Innholdsfortegnelse for 2/7/2022 i The Big Issue

On February 26 a National Day of Action is being planned by SOS NHS to stop what they call “the continued worsening of the crisis” in hospitals, mental health, primary and community care and social care. They are calling for a £20 billion down payment of emergency funding to stop the health service collapsing. Here’s how they say cash needs to be spent: £9.2bn The bill for backlog maintenance to repair crumbling buildings and replace old equipment is £9.2bn – double the £4.5bn capital allocation to NHS England. £5bn Tackling the most urgent issues will cost around £5bn. Several hospitals are in such a dire state that it could be cheaper to knock them down and rebuild – but there is no capital to do so. £3bn An additional £3bn…

“I use art-making as a healing, soothing tool,” says frequent Street Art contributor Robyn, who is in her late fifties, lives in Brighton and copes with physical and mental health challenges including rheumatoid arthritis and bipolar disorder. “We all need to learn how to best self-care,” she continues. “Especially when bad things happen. We are meant to be creative whatever that is for each of us. Find time and energy. Art takes courage. Art heals the soul. “I’m navigating life to improve my artistic skills. Creating is my happy place. Unleashing my creative energy, finding my flow. Allowing all my hidden creativity to emerge.”…

I would give anyone the advice to be thankful for what you’ve got and make sure the person that you love knows you love them JAY BOOTH, 47 I’ve sold the magazine on and off for the last four years – the most recent stint has been about a year and a half. It’s been OK on my pitch but January is a bit quiet. This Christmas was not as good as the last one. People’s attitudes have changed since earlier in the pandemic, I think, and people’s financial situations have changed as well. I noticed the difference on Christmas Eve when I sold about half as much as the year before. I’ve got a few regular customers and I do talk to them quite a bit on my pitch.…

Kids’ stuff The most obvious thing I can see but which no one wants to address is that we need to stop having so many children. Either adopt, don’t have kids or, at the very least, only have one child. It may be the most important goal in most people’s lives but we have to start thinking as a species and come out of our ‘self bubbles’ if we’re going to survive as a whole. Douglas Quaid Changing environment The Conservative government is trying to take away our democratic freedom to protest. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will give police new powers to criminalise ‘noisy’ and ‘annoying’ protest. Demonstrators will face up to a year in prison, and organisers could face up to 10 years in prison. But…

It intelligently explores the human consequences of lockdown, and has its empathetic heart in the right place How soon is too soon? How long must the gestation period be before fiction can wrap its mitts around big global events in a way that produces good art and satisfies the reader? When it comes to the Covid pandemic, one might think: a bit longer than this. Even now, two decades on, there arguably have been few novels set around 9/11 that match up to the world-changing impact of the event. And books in real time risk bouncing off the inarguable, flat facts of everyday reality. Convincing perspective in fiction usually requires a degree of temporal distance. The American-Russian humourist Gary Shteyngart has broken all the rules. Not only has he released…

As a freelance treasure hunter seeking out mythical tombs, Nathan Drake should be used to dealing with curses. But even Drake – a wise-cracking PlayStation avatar about to be played by fresh-faced Tom Holland in new film Uncharted – might struggle with this one: the curse of the video game movie. Ever since Super Mario Bros (1993) took a bestselling Nintendo cartridge and mutated it into a notorious cinematic belly-flop starring Dennis Hopper as an obnoxious lizard man, film adaptations of popular video games have had a reputation for being calamities. Around 40 live-action movies based on games have been released since 1993 and it took until Detective Pikachu (2019), inspired by the durable Pokémon franchise, to post a score much above 50 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. It is…

I’ve had one of those garden offices built out the back of my house. It’s small, warm and soundproofed and, God willing, will allow me to earn some sort of crust for the rest of my working days without having to leave home. There are people who claim humans are naturally gregarious creatures who require interaction almost as urgently as food and water. I’m not convinced. I like the idea of being able to earn a living alone in my glorified shed. I don’t want face-to-face meetings. I don’t need chit-chat. I will be delighted if I never have to sing Happy Birthday to a vague acquaintance from bought ledger again. I’m only 46 but already dream of full retirement. The garden office is a stepping-stone I will have to…

In a piece of almost inexplicably good news, after almost two years of a global pandemic that has ravaged the NHS, record numbers of bright young students are still queuing up to become doctors. And boy, do we need them. Ucas figures show applications to study medicine were up by 21 per cent in 2021 compared to the previous year, with 28,690 students eager for a career in medicine. Yet universities made 14 per cent fewer offers, giving places to over 7,000 fewer students than in 2019. Britain trains only half the number of doctors that it needs, meaning that the country relies on attracting – some might say ‘stealing’ – doctors trained abroad, largely from Africa and South Asia. With demand so high, and an eager pool of potential…

My big preoccupation at 16 was getting out. We lived in a housing association estate and really, we had no money. I got a free place at the local private school and I became focused on education and saw university as my way out. At home it was quite difficult. I had to do a lot of sneaking around to go out and go to parties and go drinking and so on. There were a lot of secrets and lies and rows and tension – between my parents and between me and my father. My parents didn’t have a car so while other people’s parents would pick them up – so they knew where they were going – I could quite easily lie and get taken home by somebody else.…

1 Redeemable by Erwin James When James was doing a life sentence for double murder, he was so ashamed that he wanted to sit in his cell and allow himself to rot. He was shaken out of this when a psychologist told him that he owed it to his victims to live a good life. Redeemable is a book about the possibilities of guilt. 2 A Sense of Freedom by Jimmy Boyle The therapeutic unit at Barlinnie prison transformed Boyle’s life. Similar units could help many more people if we had the courage to build them. 3 Prison: A Survival Guide by Carl Cattermole Hope isn’t always about grand transformations. In prison, there’s hope in the fact that someone got out of bed this morning, or that…

In episode two of Unforgivable, there is the lovely but vanishingly rare sight of a comic taking part in a panel show with her young baby asleep on her knee. Katherine Ryan’s appearance, alongside – or, more accurately, beneath – her newborn baby might just be a TV first. And embarrassingly for the country’s politicians, it shows that Dave – the most anarchic, daft, frivolous of all the TV channels – is now more inclusive and progressive than the UK Parliament. Let’s just ponder that for a minute. Stella Creasy MP was recently told that she cannot sit in the House of Commons with her baby. Yet a comedian can take their child into a studio to record a televised confessional in which Mel Giedroyc and hosting assistant Lou Sanders…

Everyone agreed the weather was perfect. It was cold; not the crisp, drinking hot chocolate type, the unpleasant, damp sort. A stubborn mist framed empty buildings – the city of London sleeps on Sundays. “Enjoy,” the steward smiled at me as I took my place in the bowels of the Barbican. It seemed an odd thing to say to an audience about to watch a screening of The Music of Terezín , a 1993 documentary by Simon Broughton about compositions and performances made by prisoners at the Czech ghetto, which was used as a holding pen before detainees were murdered at Auschwitz and elsewhere. But, as Broughton said in his introduction to the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion: Music for the End of Time – a day-long programme of events…

Valentine’s Day is the moment, once a year, when much of the world focuses on romantic love. It’s a day of silly love songs, heart-shaped cushions and flowers. Traditionally, men, though not always men, are expected to make a grand gesture to display their love for their significant others. But why do we make such a big thing about a feeling that, when you strip it right back, is just about making babies? More to the point, how did we get from just making babies to bribing maître d’s for the best table? What is love anyway? For love to occur, the first thing we need is to be attracted to someone. Attraction happens when the feel-good chemical – dopamine – is released in the brain’s reward centres after we…