Innholdsfortegnelse for 2/13/2023 i The Big Issue

It is not often that I wax lyrical about a book. But a small book I picked up last week intrigued me. I, a slow reader, read the 175 pages of Mr Fox by Barbara Comyns in just under a day. It’s published by a Northern Irish publisher called Turnpike Books, and I picked it up in Waterstones, attracted as with most of my book purchases by the cover. It showed a reprint of a railway company poster of 1939: a bustling, bus-laden street with St Paul’s Cathedral towering over all. Enough of a draw to a chap like me who is in love with the 1930s and the war years, having only just missed them because Mum had only just met Dad. Am I one of only a small…

A UK government public health review in 2019 concluded that long-term exposure to air pollution is responsible for between 28,000 and 36,000 premature deaths a year in the UK. Globally, it is estimated to contribute to seven million deaths. With over 30 million cars on UK roads, transport accounts for nearly a quarter of the nation’s emissions. Air pollution is measured in micrograms of particles, called PM2.5. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommended limit is five micrograms (5mcg) per year. UK 10.1 micrograms of PM2.5 per year According to State of Global Air, the UK averages 10.1mcg of PM2.5 per year. This is twice the WHO recommended limit but many areas across the country average significantly higher levels of PM2.5. A report published by climate organisation Friends of the Earth…

REVIEWS What if alien life forms are already here? One of the great things about science fiction is the way in which the genre is a terrific tool for interrogating our current society, attitudes and relationships with the rest of our environments. This week we have two fantastic novels that manage to do exactly that, but never forget to keep the reader entertained into the bargain. First up is The Mountain in the Sea by American author Ray Nayler. This is Nayler’s debut novel but he has a strong track record of short stories in the genre, and this book comes with blurbs by titans in the field such as David Mitchell and Jeff VanderMeer. The book is set in a more advanced near future, in a remote Vietnamese archipelago,…

INTERVIEW Jack Lowden On November 26, 1983, six gun-wielding men burst into a security depot near Heathrow airport expecting to steal cash from the vaults. Instead, they found gold bars worth £26 million (equivalent to more than £112m today). The Brink’s-Mat robbery, as it became known, was the biggest heist the world had seen. Its consequences rippled far beyond the South London crime world. The proceeds fuelled the birth of large-scale international money laundering and funded the regeneration of the London Docklands. If you’ve bought gold in Britain since 1984, you probably own some Brink’s-Mat bullion. This wild true crime story is now the subject of new BBC drama The Gold, starring Hugh Bonneville, Dominic Cooper and Jack Lowden – fresh from his star-making turn in Apple TV’s Slow Horses.…

OPINION The places where we found our people My friends and I walked up the street towards Pepes, Derry’s only gay bar. None of us talking as we relayed the dates of birth on our IDs over and over in our heads, terrified that if we stalled the bouncers would suss us out and that would be the beginning of the end. I was 15. There was a dull bassline coming from inside the bar. “Date of birth, please?” “April 17, 1987”… meaning I had just turned 18 a few weeks before. I knew that he knew, but he recognised that for many young people my age growing up gay in Northern Ireland this was not just a gay bar, it was our refuge. Pepes is where, for the first…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Thank you, NHS I was deeply moved when I read the opinion piece written by a frontline NHS paramedic [Issue 1546, January 9). Between November 29 and December 8, 2022 we had to have an ambulance attend our home three times as my mum had a small stroke (and subsequent falls). She was hospitalised for a week at the John Radcliffe in Oxford. There are only a handful of times, if we are lucky in our lives, where we will sit in an A&E cubicle watching our loved ones drift in and out of sleep, and the incredible healthcare professionals that make up our NHS busy themselves monitoring all the vital…

A walk down Boston’s historic streets throws up many pairings: a William Hill next door to a Coral, or a Paddy Power next to a Betfred. The Lincolnshire market town already has 15 places to gamble within a square mile, and the locals have just seen off plans for a 16th and 17th. In many towns across the UK, it rarely takes long for the one-armed bandits to be wheeled in after a high street store closes. In Boston, an old branch of Clarks and a branch of Trespass which has weathered several closing-down sales were the latest targets for the 24-hour slot machine arcades, adding to the stack of places to gamble in the town. Suzanne Welberry, who is organising resistance to gambling alongside running a vegan food factory,…

At age 16 I’d just done my O levels and I hadn’t done brilliantly, so I was waiting to find out whether my dad was going to have a hissy fit at me. He was a real academic. I think he thought I was clever, but the school always told me I wasn’t. He wanted me to fulfil my potential, which I did later. My other preoccupation was whether I was going to still be with my boyfriend if I went off to university. I’d been with him for about a year and a half and I was madly in love with him. In the end we did stay together for all of university. We lasted seven years, childhood sweethearts who were absolutely inseparable. But drama school finally put an…

