Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/25/2022 i The Big Issue

6 Sense I completely agree with Sam Delaney on the life-enhancing qualities of BBC Radio 6 Music [April 11]. I started listening to Sean Keaveny on my way to work shortly before retiring eight years ago and then went on to discover the joys of Lauren Laverne, Amy Lamé, Radcliffe and Maconie and many others. Radio 6 has introduced me to so many new and favourite musicians, such as This is the Kit and Joan as Police Woman, that I would never have heard otherwise. The musician DJs such as Cerys Matthews, Guy Garvey and Iggy Pop are excellent, and Cillian Murphy’s Limited Edition was a revelation. Robert Plant covering for Iggy recently has been a joy, likewise the bands showcased at the 6 Music Festival like Khruangbin, which I…

The Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill aims to introduce new anti-protest powers across England and Wales. Conditions could be imposed on any protest deemed disruptive; 10-year prison sentences for damaging, for example, statues. It has generated much criticism, inspiring ‘Kill the Bill’ protests across the country. In January, the House of Lords rejected the Bill before the Commons, thanks to the Conservative majority, carried on trying to push it into law. With the Lords still resisting many of the Bill’s amendments, an agreement has to be reached by the end of the current session otherwise it will fall. Keep up to date with developments at bigissue.com…

I was 16 in 1975, living in Lagos. The Nigerian civil war had been ended for five years and we were all dealing with the aftermath. I had finished secondary school about two years before and was preparing for my A-Levels. I did a lot of reading. I read the Russians and the French, Maupassant and Chekhov, as well as Ibsen and Somerset Maugham, Jane Austen and the Brontës. I had discovered a lot of Penguin Classics in dusty bookshops. I had developed an interest in eastern philosophy – Zen Buddhism – and in art. I was painting a bit at the time but I kept that quiet. My dad was a big influence on my formative thinking. He became a lawyer for the poor. We had had some financial…

1 8 Little Planets by Chris Ferrie, illustrated by Lizzy Doyle It’s never too early to get kids excited about science, and this simple and fun counting rhyme about the Solar System is a welcome change from reading the same old fairytale. 2 The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque These days we remotely control telescopes, but imagine a time when to observe the skies you had to climb slippery ladders and sit overnight in a freezing telescope dome. Levesque writes an homage to the days when astronomy was a hands-on activity. 3 Is Anyone Out There? by Frank Drake and Dava Sobel Not all telescopes are long tubes. Here, pioneer Drake writes a love letter to radio astronomy and tells us about a career spent listening to…

Romance, sexuality and drama run through the highly anticipated LGBTQ+ Netflix series Heartstopper. The eight-episode series traces the friendship and then romance between Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick, the most popular rugby player at their all-boys grammar school, played by Kit Connor. Connor has just turned 18 – “There was a surprise birthday party, which a lot of my friends including some of the Heartstopper cast were at, which was amazing, I honestly had no idea” – but he’s already an acting veteran. Making film and TV since the age of eight – he was a young Elton John in Rocketman and voices Pantalaimon in His Dark Materials – his role as rugby-playing Nick is his highest profile to date. Based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novel and webcomic series, Heart-stopper…

You’ve seen polygraph tests a thousand times on crime dramas and daytime TV: a stubborn suspect gets hooked to the machine and their darkest secrets come spilling out, etched forever onto a roll of paper. Its results are often presented as fact, as black and white, but the truth about the lie detector is much more complex. The machine was invented in Berkeley, California in the early 1920s by a rookie police officer called John Larson. He was a physiologist by training, and he wanted his machine to offer a more humane alternative to the ‘third degree’ – the brutal beatings that police would dole out to suspects to get information out of them. At first, he had great success solving thefts at college dorms and some high-profile murder cases.…

