Dear David,

This coming Christmas will be my 79th.

Christmases have greatly improved since my first one in 1946 in a Notting Hill slum. Seven slum Christmases were followed by two in a Catholic orphanage. Then five in a Fulham council flat. When money was so tight, we made decorations out of old newspapers.

There followed many where for some strange reason once Christmas reared its head I was without a place to go.

I still associate Christmas with loneliness. With a sense that it’s the worst day of the year that tells you you’ve failed as a human being. Or that you have so screwed up your life that you’re like a blank spot on the planet. People don’t want to know you.

The early Big Issue Christmases were glorious because you had a lot of people in need of togetherness.

Big Issue challenged loneliness simply by being there for the homeless. It was a great feeling that we were with people who were not ‘blank spots on the planet’. That their humanity had been recognised. And that homeless people were enjoying a kind of renaissance of feeling. Because as they sold their magazines, they had a new relationship with people in the street. Not like begging, where the public found it difficult to relate to beggars.

We trade in the marketplace. If people don’t take the magazine they may support the vendor financially, but they fail to support the whole reason why they have become vendors of Big Issue.

So if you buy our bumper two-week Big Issue Christmas special - on sale now - please remember to take the magazine you buy.

God bless you all.

Warm Regards,

John Bird

Founder, Big Issue