Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/26/2022 i The Big Issue

We’ve said farewell to the Queen, and we need to say farewell to poverty too I listened to the funeral on the radio in my garden. As I sat I pictured the route, knowing every corner, every old building from my decades of working, drinking, loitering, even sleeping rough within its crevices and crevasses. I much preferred the idea of sitting and imagining the cortege, the gun carriage, the rope-pulling sailors and the crowds. The Queen was royally served by Radio 4 and the cream of the BBC’s presenters; though the sonorous, soft Scottish voice of James Naughtie was the only one I recognised, with an Irish voice near Clarence House, a Northern Irish voice near Buckingham Palace and plain English middle class seemingly placed along the way. I sat…

My upbringing was working class. My dad was a bookmaker, he was a taxi driver, he was a plumber. My mother didn’t work, she had three daughters to bring up. We lived in a council house, then a council flat and we didn’t have a lot of money. But my dad was a gambler. So sometimes we had a bit more – I had a pony for a while, we’d go out for lunch on Sundays if he had a good week. He wasn’t a stupid gambler who suddenly couldn’t pay the bills, he was a happy gambler. I left school at 15 and went to the Italia Conti stage school, ostensibly to learn music, acting and dancing, and to finish my education. But the education took a backseat. They…

REVIEW The delight of ditching drudgery for a dream dress In mid-August a big cardboard standee of the Mrs Harris Goes to Paris poster was placed fairly prominently in the foyer of my local Cineworld. Now every time I file past the likeness of Lesley Manville clutching a gorgeous green Christian Dior gown I feel compelled to adopt the classic gravelly “trailer voice” and add a silly tagline: “From the people who brought you Inside Chernobyl with Ben Fogle…” Doing something slightly daft just because it cheers you up – and not really caring if anyone else looks down on you for it – is very much in keeping with the spirit of this warmhearted period fable, adapted from Paul Gallico’s 1958 novella about a British charwoman who upends her…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Blame Labour The question is asked on freezing rents ‘Will Liz Truss follow suit?’ [Issue 1530, September 12]. The short answer is ‘No’ given that the Labour Party would not back such a step during the passage of what became the Welfare Reform Act 2012. I am afraid members of the Parliamentary Labour Party helped bury any possible amendments from the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (for whom I was working at the time) on either controlling rents or reducing the export of housing benefit money abroad from even being discussed at the Committee stage of the Bill which duly became the Act. Benefit caps were never going to work while rents remain…

Dan Brown CEO Positive Transformation Group Looking back, Dan Brown can see that there were a couple of people who turned his life around. Homeless at 15, sleeping first in a friend’s car and then outdoors in the village of West Horndon, things were bad. And they were on the verge of getting much worse. Brown was standing outside a local recruitment company in Brentwood, Essex, looking at cards in the window and searching for work, when the first of those people came along. “The lady who owned it came up, and we were just talking,” Brown recalls. “She helped me find some work in warehouses and things like that. She was really, really supportive, even taking me to and from jobs on various occasions. “Eventually she helped me get…

Long-time regular Street Art contributor Mary’s colourful paintings are her way of helping to deal with a history of depression and homelessness. “I am always experimenting,” she says. “False Face is the product of a particularly fruitful day of spontaneous creativity, not restricting myself to any particular medium, approach or past attitude. It is interesting to me for its directness and simplicity. Usually I return to a piece and start working back into it with different media, taking the subject into more abstract places. But not here.” 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.…

INTERVIEW Malcolm McDowell is pointing to the end of the world out his window. The actor is speaking to The Big Issue from a hotel in St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, facing his phone towards the harbour. This is the island that reaches so far into the Atlantic that flat earthers think the edge of everything is somewhere nearby. “Isn’t it amazing? It’s a great place,” McDowell enthuses. “All around this coast there’s craggy inlets and these fishing boats, I mean, the cod literally jump on the line. Absolutely my favourite place I’ve been to make any movie or television show.” Over half a century after his two massively big breaks, in Lindsay Anderson’s if… and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, McDowell has close to 300 acting…

WILL HERBERT, 62 I don’t know what is going on at the moment – I don’t know if a lot of my customers are on holiday – but it’s very quiet on the street. Since the heatwave in July it’s been almost as quiet as it was under lockdown when no one could come out. I’ve been outside Budgens for about 10 years now and I’ve made this place famous. I feel like a little bit of a local landmark. I’ve actually been selling the magazine since The Big Issue started. Back then I was homeless, on the drugs and everything. Now I’ve cleaned up my act, thanks to The Big Issue. Thanks to them giving me the chance to sell papers it’s a different ball game now. We used…

The super-wealthy can be our superheroes Yvon Chouinard is not messing around. Until last week, he was a billionaire. Then he gave it all away. Chouinard is the founder of the Patagonia outdoor clothing company. He has often been described as a reluctant billionaire. There are worse things to be reluctant about. Chouinard, a devoted environmentalist, put his money where his mouth is. He signed over his company to a trust that will direct money not reinvested in the company – roughly £87 million per year – to work that is being described as having environmental purpose. Exactly what this is remains to be mapped out, but it will “fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities”. Chouinard’s family are no longer controlling the company. “Earth…

Burkina Faso 1 According to the most recent World Malaria Report, in 2020 there were 241 million cases of malaria, killing 627,000 people – 96 per cent of them in Africa. Those numbers were at their highest level in nearly a decade, but new hope comes with a new vaccine developed by scientists at the University of Oxford. Trials consisting of 409 children from Burkina Faso showed it’s 80 per cent effective against the disease. Next step is a larger trial later in the year. If approved, 100 million doses a year could be manufactured. Eritrea to Switzerland 2 The heartwarming and hopeful story of a street paper vendor Ruta Teklezghi, 32, who sells Surprise in Lyss, Switzerland. I am from Eritrea, and I’ve been living…

RICHARD OSMAN As we’ve waded through Brexit, partygate and culture wars, it’s sometimes been hard to remember there was once a vision of English decency. The loudest voices have too frequently been bullish, boorish or both. But as the tributes to Queen Elizabeth showed, there are a huge number of people who still aspire to those old-fashioned values. For those looking to celebrate the better side of the English national character, Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has been a boon. Sure, there are some violent deaths in there, but they happen in a world where politeness is valued, intelligence respected, people are treated as human beings no matter their age or background, and there’s still a real sense of community. There’s also a great deal of cake. “We live…

CHERRY PICKINGS Autumn jewels to brighten the short, dark days ahead Liberation Day By George Saunders Time magazine called George Saunders “the best short story writer in English”, so it’s not surprising that the announcement of a new collection of short stories sent ripples of anticipation throughout the book-loving world (despite five of these stories actually having already made an appearance in The New Yorker). The 60-page titular story that kicks off proceedings is one of the book’s publication virgins, and begins with a thrillingly mystifying paragraph, the bizarre language of which suggests a futuristic or fantastical setting. Saunders has been teaching the craft of the short story at Syracuse University for 20 years; he has honed to perfection the art of locking in his reader within a few sentences.…

JAZZ Going back in time to forge future paths During lockdown 2020, when each week began to feel drearily indistinct from the next, my calendar was almost entirely held together by new music releases. While some record labels found the lack of PR opportunities inhibiting, others took advantage of a captive audience, and many albums released that year feel as special to me now as favourite albums from my childhood. In particular Blue Note Re:imagined, which arrived in the autumn and felt for all the world like a genuine event. Here was Blue Note Records, with the weight of an enormous jazz heritage on its shoulders, giving licence to a bunch of young upstarts from the ‘new wave’ of UK jazz to rifle around in its archives and recreate what…