Energy drinks - survey mapping UK consumption habits

For the final major project of my university career I will be conducting an investigation into energy drinks and the potential hazards behind them.

Energy drinks and the possible hazards they could contain have shrouded the world in confusion - find out the truth soon

Below is a survey to help me map the UK's energy drink consumption.

Fill out the questions below to be part of this project and discover the drinking habits, it shouldn't take longer than a couple of minutes to complete.

In advance many thanks!

Stay tuned for features, audio and videos analysing the potential hazards of energy drinks.

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Pebble: Homeless for the Holidays

(Featured in Pebble Zine: Issue three)

Homeless for the Holidays

words by joshua saunders • illustration by lauren kelsey

James Beavis spent over a week living on the streets of London this Christmas, witnessing life from a section of the community that society turns away from on a daily basis. He told Joshua Saunders about his filmed experiences of being homeless over the merriest season of the year; a time over spilling with tinsel, turkey and supposed generosity, during one of the coldest winters of the past 100-years. 

“I am truly out there, I am truly on my own with nothing,” said an understandably anxious 22-year-old student, he’d announced on his first of six video diaries that he would be spending Christmas homeless on the streets of London, to raise money for homeless charity Crisis. 

“I won’t have planned where I’m staying. I’m taking no money with me, no card, so I’ll have to beg for food and water. If I can get anything I’ll be giving any excess to Crisis... and if I can’t get enough, I’ll be going hungry and thirsty. I’m having no phone with me, no contact with my friends or family, I think I’m going to find the hardest thing this Christmas is not speaking to my dad, my gran, my mum and family.”

He’d be spending nine days and eight nights experiencing homelessness first hand on the streets of Lewisham, one of London’s most deprived areas. He would be appealing to anybody watching his videos to donate or to share his initial video across Facebook and other social networking sites, and unbeknownst to him 1,384 people across the UK did. By the end of his time stint on the streets James accumulated just under 35,000 views from the YouTube videos that recorded his arduous endeavour. Beavis also managed to raise over £26,000 to help the homeless community seek refuge in Crisis centres dotted throughout the UK.

“It costs £20.48 for a place at Crisis centre and they were 150 beds short. Charitable giving has gone down by a fifth, it’s not that people won’t give it’s about finding a way to make people give,” said a healthier looking James Beavis, only a few days after returning back home. 

James Beavis was on recorded his experiences on the streets through
video diaries, documenting the troubles of being homeless at Christmas

“I always thought I was quite a big, strong person” he said, “but it made me realise how weak I am, I’ve never done something so difficult in my life. I did it for 8 nights and there’s a guy I met who has done it every day for 12 years, he’s been set on fire, stabbed. I realised I couldn’t do it for that long, I think I’d have given on up life.”

Trying to find work is a problem riddled task for people on the streets, as without an address it’s not possible to apply for a National Insurance card meaning they are unable to get a legal job and therefore run the risk of having to do things illegally.

In December 2003 begging was made a recordable offense, it is an illegal activity but does not carry a jail sentence. James vehemently opposes this legislation, he questions “Why can’t you beg for yourself if you’re in need of charity? We’re cutting off the lifeline for these people. We are failing them because we can’t give them benefits either because they don’t have an address.”

 

During his time on the streets James struggled to raise just under five pounds a day even in some of London’s high-footfall locations, including outside Tottenham Court Road train station, having been removed from inside by security. “I went an hour and a half without talking to people, there must have been 300 people walking past you a minute.

“People don’t just turn their eyes away from you, they turn their whole head 90 degrees so as not to look at you. So if you’re not in their world, not in their vision, you’re not a problem for society, then they don’t need to tackle this issue; and we call ourselves a developed country...”

Instead of begging, James would often find himself looking through bins for any remnants of food, including Christmas day, a time when no shops are open.

“Begging is the most dehumanising thing ever,” James says, “I literally survived on as little as possible. You look down to the ground while saying it, it’s really the most humiliating thing and I think I’d find it even harder if I knew I wasn’t doing it for charity,” he recalls.
In the first of his video diaries from the streets, which he spent the last of his money and missed a meal to upload in a nearby internet cafe, an exhausted and feverish James told viewers, “Last night was the hardest night of my life, four hours of worrying about being beaten up, bottled or knifed. It’s Christmas now, it’s about 4am in the morning and I’ve been kicked out of two stops, I’ve had my cardboard taken.”

While his friends and family were overindulging on roast turkey dinners, James was getting progressively more sodden from the heavy rainfall sweeping England on Christmas day, in the evening he continued to say, “It’s really, really cold. I didn’t get enough money begging today so tomorrow morning I’m going to have to route through bins and I’m really hungry now.”
He reflected, “The rain was pouring on my face, all my heat was sapping into the ground and it was so windy that my sleeping bag was filling up like a wind tunnel.

“There’s cold, it’s not like a sharp shooting cold it’s a numb, bone aching cold, you don’t feel cold in your skin you
feel cold in your bones. It’s your bones that are making your skin cold.”

