Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/13/2022 i The Big Issue

A landmark investment fund, aimed at tackling the lack of diversity in entrepreneurship, has been announced – backed by The Big Issue. Designed to help entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds change society, the Growth Impact Fund is backed by Big Issue Invest, the investment arm of the Big Issue, along with partners UnLtd and Shift. Investment in social enterprises has serious problems with inclusion – particularly with race – a report from the Adebowale Commission found this year. Entrepreneurs will be able to apply for investment ranging from £50,000 to £1.5 million. It is backed by funding from Bank of America and Access to create a potential £25m pot. Danyal Sattar, Chief Executive at Big Issue Invest, said: “We know a large pool of talented and diverse investees exist who aren’t…

I grew up in a tiny village called Colne Engaine near Colchester. I had a little gang of about five friends but really I had nothing particularly in common with any of them. There was a group of four of us at school who did lessons together because we were considered to be reasonably bright. And when you’re the supposedly bright kids, you often end up being slightly… not ostracised, but outsiders in a way. So it can make you feel awkward and I was already a very awkward, shy teenager. As a result, I ended up creating an interior world outside the real world. From the moment I finished my homework, I kind of unlocked a door into this other world, which for me was built entirely around music.…

1 Cuba: A History by Hugh Thomas Cuba’s revolution emerged from a bloody history. In this book Thomas tracks the island from Spanish colony to the corrupt playground that inspired Castro to rebel. 2 The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L Matthews of The New York Times by Anthony DePalma Castro was once a hero to many Americans. The man responsible was veteran journalist Herbert Matthews, who interviewed the rebel leader at the start of his campaign. 3 Diary of a Combatant: The Diary of the Revolution that Made Che Guevara a Legend by Ernesto Che Guevara These days his face is a familiar sight on posters and T-shirts. Back in 1958 Che Guevara was Castro’s most famous fellow rebel, and his diaries capture…

THE BIG ISSUE: What sparked the idea for The Lazarus Project? JOE BARTON: I remember reading about the Cuban Missile Crisis and times where there was an incident, like a Russian submarine whose radar picked up something that they thought might be an American nuclear missile and they couldn’t get hold of their superiors. Only the calmness of one or two Russian soldiers meant they didn’t launch a nuclear weapon and start World War 3. It’s really about the near misses we’ve had, when the Doomsday Clock gets almost past midnight. Plus I was reading about how the world’s nuclear weapons are getting really old, the systems around them are decrepit and still run off floppy disks – all this depressing stuff. And I was thinking, how have we avoided…

Get in touch  The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Gone bust Regarding Martin Lewis’s sorrow about our huge energy bills [Cover Feature, Issue 1514, May 16]. The great rise in our standing charges are due to the demise of so many providers going bust that Mr Lewis, among others, kept telling us to switch to. Sylvia, Kent Power to the people How can it be right that France sees an increase of four per cent on energy prices, and it will be over 100 per cent here by October? Systemic change is needed so handouts are not required, but it won’t happen with this government. The paltry handout is a fraction of the increase anyway. And to add insult to…

I’m not sure when my obsession with old images started, and what it is about them that I find so alluring. After university I lived for several years in Berlin and would spend each Sunday at flea markets digging in shoeboxes full of old photographs. There’d be no rhyme or reason to the selection found in any one box, a wild mix of subjects – family snapshots, formal portraits, postcards, clippings – so many fragments of stories and hints at lives now lost. I’d make a selection from each box I’d trawl, to create a cluster of images that in some way spoke to each other, spun some other kind of story. It was around this time that I got into making collages, and discovered various online archives of public…

People are going back out on the streets and discovering the value of social enterprises, of which The Big Issue is one If there’s one TV special that should serve as a testament to the curious period of history that was lockdown – and please, there’s no need for more than one – it’s Bo Burn-ham’s Inside. A homemade, tragicomic collection of songs and self-shot videos, Inside captures a painfully accurate sense of the malaise, despair, laugh-or-you’ll-weep mood that was much of 2020 and 2021. The most streamed song from the show is about “CEO, entrepreneur, born in 1964, Jeffrey, Jeffrey Bezos.” Burnham must find Bezos – or the sound of his name – fascinating. Outtakes from Inside were recently released, taking the tally of ditties inspired by the billionaire…

