Innholdsfortegnelse for 8/1/2022 i The Big Issue

What is the relationship between the career of Elvis Presley and the 40-degree heat we hit recently? What? Is that a serious question, or some kind of ridiculous riddle that should not be posed? How could you compare a pop star to a few days of heat never experienced in our climes before? It reminds me of the delicious madness that Monty Python posed in the 1970s when they asked if Magna Carta was the charter that began the slow development of parliamentary democracy, or was it a piece of chewing gum on a bed in Dorset? On the night of the Great Heat I went to a chilly cinema to see the new Elvis Presley biopic Elvis. It jumped about a bit and even I, who know Elvis’s musical…

24 / JAMES CONNOLLY Recent industrial action by members of the RMT union has created something of a buzz around its General Secretary Mick Lynch, and has thrust him and his Assistant General Secretary Eddie Dempsey into the media spotlight. Lynch and Dempsey have stood out as straight-talking speakers with none of the equivocation or oily double-speak so evident from Boris Johnson and his government. This has resulted in Lynch in particular gaining a public profile, and journalists seemed taken aback by his articulacy and candour, if appearing a little frustrated by his ability to bat away the questions they bowled at him with such aplomb. When asked on ITV’s Peston show who his political hero was, Lynch said “James Connolly”, to which journalist Anushka Asthana replied quizzically “James Connolly?…

Frequent Street Art contributor Christie’s latest painting is a reworked version of an old artwork, which she decided to revisit “after my situation changed when I felt I needed therapy to cope with past trauma”. “I have found that the therapy that I have been having has given me new ways of coming to terms with issues of my past,” she says. “Regeneration has taken a few years to finish, and for a while I couldn’t look at it. Recently I have understood how to finish it, the foreground – symbolising the past – is not something to escape, but to see as a beautiful memory. The future, through the door, is undiscovered, but the water of that world pours into what your life once was, to regenerate you as…

CHLOE PETTS Wake up: cancel culture doesn’t exist The stand-up star says nobody should worry about being cancelled – it’s not a real thing, and if it is, it only makes it more likely you’ll get talked about I’m actively bored of the discussion around cancel culture. I’m actively bored of the thing that I’m meant to be writing about. I’m bored of cancel culture because we’ve been banging on about it since about 2017 – and since then, I’ve been convinced that it doesn’t exist AT ALL. It’s a mythic creature, like a unicorn or a competent member of Parliament. Let me start by defining my terms as I realise that cancel culture isn’t something everyone’s aware of – in fact, a recent YouGov poll found that two-thirds of…

REVISED CALENDAR A man for all 72 seasons We have four seasons. Everyone knows that. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. As entrenched in our consciousness as the days of the week. We also know that the spring of early March – daffodils breaking clear of their sheaths, fresh cherry blossom bubbling up, birds checking their voices still work – is not the same as the spring of late May, with its screaming swifts, frothing wisteria and knackered blue tits ferrying caterpillars by the hundred to their demanding chicks. Why not, then, monitor the year’s gradual changes more closely? Why not divide it into smaller chunks? Twenty-four, perhaps, as the Chinese did with their ‘solar terms’ back in the day. Or take it a step further, and divide each of those 24…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Bleak housing Paul Moynihan [Letters, Issue 1521] says that “the way of dealing with the housing crisis is to build thousands of affordable homes”. But this is to miss the point completely. For a start, what is an “affordable home”? There is no legal definition so developers can basically do what they like. Secondly, how can there be a shortage of “affordable” homes when every home that gets built is sold to the highest bidder because demand is so high? Thirdly, once an “affordable home” has been sold it ceases to be “affordable” because when the owner sells it on they do so at market value. What there is, is a…

Tom Daley is not diving at this year’s Commonwealth Games. Instead, he is using his platform to change the world. Daley competed at his first Olympics in Beijing at the age of 14. Now 28, he has spent half his lifetime in the public eye. The Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth champion is one of the great British sports stars of recent times and, since coming out aged 19 in 2013, he has been an increasingly confident, outspoken advocate for LGBT+ rights. At this year’s Commonwealth Games, while not competing, Daley will be making an even bigger splash than usual. He is not only highlighting the fact that it is currently illegal to be gay in 35 of the 54 sovereign states of the Commonwealth, but actively working to bring…

REVIEWS A flawed pair of master gamers take on the world Straddling Shakespeare and gaming together in a novel about the redemptive possibilities of friendship through tragedy seems a mix hard to keep up with, but it’s one Gabrielle Zevin has managed to present as a perfectly realistic depiction of contemporary American life. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is ultimately about computer gaming and how great it all is to play games and make games, so it’s a harder win for those who thought it was a mindless pursuit for the less gifted: Sam Masur and Sadie Green, the two flawed and brilliant characters at the centre of this book, are the best riposte to that idea. Gamers from their birth in the 1980s, Sadie and Sam come together through…

