Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/5/2021 i The Big Issue

Since subscribing to The Big Issue last year, I found the Locked down in Lockdown [March 22] the best and most thought- provoking special feature yet. All the contributions were so valuable and certainly have helped me gain a far better understanding of prison, prison life and the real challenges in the system. The highlight however was the article by the anonymous contributor [The best people to tell you about prison are prisoners] – a simple outstanding piece of writing and one which has gone a long way to change my probably rather stubbornly fixed views on the matters covered. Well done and thank you to all the contributors. Jamie Black, Largs As a regular reader of The Big Issue, and a recent subscriber, I set about the Locked up…

To mark the easing of lockdown, there has been a rush of new job opportunities, recruiters report, with the next few months looking “very positive” for those seeking work. That includes both full-time roles and temporary summer positions to boost earnings of those on furlough – the scheme comes to an end in September. There are nearly 890,000 advertised vacancies available across the UK, according to Adzuna, the jobs search engine and Ride Out Recession Alliance partner. It’s the fourth week in a row that vacancy counts have exceeded 800,000 as the UK gears up for reopening. The amount of jobs on offer in hospitality is up 264 per cent since the lowest point in June 2020, with 25,500 vacancies compared to just 7,000 in summer last year – mostly…

The climate crisis is already here. Just last month the Red Cross revealed that in the last six months almost 10.3 million people had to leave their homes as a result of climate-related events such as flooding and droughts. The number displaced by conflict in the same period was 2.3 million. The impact of global heating is profoundly unjust. Those who contributed the least to our heating planet – its poorest and most marginalised – are being affected first and worst, while the world’s wealthy are still able to avoid the worst consequences. And as our planet continues to heat up, these injustices will magnify and multiply. The UK is responsible for nearly five per cent of the total global CO2 emissions from 1750 to 2019. Our government should be…

I’m sitting in my kitchen at Liverpool playing with my favourite phone app, Radio Garden, and it is a thing of beauty. Invented in 2016, it’s really only taken off under lockdown. When you open it, you see a globe spinning through space, like on Google Earth. You turn the globe with your finger to any continent you like, zoom in by pinching the screen until a country or a city takes your fancy, and tune into one of 30,000 radio stations. There’s nothing like music to transport you, instantly, to a faraway culture. Radio Garden’s sonic tourism is a fix for travel-hungry people marooned by Covid-19. But something deeper is going on because, to take the long historical view – as well as the view from space – our…

NEED HELP? Why not get together with other Big Issue readers on Twitter – @BigIssue Get the answers in next week's mag! Good luck 1. Radiohead’s 1995 album The Bends is dedicated to which comedian? 2. In what year was the Gmail service launched? 3. Who was the last Chancellor of Germany before Adolf Hitler took office? 4. What is the common name for the part of the body called a hallux? 5. Rhode Island is the smallest state by land in the US, what’s the second smallest? 6. At 78, Joe Biden was the oldest US president to take office, who was the youngest? 7. Which UK TV show ran for 2,425 episodes from 1983 until 2010? 8. Honey locust, maidenhair and banyan are types of what? 9. Whose…

The pioneering Homeless Bill of Rights has been adopted in Brighton and Hove, the first UK city to put the initiative into action. Councillors voted in favour of the bill last month after a hard-fought campaign launched in 2018. The bill, which recognises the rights of people experiencing homelessness, passed with 31 votes to 13, and seven abstentions. “It’s not about giving the homeless extra rights,” said Jim Deans from Sussex Homeless Support. “It’s about giving them the same rights.” It means the right to housing, the right to shelter and the right to public space – which means, for example, people experiencing homelessness should not be moved on from places such as parks and pavements – will all be enshrined in council policy. “It has been a long journey,”…

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01 Work It, Girl: Blast Off Into Space Like Mae Jemison by Caroline Moss, illustrated by Sinem Erkas Her mum always said, “everything is connected to science”, and soon Mae Jemison went from a little girl watching the Apollo moon landings to becoming the first African-American woman in space. 02 Brilliant Ideas from Wonderful Women by Aitziber Lopez, illustrated by Luciano Lozano You know that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but do you know who invented the car heater? Or the medical syringe? This book will show you many marvellous things, all invented by women! 03 Audrey the Inventor by Rachel Valentine, illustrated by Katie Weymouth It’s impossible not to fall in love with Audrey: like many children, she’s full of questions. Her…

