Paper Cup

Product Information

When you’ve downloaded the paper cup STEM activity and prompt card pack, you’ll find everything included in one handy folder downloaded onto your computer. While I commend the author for shining a light on homelessness and centring the book on Kelly, a homeless woman with addiction and mental health issues, I found it agonisingly slow-paced and lacking in character development. There are some harrowing scenes along the way - one particular scene in a pub will be forever etched on my brain. We’ve seen her, or him, sitting outside on the pavement with their paper cup, asking for nothing but 20p and possibly a sandwich.

First, a great choice to go with if you’re struggling to know where to start is this Teach Outside The Box Activity Pack! This journey and the people we meet along the way show just how much one meeting can have an impact in someone else’s life (and likewise how they can impact your own life). Let’s not judge so quickly, let’s humanise those who are struggling and let’s not just turn a blind eye.As the story progresses, it’s clear that Kelly has tried – and failed – to resist one hell of a lot.

I read this in January as part of the Another Chapter Podcast readalong and struggled to get through it. As a parting gift they leave her with the bag of coins they’ve collected in Glasgow’s pubs but the bag will turn out to be both a blessing and a curse for Kelly.

Along her journey we are shown the various challenges and characters she encounters daily, and gradually peel back the layers of how Kelly came to be in this situation.

For relying on herself, despite the craving, the absolute craving to quench the thirst that never leaves her. It’s Kelly’s interior voice and her “notes to self” that lift this book, creating a character who is both vulnerable and striving to do better, so that even when she gets drunk enough to behave abominably, her actions are ultimately forgivable. She has bright spots of nearly but not quite friendship but for each of those there’re three tales of being beaten, abused and/or mocked by people who should be looking out for others, people going out of their way to make her tough existence a little bit worse. Full of compassion and hope, Paper Cup is a novel about how easy it can be to fall through the cracks, and what it takes to turn around a life that has run off course.Throughout the book we get glimpses of Kelly’s past, giving hints at how she ended up on the streets after what seemed like a fairly privileged upbringing. It’s described in this book as not one net but a series of nets with big gaps to fall through, and some of this hopelessness is in Kelly’s telling of how she got where she is today. Campbell doesn’t shy away from writing about Kelly’s flaws and actions that can seem shocking at times but we also get to see a side of Kelly that has been broken by a lack of support and being perpetually disappointed by people who have ulterior motives in their supposed kindness. Some of these people are unconvincing, too straightforwardly good or bad: the hippies who give Kelly a lift in their camper van; the posh Englishman whose dog Kelly steals; kindly Clara who makes her breakfast. Established in 2009, Tippermuir seeks to add to the cultural life of Scotland by publishing interesting and worthy books in English and Scots.

On the other hand, such liberation may result in self-indulgence and her new venture is not entirely free from this. Not a topic most of us want to think about, and I always despair of the people I see begging on the streets of my beautiful City. When the hens eventually find her they donate some money to Kelly but in the haste to get going the bride’s engagement ring is left with the cash.It is written in Scottish dialect and sometimes I failed to understand the words, however, it is also a poignant, harrowing, yet incredible read. An old English teacher of mine liked to quote that Tennessee Williams line from A Streetcar Named Desire.