Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/18/2023 i The Big Issue

BIG PICTURE These are Christmas dinners that people experiencing homelessness have eaten on Christmas Day. The people who have shared their festive food from the Christmases past are now supported by The Soup Kitchen, who recreated the meals to show the reality for increasing numbers of people. Throughout the year the London charity provides mental health support, clothing and a social hub for vulnerable and elderly people – as well as nutritious food. More than 600,000 people in the UK are predicted to need support from food banks this winter, with The Trussell Trust distributing a food parcel on average every eight seconds. Across England, Scotland and Wales, the latest figures show that 149,289 households are living in temporary accommodation – the majority of these being families with children –…

Shane MacGowan’s funeral got me. I had work to get on with but thought I’d briefly watch. In a moment, when Nick Cave sat down to perform A Rainy Night in Soho, I was gone, singing along, and smiling and fighting tears. All that heart and all that loss. By the version of Fairytale of New York, I was full-on blubbing. The regrouped remaining Pogues singing The Parting Glass for their leader as the service neared its end didn’t make this ease. So a fine Irish funeral, then. Though the dancing in the chapel brought stern words from my mother. The funeral led the Ten O’Clock news in Britain. I’d imagine Forwarded Many Times was a leading WhatsApp message as clips were shared. Quite why MacGowan’s send-off sent so many…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue The joy of a Christmas tree This resonates so much with me [Sophia Alexandra Hall’s article on being in foster care at Christmas, Issue 1594, 11 December]. I did the very same. Grew up in care, and when I bought my own home by myself I got the biggest Christmas tree I could, and each year I bought one extra decoration for it to remind me how far I have come. @ClaireFollitt I have a 15-year-old foster son right now. Last week I told him we will be going to get our Christmas tree on the third. His eyes lit up and he asked me if it was a…

Christine Durand keeps busy. “I’ve got Steven’s photographs all over my living room. If I sit at home too long by myself that will get me very depressed,” she tells me over the phone from her home. “I try to keep busy so my mind’s not on Steven all the time, see? Because your mind wanders. At nighttime, that’s when I think about him a lot.” Christine’s son went missing five years ago. Steven (above) lived in Preston, but was last seen in Manchester on 20 October 2018. The five-year anniversary of his disappearance has not long passed and Christmas is approaching. “It does get difficult at Christmas without – my son was called Steven, same as you, spelled the same as well – being here, but we manage. I’ve…

It’s the big one. It’s the Big Issue Santa cover. Every year we are presented with the same conundrum: how do we illustrate Santa this year? With AI being one of the year’s big topics, we wondered what the bots would make of our Santa cover. Last month, using Microsoft Bing, I briefed the bots with my image requirement: Santa selling The Big Issue. Initially, I had to applaud AI’s thought process with its range of media. Ideas began as photography then after a month-long pause (I’m assuming it went back to the AI drawing board) adapted to illustration. Yet the more times the bot was briefed, the odder Santa revealed himself. But what really intrigued me as a graphic designer is what AI thinks Big Issue magazine looks like.…

Wifedom by Anna Funder (Viking, £20) “We live in a society where all of these mechanisms work silently, in this dark, dirty, tectonic way, to make men seem central to themselves. If you have a woman in your orbit, you must be the star. And the central figures of that culture have to be men, who other men look at and think wow, look at him, he did it all alone.” This is how, in an interview with The Big Issue, lauded Australian author Anna Funder (Stasiland, All That I Am) described the impetus behind her study of the marriage of George Orwell and his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. There were multiple popular wrongs about the relationship and Funder, a longtime Orwell fanatic, became determined to right them. She explains…

We spent an afternoon last week trying to wrestle the idea of a Ministry of Poverty Prevention (Min-Pov) into being. Or the concept of it. It’s a difficult one. We know that 90% of the people who end up in poverty come from the same socioeconomic group. Meaning that they often inherit poverty from their parents – it is their only inheritance. There is a distinct chance that your children will also inherit poverty, and so on down through the generations. Lots of stuff goes with poverty. Poverty is a great destroyer of opportunity and possibility. It is as if poverty was a creation of life that must have many things associated with it. It’s a bit like if you have plenty, then you have an accent and the tastes…

Humza Yousaf is one of Britain’s most pivotal politicians. As First Minister of Scotland, how he leads in the coming months will have a very real impact on the independence issue. And that has ramifications beyond the future of the union with England and the make-up of Britain, to a potential acceleration of other global secession movements. The road ahead is bumpy. He took over in March after his predecessor and mentor Nicola Sturgeon left in a hurry. The day before her resignation, 14 February, Yousaf, then Scotland’s health secretary, had no idea of what was to come. At around 9.45pm that night, he says, “I got a call from Nicola, and she tells me she’s going to resign the next day. I was shocked.” He won the run-off election,…