CLIVE, 58 USUAL PITCH: Theatre Royal, Plymouth This lockdown has been easier for me than the first one. I haven’t been so petrified of catching the virus and dying, basically. And the pressure cooker of life just really got heavy on everybody first time round, there were fights and violence all over the shop. Thankfully, I’ve had both vaccines now as I’ve been volunteering at a mass vaccination centre. On my very first shift I was very fortunate and got the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccination by a bit of luck. Then last Friday I got my second one. I’m just so glad I’ve got it, it means all the arguments in Europe can’t now get in the way. After the first one, it was like a weight had dropped off my back.…

The viral photo that shocked Scotland has kicked off a campaign to tackle homelessness and food poverty – but the Bowie charity single to raise funds is more Scotsman than Starman. Glasgow radio DJ George Bowie’s cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence – produced with singer-songwriter Phil Campbell – raced into the iTunes top-10 last week with all proceeds going to Kindness Homeless Street Team (KHST). The Big Issue broke the story of how the grassroots group’s soup kitchen was feeding hundreds of people during sub-zero temperatures in Glasgow in February. A photo of the food queue in a snow-covered George Square – just yards from the city chambers – sparked anger on social media, while future Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar branded the snap “devastating”. It…

Last week I watched a film that was made in 1958 in World’s End in Chelsea. I had never seen it before but chose to watch it to check a memory I had from that year when I was 12. The film company had come to our school nearby to get extras. They wanted a group of ruffians breaking up boats on the River Thames that runs past Chelsea. The main character lived in one of the boats and sure enough there was a gaggle of scruffs playing at being vandals. I was not chosen. One of the boys chosen was possibly one of the most obnoxious people I have ever known. I befriended a boy who was often beaten by this boy who’d been chosen as an extra. This…

I Saw A Young Girl… “Since lockdown started, I have left the support of the mental health charity, and have tried to keep making a living as an artist,” says frequent Street Art contributor Christie. “There have been hardly any opportunities to show my art, or to see anyone else’s art, which is why Street Art in The Big Issue has truly been a light in the dark. “This drawing is one of three I will be showing at an exhibition that I have been invited to join at a new arts hub in Erith in London called The Exchange. It has a Haiku as a title: I saw a young girl Chasing a white butterfly The image of me “I see it as a reminder that we are still…

Palm Springs Available on Amazon Prime from April 9 Almost three decades after its original release, Groundhog Day has transcended being just a beloved movie. Bill Murray’s perpetual Punxsutawney vacation has practically become a genre, with its central time-loop concept thriftily recycled for everything from sci-fi thrillers (Source Code, Edge Of Tomorrow) to slasher horror (the Happy Death Day franchise). What is much rarer is a Groundhog Day-inspired film that tries to be an actual rom-com, perhaps because that would be taking the long-standing champ head on. So Palm Springs feels like a big swing: a scruffy, often raunchy movie about finding a soulmate in the strangest of circumstances (in this case, a fancy destination wedding in the titular resort town). Andy Samberg from zippy cop sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine stars…

“Adelaide, that music, it’s from Carmen isn’t it?” asks Georges Hautecourt in The Aristocats (1970), as Berlioz the kitten winds up the gramophone. “That’s right, it was my favourite role,” replies Madame Bonfamille, in what might be the least subtle humblebrag going. “It was the night of your grand premiere that we first met,” recalls the visitor as the two reminisce about the former mezzo-soprano’s career. This was my first encounter with Bizet’s Habanera, and I acquired a recording of the full opera during a subsequent library visit. Film soundtracks can be a useful route to classical music. Many movies have bespoke music, of course (the likes of John Williams and Hans Zimmer have made composing for screen an art form in itself), but many use pre-existing works. There are…

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