Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/5/2022 i The Big Issue

I first saw Edinburgh when a plasterer let my girlfriend and me off in Princes Street, right at the centre of Scotland’s majestic capital. It was 6am on Christmas Day. We ran for a bus to get to her parents who lived in the suburbs by a stream and a hill. It was all so strangely new. And even though it was Christmas Day 58 years ago, you’d have thought it was an ordinary day. New Year was the big Scottish celebration, and Christmas seemed to stop at the Scottish border. Last week I arrived at Waverley station by train and the noise of Christmas music announced itself. I climbed the steps to Princes Street and the very spot where decades back I had been dropped was transformed. Popular Christmas…

In September, Lewis Capaldi was set to release his first new music in three years. Promo posters of him in his pants, sipping a cocktail, had been plastered across the country ready for an intensely anticipated midnight release. It turned out to be an undeniably historic day, and a memory hard to shake for Capaldi. “Releasing a single the day the Queen died will definitely live with me,” he says. “That haunting fear of like, oh my fucking god, we’re bringing this song out and they’ve just announced the Queen’s died.” Forget Me was still unveiled on September 8 – with more muted fanfare than planned – but not even the death of a monarch was going to interfere with Capaldi’s big comeback. “This is the thing,” he reasons, “you’ve…

YUVAL NOAH HARARI Good news. You are a superhero. We all are. But instead of being able to fly or become invisible, the superpower that sets us above the rest of life on earth is the ability to tell stories. This is the central argument of historian Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World. The bestselling author of the hugely influential Sapiens is one of the world’s great thinkers – Barack Obama is one of his biggest fans. Unstoppable Us is aimed at younger readers, though the ideas remain profound. Here he tells us how we can realise our power and use it to do good in the world. THE BIG ISSUE: I’d prefer to be able to fly, but why is being able…

REVIEWS Everyman thriller with a slice of noir As I’m writing a book series that lingers around the hinterland of the crime genre myself, I’m always intrigued as to how other authors in a similar vein go about the business of setting up a series and keeping it fresh for the reader. This week we have two books that are the second in their writers’ series, and which both deliver on the promise of their series openers. First up is the laconic and acerbic Shifty’s Boys by Chris Offutt, the follow-up to last year’s The Killing Hills. Set in the author’s home turf of the remote Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, it follows the trials and tribulations of Mick Hardin, an army officer home on extended leave as he recovers from…

Well, it’s finally happened: I have started attending my local jazz club. When I moved to this area 15 years ago, I was aware that the local boozer had a small live venue out the back that was somewhat renowned in jazz circles. But I was still in my early thirties back then and thought I was too good for jazz. I believed jazz was daft and pretentious; for posturing weirdos and earnest chin-strokers in berets and polo necks. I saw myself as too cool, modern, thrusting and dynamic to set foot in such a place. Things change. I started secretly listening to jazz a few years ago strictly as an accompaniment to work. I found that the meandering, lyric-free sounds somehow aided my writing process. I kept the output…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Playing percentages R Warren [Issue 1539, November 14] doesn’t present the full picture about voting majorities. In 2019 the Conservatives received 44 per cent of the vote, compared to 42 per cent and 36 per cent in the previous two elections. So, in some sense a majority of voters did indeed vote against the Conservatives. These figures compare well with Labour’s majorities in 2005, 2001 and 1997 which were 35 per cent, 41 per cent and 43 per cent. Even Clement Attlee in 1945 and 1950 received only 48 per cent and 46 per cent. Pretty much every non-coalition government in the past century or two has governed on a minority…

At 16, I was a grease monkey in a garage. That was the colloquial expression for the lowest person there, and I was just a lad working my first job. I had two very good friends, and the three of us got some cheap secondhand motorbikes, because we didn’t have any money, and took them all apart and rebuilt them. That took a lot of time and a lot of commitment and a lot of energy. Because there was very little money about, we had to learn to do it all ourselves. So that was my main hobby – and it took a long time to get it all sorted because finances were very short. It wasn’t until much later that I got any interest in music – and when…