“I was actually starting to think like a homeless person, it’s ‘outstitutionalised’, you start to think us versus them,” James explained that the isolation of being homeless, estranged from the help of the public, left him feeling out of the institution - ‘outstitutionalised’.”

This split in society was further highlighted when he was filming outside of the prestigious Savoy hotel and a taxi driving passed nudged into him.

“There’s cold, it’s not like a sharp shooting cold, it’s a numb, bone aching driving cold, you don’t feel cold in your skin you feel cold in your bones.”

 “Someone threw a vodka bottle at me, [if it hit me] it would have screwed me up. It was a dead on shot but smashed before it reached me. You get upset from people treating you like crap.” Wanton actions like that leave the homeless community feeling further alienated from society, deprived of basic human kindness leaving a lot of people with an ‘us versus them’ mentality.

A common misconception that fuels this segregation is the presumption that a lot of homeless people are drug and alcohol addicts.
James has worked at one of Crisis’s homeless shelters for just over a year, he asked people stopping there about this widely presumed fact, “The people who I spoke to, who are homeless, don’t drink that’s for sure because it lowers your blood temperature, you get yourself food, hot drinks, also partly because of what people think of you.

If people see a tramp drinking, it’s just another alcoholic beggar who made the wrong decisions in life and that it’s their fault that they’re there. Taking drugs is too expensive for most of the homeless people. Who can spend £40
or £50 on Class As when your budget for a week is less than £40?”

Touchingly, when people from the homeless centre found out about James’s campaign many offered him money, “I think that just showed that we’ve got a community who are so willing to give so much back and then the way we treat them is not nice.”

“Taking drugs is too expensive for most of the homeless people.
Who can spend £40 or £50 on Class As when your budget for a week is less than £40?”

Changing people’s perceptions is at the mantra of James’s campaigning, his stint on the streets stemmed from wanting to raise enough money so that Crisis homeless shelter wouldn’t have to turn people away at Christmas due to a shortage of beds.
Feeling compelled to make a difference for “a community no one was sticking up for”, his videos hastily revealed the harsh reality facing anyone without shelter over the festive period, during one of the UK’s coldest winters in
100-years. 

Government statistics in 2011 estimated that homelessness had risen by 14%, translating to 48,510 people living rough on the streets. The figure, deduced from the amount of applications for council assistance from homeless individuals, is suspected to be a mere shadow of the real calculation of England’s homeless population that are dwelling in squats, on the streets, stopping in hostels and temporarily crashing with friends. Research from homeless charity Crisis estimates the number is closer to 380,000.

Contrary to the amount of people living in impoverished conditions on Britain’s streets, on Boxing Day Selfridges claimed to take £1.5million in the store’s opening hour, the company’s most successful hour of trade to date. It was also calculated that by the third week

of January the UK will have spent £22.8billion on the retail industry, a rise of £358million from last yearStereotyping has led to what James considers to be the ‘dehumanisation of the homeless’. 

His time recreating what Christmas for the homeless is like has developed into a public awareness campaign to show them that “Not all people on the streets are criminals, they’re not allalcoholics, they’re not all drugs addicts, but they have something powerful to give back. They’ve got something they can really give to society and their community, and society has really let them slip through the net.” 

From his experiences, James now intends to lobby government with his findings to campaign for more help and support for the homeless, a populace that is often neglected and cut off from the much needed aid society, and the state can give. “I can turn around to them and say, ‘I’m not in this situation but I put myself in a similar situation.’”

He would like to see the government opening late night centres for the homeless, where they can get cheap hot drinks, receive 24-hour advice on houses, jobs and other things. As well as providing somewhere to warm up at night, which can be one of the most dangerous times for someone living on the streets.

“If somebody’s going to come
up to me and set me on fire or stamp on me I’ve got nothing as I’m asleep on the floor” 

James remembers this vividly from his eight nights sleeping rough in abandoned corridors and construction sites. “The sirens, you hear them all night and police cars passing constantly, it reminds you how vulnerable you are, because you’re asleep too, you have no way of protecting yourself.

“I come from a boxing, martial arts background but if somebody’s going to come up to me and set me on fire or stamp on me I’ve got nothing as I’m asleep on the floor. I won’t know if they’re going to pull a knife on me and steal my stuff, it’s really worrying that society isn’t making a bigger deal of it.”

Over the next year he hopes to alter racist views targeted at asylum seekers and immigrants by uprooting to another country for a month and a half without money, knowing the language or having a place to stay. Showing how difficult it would be to start a new life in a foreign country through his first hand video diaries.

James hopes to open the eyes of the British public by allowing them to live through his filmed experiences and appreciate the tribulations facing any individual seeking a better life in a new country. Whilst in the process highlighting the unfair treatment and casual racism hurled at immigrants and asylum seekers in the UK on a frequent basis. He states passionately, “I’m not willing to live in a world where people treat other people like that. If it takes me doing something to get people talking then lets do it.”

You can watch James’s videos via:http://www.youtube.com/user/jamesbeavis1990

Pebble zine: Issue three

Skim the surface of alternative publishing with Pebble zine: Issue three

Open publication