A Christmas Carol is about duality, isn’t it? Scrooge addresses that monster side of us all. Maybe as a kid, I was aware of that. Maybe the seeds of being an actor were sown then. It was about kindness or the absence of kindness and that chimed with me because as a kid I was always questioning my conscience and whether I was good or bad. This time last year, I wrote to The Old Vic and asked them why they had never thought of me for Scrooge. And now here we are. As I’ve grown older I’ve realised it is about a condensed nervous breakdown that starts at roughly 7pm on Christmas Eve and ends at 7am on Christmas Day. Over the course of 12 hours, he goes through…

Books of the year/Cultural moments of the year CULTURE ART Saatchi submits his artworks via the 240Project, an activity centre in London supporting vulnerable adults. Birds, animals, and the natural world are a common theme of his colourful paintings and drawings – from stags to songbirds and roosters. “I wanted to paint an image associated with the British winter,” he says, “without implications of commercialism or religion, something simple that people associate with the season and goodwill. “A robin seemed, to me, to imply these things.” 240project.org.uk The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com. At least half of the profit goes to the artist.…

My favourite book this year is Lilith by @nikkimarmery. At once both accessible and mindblowing, you see the world differently once you’ve heard this story. @sarasheridan Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks will take your breath away. Crooks’ love for an important time in music history is palpable. Nonetheless, the issues raised here, such as police brutality, misogyny and racism are still prevalent today. @westwordsreview My favourite book was Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross. She has a way of turning words into magic, creating complex characters who you can’t help but fall for. It was an epic love story which still lingers in my mind months after reading. I gasped, laughed and cried. Perfection. @mformellaleigh An outstanding book was All The Sinners Bleed by SA Cosby. A book that…

Our vendors got the royal treatment all year The royals couldn’t get enough of our vendors this year. When Prince William visited Pret A Manger in Bournemouth – one of six locations where his homelessness initiative Homewards has launched – Big Issue vendor Karl Burns spotted his chance. Burns was whisked into a queue alongside Paul Gascoigne – oddly enough, Burns’s friend and customer – for a royal appointment. He sold a magazine to William, who also paid for Burns’s lunch. Burns described the meeting as “a blessing” and his story even inspired two readers, who wished to remain anonymous, to pay £2,000 to buy Karl a mobility scooter. Clearly, the interaction left an impression on Prince William too. Earlier this month he was back in the iconic red tabard…

1. On Christmas Eve 2016, a music star who appeared on the A-side of Band Aid’s 1984 charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas? became the first of the collective to die, and was followed a day later by the second. Name them both. 2. What was the name of the actor who played the devilish JR Ewing in Dallas? 3. Who painted The Birth of Venus? 4. What is the state capital of California? 5. What is the currency of Morocco? 6. Who was Henry VIII’s first wife? 7. According to Walkers, what is their best-selling crisps flavour? 8. What is Latin for eagle? 9. If you complete the Three Peaks challenge, which three UK mountains would you have climbed? 10. Two is a duo, and three is a…

INTERVIEW: RICK ASTLEY With each passing moment, it becomes ever more luxuriant and full of body. It was always a fantastic bar-net, ever since, as a fresh-faced wunderkind, he first appeared on Top Of The Pops in 1987 performing Never Gonna Give You Up. That song was his first number one hit and has become a bona fide pop phenomenon, its popularity spanning decades and generations, sustaining his fame and powering the Rickroll prank – one of the biggest internet memes of all time. Now, in his fifties and riding a wave of renewed professional respect and creative energy, he looks as if he has barely aged since those heady days of the mid-’80s. As we chat over the highlights of 2023 on a Zoom call, I find myself hypnotised…

THE BIG ISSUE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 All the weight of human history, carried in the memory of music Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler (Faber & Faber, £25) Time’s Echo is a book with enormous ambitions. That it achieves them, in fact over-leaps them, is astonishing. In this profound and scholarly study, Jeremy Eichler attempts to show how music retains the memory not only of its creative context, but also the intent of its composer. And when that context and emotional trigger is traumatic – in the examples in this book, the trauma is related to the Holocaust, perhaps the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century – the music has an impact almost beyond human ken. Eichler focuses on Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten and Shostakovich. As anyone who has…

My caravan is my home – I’ve had it for seven years now, but I don’t have a car, so it’s just stuck in a field. It’s on the side of the road, on a bit of land that nobody’s bothered about. Having the caravan has made a hell of a difference. Feral, The Body Shop, Bath I have been so happy for the last two months because I have received a special puppy from a friend as a gift. Her name is Gia. She fills that void in my soul and she is part of my heart. She is my special little girl. She is warm and tender. Lacramoira Lazar, Co-op, Whitby The Big Issue sorted me a refurbished laptop – it’s great for talking to my girlfriend, checking…