It all began in a hospital in Andorra, in room 102. My grandparents, my great-grandmother, and my aunts were all waiting – waiting for me. They already knew me: I was David, the strong and healthy child my parents were expecting, whom my grandparents already adored, and the whole family was impatient for me to be born. My grandmother Basilisa, who I usually just called Abu (short for abuela or grandmother) or Abu Basi, sat there nervously rubbing her fingers, feeling emotional as she constantly twisted her wedding ring. She was waiting for her son, my father, to open the door at any moment with a smile on his lips and me in his arms, wrapped in the swaddling blanket she herself had sewn with such care, and... yes, I…

Finally, I watched The Banshees of Inisherin. Somebody who knows what they are talking about told me it was the most Irish film they’d seen in years, maybe ever. They weren’t clear if that was meant as a positive or negative. It is Irish, very Irish, from the title all the way through. It’s set in a fictionalised west coast of Ireland island in spring 1923. The Irish Civil War, coming to its conclusion, is present, but only as light and fury over on the mainland. You may know something of the plot. The film has been in cinemas for a while. Essentially, it’s the story of the fracturing of a friendship. Colm (Brendan Gleeson) decides he doesn’t want to speak to his oldest friend Pádraic (Colin Farrell, pictured below…

THIS WEEK: TACKLING THE HOUSING CRISIS Liam Geraghty @LGeraghty23 Housing has never been more unaffordable in the UK and it’s a similar situation across the globe. Rents at record highs, house prices the same and mortgage rates growing as interest rates are raised to ease inflation – the situation is pricing people out of a home. Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement did little to face up to the reality. While he made the house price-boosting stamp duty cut time-limited and capped social housing rent rises at seven per cent, there was no good news for private renters struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Other countries have stepped up to support renters – Scotland has brought in a blanket rent freeze and eviction ban – as well as introducing innovative…

Katie and her partner Mark dropped everything when social services asked them to take in their eight-month-old niece in April 2020. They knew authorities were involved, but they weren’t aware just how bad things were when they were told to pick her up from her mother’s house immediately. All they knew was she needed to be somewhere she was safe and loved. Now, in the cost-of-living crisis, they are struggling to cope. Raising a child, one who has already faced trauma, takes its toll financially and emotionally. As highlighted by this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, which has a focus on fostering, there are good people out there to help the thousands of children who need a home. But they also need support themselves. “It’s embarrassing to admit we’re struggling,”…

PINOCCHIO ‘We are making disobedience a virtue’ There is, according to Guillermo del Toro, a big difference between remaking a film and crafting a transformative version of a familiar story. The former can feel tired, while the latter can cast everything we thought we knew in a different light. The Mexican director’s new film Pinocchio, co-directed with Mark Gustafson – the animation director of Fantastic Mr Fox – takes a tale we all know inside out and subverts its expected beats, turning it into a whole different beast. “The same questions that were pertinent at one time are pertinent now,” del Toro explains. This Pinocchio is unlike anything we have seen before. By setting the action in Mussolini’s Italy, the film overturns the original tale’s insistence that obedience is a…

INDIE Outsider pop chimes with the times “I’m living on a tenner a day, goodness gracious, a tenner a day,” sings Lawrence in the opening couplet of Mozart Estate’s Relative Poverty – a bleak bop about life on the financial precipice and truly a song for our times. Cited as a major influence by indie’s finest, from Jarvis Cocker to The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess and Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, the Birmingham-born cult hero singer and songwriter – no surname necessary, just Lawrence – is far from the first down-on-his-uppers pop star to have found himself living off benefits, nor to sing about the experience. But never before has anyone done it with such an intoxicating and unlikely blend of brutal frankness and tongue-in-cheek cheer. Sounding like a cross between…

VICTOR GRANCEA, 32 I do a long shift on my pitch because I work at a train station. A lot of people are on the go in the morning and running through the station. When they are coming back from work I want to be here so I can catch them then. I’ve been selling the magazine here for five years and it’s going alright, but a lot of people are still not coming in every day. Some people only come in for one or two days a week after the pandemic and it’s not very good. Now the last day of the week is Thursday, not Friday. It used to be very busy on a Friday but now it’s changed. It was very hard for me during Covid. I…