I’m from Hartlepool originally, but I’ve moved around quite a lot in my life. I’ve been homeless before, and I’ve lived in London and Amsterdam. I’ve had quite a few accidents. I’ve been knocked off a motorbike twice and I’ve been run over by a tram in Amsterdam. I’ve lived in Middlesbrough for 15 years, and I like it because it has a lot of facilities for people like me. I’ve got osteoarthritis, which can be a bit painful at times. I’ve had mental health problems as well and I’m bipolar so sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down. It’s just about finding the happy medium. I was always in and out of hospital before, whereas now I am quite stable. I was close to my father before he passed away…

HOUSING Escalating poverty crisis is now seeing elderly people ride buses all day to stay warm Anti-poverty experts aren’t sure ministers realise how serious the cost of living crisis is, so they’ve laid bare the real-life impacts for them. Inflation is at its highest since records began, leaving people across the country forced to choose between paying for food and heating their homes. Anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) says these situations are not “inevitable” but the result of political choice. “A decade of cuts and freezes to benefits have left many people in our society in increasingly desperate situations,” said Chris Birt, associate director at JRF. “With the price of food, clothing, transport and energy growing fast and overall inflation now at seven per cent, the impact of…

As a child Zakia was drawn to the shapes and colours of the natural world around her in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she grew up. It was this passion for the wonders of the landscape that led her to pick up pencils and brushes, playing with colour and shapes to capture moods and express feelings. Recently she began working with mosaic, quickly developing her work from rigid, linear forms, governed by the shape of the tiles, to more expressive pieces, using broken ceramic and found objects. Creative expression brings her a real sense of joy and a deeper attachment to the world and to others. Zakia seeks to challenge herself through the making of complex, thoughtful and unique artworks. The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised.…

When you tell people you’re from Hull, a look passes across their faces for a fleeting moment, as if someone has left an unidentifiable smell in their en suite. It’s not disgust, exactly. It’s more like they’re politely trying to hide their confusion and panic. Inside, they’re screaming, “That can’t be good, can it? But what am I going to do about it, OMG what will I say? HELP.” And I understand. Hull is one of life’s greatest mysteries. It’s widely synonymous with being crap and smelling like fish, and for that reason it doesn’t get much airtime. Some people can talk to you about Philip Larkin or the Humber Bridge, but for many it’s a blank space of depressed coastal northernness that isn’t Leeds and isn’t Manchester, and sounds…

In September 1981 on a muddy RAF site in Berkshire, one of the biggest women-led protests since the suffragettes began. Known now as Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the movement started when a small number of antinuclear protesters marched 120 miles from Cardiff to the RAF base. They called themselves ‘Women for Life on Earth’ and their aim was to take a stand against Nato’s decision to store American cruise missiles at the airfield. As awareness grew, thousands of grandmothers, mothers, daughters and women of all backgrounds came together to join them, with the intention of getting the missiles removed from the site. Evolving into a series of camps set up on Greenham Common, the demonstration lasted for nearly 20 years before it was disbanded in 2000. It has since…

Ultimately, these assassins are all just pawns in the game, still alive as long as they’re useful to those in charge There are a million different ways to keep the reader turning the pages as they move through your book. This week we have two terrific novels that both grab their reader, but in very different ways. First up is Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka, translated from Japanese by Sam Malissa. Very well known in his home country, Isaka is about to have his fame taken to a new level when the big-budget adaptation of his novel Bullet Train , starring Brad Pitt, hits cinemas this summer. While Bullet Train and Three Assassins occupy a superficially similar world of killers and double crossing, the slapstick action of the former is…

From the little girl who went viral after sweetly singing Let It Go from Disney’s Frozen in a Kyiv bunker, to a many millions of times streamed folk song dedicated to the deadly Bayraktar combat drone, it’s been intriguing to observe the part that music has played in galvanising Ukrainian morale since the Russian invasion began. Popular song has in fact long been a weapon of resistance in that country to the aggressive impositions of its much larger neighbour. One song in particular, sung en masse everywhere in recent weeks from makeshift bomb shelters to street protests in enemy occupied territory, symbolises it better than any other. Written in 1968 by Volodymyr Ivasyuk – then a 19-year-old student at the Chernivtsi Medical Institute, later to become one of the most…