I was talking loudly in the library. Even worse, I was swearing in the library. Just once, but still… And even worse than all of that, I was cheered on by the librarians of Sheffield. I decided I hadn’t visited enough libraries in the last few years. I love that they exist and what they can help people achieve. But libraries, as ever, are under threat. This symbol of civilisation is deemed a luxury good. While some people are allowed to embezzle our money for access to yachts, and banks can be bailed out and then, once secure, can tell us to piss off so they can make their profits without interference, the rest of us may have to battle to get free access to the latest Bernardine Evaristo. The…

VIANA DUMITRU I have been selling The Big Issue since 2015. The job has helped me so much. I have a lovely family and a great work ethic. We first came to England in 2012. This was my first job. My husband Ciprian sells too. In 2017 he had to have a liver transplant. That meant that we had to isolate and be very careful during lockdown since he was in the vulnerable category. Throughout that time, staying in contact with staff from The Big Issue was important, just hearing a voice. We appreciated the support. I have seven children: they are 21 then 20, 19, 16, 12. My youngest daughter is eight and my youngest son is six. My oldest girls work now, and my sisters help with the…

Since 2010 there have been 21 managers of Watford FC. There have been 15 housing ministers in Westminster during the same period, with the newest announced last week. Watford have, for a long time, been a byword for short-termism and knee-jerk reaction in high-level football. However, the current man in the Watford job, Slaven Bilic, has been there since September. Which is longer than number 14, Lucy Frazer, was in her post. It’s gotten to the stage where it feels like being housing minister is part of some performative art project, that in a number of years we will see an installation in the Tate Modern with messages on how we’ve ALL actually been part of this and that, no, of course there wasn’t REALLY a housing minister, but rather…

STRIKES They joined picket lines outside schools, train stations and job centres; at the gates of lecture halls, government offices, driving centres and museums. On ‘walkout Wednesday’ mass rallies took place in every major British city. An estimated 500,000 people took a stand, demanding better pay and conditions. The strikes have been running in various places since last autumn. But now, as the government shows itself reluctant to engage, they are growing quickly. Language about union barons and a militant few isn’t washing any more. This is across society. And it’s not slowing. At what could be the most northerly strike in Britain, search and rescue coastguards on Shetland staged a windswept two-person picket. The award for the longest picket line, if someone were measuring, might go to staff at…

AIR POLLUTION Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah died on February 15, 2013 from a severe asthma attack. She is, to date, the only person to have air pollution listed as their official cause of death, attributed to the high levels of pollutants in Lewisham, South London, where the nine-year-old’s family lived. “As her mother, all I want is to have my daughter back, but I know she won’t come back, and the fact is that Ella’s death will end up saving millions of lives,” Ella’s mother Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah tells The Big Issue. According to figures released in 2022, around 97 per cent of addresses in the UK are surrounded by unsafe levels of air pollution, and nearly 40,000 people are estimated to die prematurely from its effects every year. Initially, Adoo-Kissi-Debrah had no…

Nicole submits her work via the 240Project, a London arts and health activity centre for people affected by homelessness and exclusion. Her artwork finds her immersed in what she calls “the therapeutic dottiness of pointillism… I’m fascinated by the intricacy, precision and detail of the style.” Nicole’s enthusiasm for painting came from attending art groups with her mum over the last few years. She also loves playing football. “A way to exercise, compete and connect with people after laying down dots all day,” she says.…

REVIEW Small wonder could be a big hitter From thunder gods to spider-teens, we are living in an age dominated by cinematic superheroes. But what qualities are audiences looking for in these larger-than-life characters? Bravery? Empathy? Portability? If that last one is a biggie then good news: this is a bumper release week for protagonists you could safely pop into your pencil case. In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Avengers power couple Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly crank their size-altering tech all the way down so they can explore the phantasmagoric Quantum Realm, a dinky dimension full of alien wonders. And in Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, a one-inch tall mollusc with a single googly eye potters round a secluded Airbnb to care for his grandmother, who sounds suspiciously…

SOUND AND MEMORY HOW SUPER TROUPER BECAME A TREASURED FAMILY HEIRLOOM When we lose people we love, we often hold tight to heirlooms. From my grandmother, I have a bracelet of pretend pearls, and a wedding ring of Welsh gold which has now encircled a finger – hers and then mine – for over 75 years. But something else ties me much more strongly to her memory. It is something I cannot hold, touch or even see, but I experience it viscerally in my brain and my body. It is a song: Super Trouper by ABBA, their melancholy-drizzled disco epic that is almost as well-known in the Western world as a nursery rhyme. But to me it is always this first: Grandma and I together in her kitchen, singing along…