It was around 1am when Ed Daffarn woke to the sound of an alarm on the 16th floor. He didn’t get out of bed at first. His neighbour had probably burned some toast, he concluded sleepily. Five minutes later, however, he heard shouting in the communal hallway. At 1am , he thought to himself? Something was up. He wandered out of his bedroom, opened the front door and was confronted with thick plumes of smoke. “I closed the door and thought to myself, the advice we’ve been given is to stay put,” Daffarn says, recalling the harrowing night that a blaze ripped through his home in Grenfell Tower. Whether to stay or whether to go? At that precise moment, Daffarn’s mobile started to ring. It was his neighbour – not…

The year 1996 was a special one for George Michael. He released Older , the LP he always considered his finest work. And he also broke his silence, talking to the press for the first time in six years, by doing an exclusive interview with The Big Issue. This was a period of great change for the singer. He had experienced such life-changing love and such acute loss before writing Older that he was a new man, a different artist. That he channelled his feelings into one of the great pop albums of the 1990s, before choosing to speak to a magazine he knew was helping people through their own difficulties, is a measure of the man. Only after his death aged just 53, five years ago last Christmas, did…

The narrator of Comme , one of the early stories in Paul Dalla Rosa’s brilliant debut collection An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, is the manager of a sparsely stocked high-fashion retail space in Melbourne. “We had no signage. […] We played no music. Clothes hung from metal scaffolding. In shifts, time dilated.” The store embodies everything that Twitter would describe as a “liminal space”. Throughout the story we learn of the subtle, queer dissatisfaction that the main character has towards his life, both personal and professional. It is a feeling exuded by many of the characters throughout Dalla Rosa’s collection, a stark juxtaposition of melancholy in the metropolis. Through these 10 stories, Dalla Rosa meditates on that hyper-contemporary irony of the loneliness many can feel despite the fact we…

This week sees the release of Pixar blockbuster Lightyear , a strange quasi-biopic of the supposed real-life space captain who inspired Toy Story’s lantern-jawed Buzz Lightyear action figure. But Buzz is not the only person declaring it their mission to go to infinity and beyond. The new French drama Everything Went Fine begins with octogenarian art collector André Bernheim (André Dussollier) undergoing an MRI after a stroke. Though his right side is palsied, drooping his eye and loosening his lip, there is still the palpable sense of a formidable grand patron used to having things his own way. Even propped up in a hospital bed, André is self-regarding, theatrical and more than a little scathing. His grown-up daughters Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) and Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) are relieved that he is…

Last week, I received the news that I have high cholesterol, and since then I have entered a pit of despair, salads and oily fish as I attempt to wrestle back control of my escalating midlife lipids. This lifestyle change is a bit jarring, especially as I was planning on having a big old blowout for my 50th. Now it looks like my birthday cake will be made with Benecol and decorated with statins in the shape of a skull. And it’s only now that I’ve had to cut back on all the things I hold dear (RIP Mr Kipling), that I realise how much lard there is in the world. You’re all MAD FOR IT. Everyone is practically bursting at the seams with cheese. The streets are paved with…

Seconds, minutes, hours. A day. In technical terms, the passage of time is constant, but our experience of it varies greatly. An hour waiting for anticipated news might feel like days; a wonderful evening can pass in the blink of an eye. It’s a powerful theme for an opera, and, in the case of Violet – composed by Tom Coult and written by Alice Birch – it is a particularly poignant one. The work has just been premiered at Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, having been due to be staged there in 2020 – a year when time became elastic, jumping forward in great bursts while simultaneously crawling past in slow motion. The minute hand appeared to be the only being in control, setting her unpredictable pace. And so it is…

I want to change how society views people like me. That’s my dream LUKACS LAURENTIU, 38 I’ve been selling The Big Issue for three months, and for me it’s a way of living more than making money. It’s a way of helping people like me to have a life. I don’t make an extraordinary amount of money but I live off The Big Issue. I want to live in Bristol and The Big Issue helps me to do that. I think the people of Bristol are beautiful, I see the Englishman as a beautiful creature. I have been in Bristol for three years. I started as a beggar, but doing The Big Issue is a very big step upward. I’m talking at a different angle with people and this helps…