Simon Brodkin – often in the guise of alter ego Lee Nelson – has showered cash over Sepp Blatter, gatecrashed Kanye’s Glastonbury set and supplied Swastika-emblazoned golf balls to Donald Trump. But the comedian has re-evaluated who he is and why he behaves as he does after receiving an ADHD diagnosis. THE BIG ISSUE: When did you suspect you suffered from ADHD? SIMON BRODKIN: In all honesty only from the moment my doctor diagnosed me six months ago. I always knew I was a bit off kilter. I mean not many people get arrested six times and can call it a career. It was only when I started learning more about ADHD, I had my jaw-drop moment. I started crying as I listened to an ADDitude podcast on my way…

There is something reassuring about Barack Obama’s summer listening list. First, it’s a list. We all like lists. They bring order and a focal point for an argument. The list arrives annually in high summer, a marker of time, like a putative hosepipe ban but with better choruses. The list also always feels real. It’s probably carefully curated, but it never feels confected. In the past when Obama settled on Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski there was a very real sense of a father recommending tunes he’d heard and quite liked when giving his daughters lifts into town. There is less of that now, and, with acts like Wet Leg, Kendrick Lamar and Jack White on his list he has the air of the ageing gent of BBC 6 Music who…

VENDORS A new pitch at Pride for born-and-bred Bristolian Dean Dean Brown is Bristol born and bred. But, at the age of 61, this year was the vendor’s first visit to the city’s Pride festival. Away from his usual pitch by Pero’s Bridge, Brown was in attendance at the event on Saturday July 9 to sell Big Issue magazines. “I’ve never been to anywhere like that. It made a difference to me – it was a different experience,” he said. “Would I go again? Definitely, 100 per cent. I would encourage people who’ve never been, like my kids or friends, to go and experience it.” The festival, held on The Downs, was headlined by singer Carly Rae Jepsen and attended by over 40,000 people. Members of The Big Issue team…

This year’s Commonwealth Gamest could be the end of the event as we know it. While the Games offers high-class sport for fans and the chance for athletes to compete at major international events for many inexperienced athletes, there is a question mark hanging over its future. The 22nd Commonwealth Games, which has opened in Birmingham, was the major international sporting event no one could afford to host. When Edmonton, Canada pulled out of the running citing the prohibitive costs, only Durban, South Africa remained in the race. But what should have been an historic first Commonwealth Games to be held in Africa proved too expensive. Instead, the bidding reopened with Liverpool and Birmingham the only candidates for an event that will cost £750 million. Competitors in Birmingham will be…

I had a lot of trouble at school when I was a teenager. I was really bright when I was younger and there was a feeling that I was on my way, I was going to have a good academic background. I think my mum and dad were very happy at that point. But I’ve got Asperger’s and that really started to show itself. And that coincided with me realising I wanted to be a musician or pop star. So school became an obstacle, and I became quite troubled. I’m not a rebel and I’m not a feisty sort of person, but I didn’t like authority wielded in a heavy-handed way. I got expelled from the school and came out with no qualifications whatsoever. So the end result of my…

DIGGING DEEP Jonny Trunk’s treasure trove As committed music nerds at school, there was only one sport that my friends and I took seriously: mixtape making. Tapes were created equal parts affectionately and competitively, each of us aiming to create a perfectly balanced playlist of tracks both unfamiliar and astonishing to the recipient. Without the assistance of the internet, at least in the beginning, we went from scouring our parents’ record collections to spending hours in record shops, judging albums by their covers, taking chances on bargain-bin treasure, and listening obsessively to late-night radio. My favourites were a Dublin pirate station called Phantom FM and John Kelly’s Mystery Train on RTÉ, which bounced indiscriminately between calypso, industrial, proto-classical music and all imaginable genres in between. Guided by Kelly’s wisdom and…

My daughter wanted to have her mates over to celebrate her 15th birthday. Sure, I said. But there were some conditions (hers, not mine). She wanted her mum, her brother and me to fuck off out of it for the evening so they could have the house to themselves. Also, she wanted me to lay on a Domino’s delivery and some prosecco. What if her mates got pissed and their parents blamed me? No problem, she said. They’d stay the night so their parents would never actually get to see them inebriated. A watertight plan. I found myself saying yes to everything. It took a couple of days for the absolute piss-take nature of her proposal to sink in to my tired and weary brain. After which, I went back…

DAVE CAMPION, 41 I’ve been in Dawlish since about three months before the pandemic. It’s a bit quiet but it’s a nice place. I grew up in Derby and first became homeless when I was 15 or 16 and then again from when I was about 25. So I’ve moved from place to place over the years. I do have a few regular customers – I would like to have more – but Dawlish does look after me. The Thai place across the road is always bringing meals out, the taxi company gives me a discount and things like that. Things haven’t really got back to normal in terms of selling the magazine since the first lockdown. Even at the height of last summer when people were allowed out again…