self-esteem; developing and maintaining skills. In our culture your job is your identity. That The Big Issue has recognised this, and is doing something so positive about it, is only to be applauded. And supported, more to the point.

It comes out fortnightly - buy yourself a copy. In fact, buy two, and give one away to help spread the word. And if it relieves some of the guilt you feel as you rack up another designer garment on your fifth credit card, then that's a bonus, isn't it?

*Inside Edge, I'm ashamed to tell you, is the New Idea of cricket mags. It's horrid.