My name is Araminta Jonsson and I am the founder and editor of a magazine called Pipe Down. It is a magazine whose aim is to bring recovery into the world and the world into recovery. It is for anyone whose lives have been touched in any way by addiction or alcoholism.

I HAVEN'T written a column for the Argus in months. I think the last time I wrote anything was in June, at the beginning of the summer. It was a time when I was slightly despairing for the future of Pipe Down Magazine. We had no funding, but at the same time, an exceptional chance to get the magazine distributed nationwide through a new partnership with the Recovery Street Film Festival. It was truly an agonising moment in time for me and just as I was deciding that maybe Pipe Down needed to take a bit of a hiatus, I got rushed into hospital one Sunday night with excruciating pain in my head. 4 days, one CT scan, one MRI and multiple bags of antibiotics later, I was told that I had contracted meningitis.

Whilst this was going on, I was aware that time was ticking and I was no closer to getting the funding we needed to be able to deliver an issue on time for the Recovery Street Film Festival. I was truly gutted. Partnering with the film festival had seemed like a massive step in the right direction for Pipe Down, in exchange for magazines in their goodie bags and an advert, we were to get national distribution across the other drug and alcohol services they had partnered with. This was huge for us. Our main aim is to get as many addicts, in recovery or not, to join our community by reading and contributing to the magazine. Guaranteed national distribution was going to enable us to reach so many more people and therefore expand the Pipe Down community.

Not only was I devastated not to be able to fulfil our partnership deal with the Recovery Street Film Festival, but also to be letting down so many members of the current Pipe Down team, many of whom had already written in with articles hoping to be published.

However someone, somewhere had other plans. Whilst speaking to a woman in the field for whom I have a lot of love and respect, I told her of my plans to pull out of the Film Festival because we couldn’t get funding, she was adamant I was not to. She promised me that if we put our heads together we would find funding through advertisement. Lo and behold, with just under two weeks before the final printing deadline, we managed to secure just enough funding from various wonderful organisations who put adverts in the magazine. With a heroic effort, not just from me, but also from many other key members of the Pipe Down team, we pulled an issue together. And, even if I do say so myself, I think it is a damn good one.

The theme of this issue is trust, and what I have realised in the process of putting it together and the experience of the months prior to it’s conception, is that I must always trust that the universe has our back. Pipe Down is not going anywhere just yet. We live to fight another day and I’m pleased to say that we made it to the Recovery Street Film Festival and managed to get the magazines into their goodie bags and have now secured distribution nationally. We couldn’t be happier. Now on to finding funding for the next issue!

You can download Pipe Down issue 6 on Trust here: http://pipedownmagazine.co.uk/download-issues/

If you would like to contribute to further editions of Pipe Down, either financially or with your incredible written talents, please email: araminta@pipedownmagazine.co.uk