The Big Issue has stepped in to help much-loved vendor Richie through a crisis while in lockdown after the Lincoln seller lost £200 of frozen food when his freezer failed.
We acted quickly to order a new freezer for Richie, who is temporarily unable to sell the magazine on his regular pitch outside M&S on Lincoln’s high street due to the Covid-19 pandemic, while we also supplied him with a supermarket voucher to replace some of the lost food.
I might as well have just drawn the money out of the bank and set fire to it
He told The Big Issue that he was left in tears after waking up to find his freezer broken and kitchen flooded – just a day after he had stocked it up with frozen food following the arrival of his first Universal Credit payment on May 22.
Richie said: “I’d been struggling for food so I had a brainwave and thought I’d get £200 of frozen food and filled the freezer so I knew I had at least a month’s worth of food. I woke up to a flooded kitchen and most of the food had gone, I was only able to salvage three meals out of it.
“It just made me want to sit and cry, I was devastated – it’s the way my life runs at the moment, I get one idea, sort it in my head, it plays out okay and then 10 minutes later it all goes wrong.
“I say to all my friends that if I didn’t get any bad luck I wouldn’t get any luck at all. I can’t really complain – I bought the freezer for a fiver second-hand six years ago and if I hadn’t put that much food in it then it wouldn’t have gone wrong so I won’t make that mistake again.
