Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/27/2023 i The Big Issue

For the life of me I cannot understand much of the debate around the recent budget. The economists talk about minimal growth, some inspired by the minuscule increase we have seen, some disappointed that it wasn’t much more. Obviously, no mention is made at times like this that growth harms the environment because most growth has a negative impact on planetary health. Green concerns apart, I can’t understand how you could have a whole government budget debate without factoring in the 40 per cent of government spending that goes into the damage caused by poverty. An economist must, I would have thought, consider that 40 per cent an enormous figure. Economists are split into the two camps that divide much of politics: pro-big government and anti-big government. Labour is seen…

At 16 I was in an all-girls boarding school in High Wycombe. I did have some good friends there, but mainly I hated it. Everyone wore exactly the same stripy skirts. I wish I could say I was a rebel, wearing latex, but I was definitely trying to fit in. I wasn’t a tragic sad case, but the whole time I felt I just wasn’t like the others. I would say to my 16-year-old self, in a couple of years it’s going be good that you don’t fit in here. This is the only place that it matters that you don’t fit in. The minute you leave, this is going to be a massive advantage. My dad worked for British Airways. I was born in Hong Kong and my little…

JAMES ALLERTON, 43 I was living in Bradford and working full-time when I split from my partner and had to leave our flat. So I was homeless from that moment. I got hold of a couple of friends in Derby and managed to stay with them until I found myself a hostel. Then they moved me out of the hostel into a shared flat, and now I’ve got my own place. In your own flat you can do what you want, watch TV in the living room and have a drink without having to leave the premises. I’ve had a lot of mental health issues. I’ve self-harmed in the past but since I’ve had my dog he’s been a lifesaver. He’s an American cocker spaniel called Harlow and I look…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Borrowed budget Jeremy Hunt is yet again borrowing billions of pounds. The biggest spending is on pension pots, he handed the richest one per cent huge tax cuts on their pensions and didn’t even mention the public sector who are all on strike to have their pay reinstated to 2010 levels. Except for the barristers who settled for 15 per cent last year when they threatened to strike. The Conservatives go on about reducing the UK debt. This is something their party has never done in the last 120 years. The Tories last had an annual budget surplus in 1904. So that was the last time they actually reduced the debt.…

It’s the mid-’80s in Moscow. The communists have been in power for nearly 70 years. The Cold War is rumbling on, the threat of nuclear apocalypse feels very real. At the Moscow Medical Institute, they have a productivity problem – which, in a society where the state owns the means of production, is skating close to treason. Staff keep downing tools to play a game on the institute’s computers. It features falling blocks and is extremely addictive. Its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, calls it Tetris. And he already knows how compelling his creation is. Inspired by a life-long love of puzzles, Pajitnov designed Tetris in his spare time from his real job at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. For weeks he pretended to himself that he was playing…

“My brain’s not working properly, or feels that way, so I make things, distract it, keep it occupied,” explains Assad, who submits his artworks via London homeless charity the 240Project. “I work with whatever’s at hand: found objects, clay, plaster, wood, forcing them together, making them into a single cohesive entity. I’m not trained, just determined. “I am inspired equally by Somalia, where I was born, and London, where I live now. The figures I make can be quite ugly, brutal. It’s not intentional, but does reflect my past. Maybe they’ll get prettier over time.” 240project.org.uk…

REVIEW Intense Irish family drama, two stars at the top of their game From bangers to cachet: in just three years Paul Mescal has gone from making his screen debut in a TV ad for Denny Irish sausages to being cast as the lead in Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel to Gladiator. Along the way, he has trousered a Bafta for his role in the mini-series of Sally Rooney’s global bestseller Normal People and picked up an Oscar nomination for playing a single dad in heartbreaking holiday drama Aftersun. Cannily, he has also secured his long-term career prospects by signing up for Merrily We Roll Along, an ambitious film version of Stephen Sondheim’s coming-of-age musical that will film every few years until a forecasted 2039 release. The lad from County Kildare…

This year continues to be one spent mainly touring bookshops and libraries, so it is time spent with the best people. We live in a world of anxiety with a low hum of panic around us, so each act of kindness becomes increasingly powerful. I was recently helping out in The Unexpected Bookshop in Alnwick. Someone came to the counter with an excellent selection of books and I said, “Can I recommend one more – Leonard and Hungry Paul – just read the first paragraph and you will know if it is for you.” Within that paragraph is the sentence, “She was a person for whom kindness was a very ordinary thing, who believed that the only acceptable excuse for not having a bird feeder in the back garden was…

FORAGING It’s the ideal time to get back to our roots Mo Wilde spent a year living on foraged foods. With the cost-of-living crisis and food shortages spiralling, she urges people to give foraging a try Here in Britain, foraging is often portrayed by the media as a middle-class activity. We forget that thousands of people around the world still depend on the collection of wild food. Despite all the dietary health evidence pointing to the need for greater consumption of fruits and vegetables, half of the world’s daily calorie intake is from just three starchy species – wheat, corn and rice. Farming has brought carbohydrate-laden calories to most people but it is the wild weeds that so often provide the precious green nutrients essential to good health. I started…

You’re going to have to pay. So am I. So are your friends and relations, and even that person who you try not to make eye contact with when you’re walking the dog because you know it’ll be 15 minutes and become a whole thing and get really awkward – they’re going to have to pay. All of us are. All the sewage that is being pumped into the rivers and coasts of Britain by water companies, the tonnes of it that make infographics trying to just explain what is happening look like a dirty protest, it’s not on them, it’s on us. I’m not sure if I mean that literally. We all know the issues. We have heard the excuses that it was just in extreme moments, that it…

Deep within the brutalist beauty of the National Theatre on London’s Southbank, Siobhán McSweeney has been dancing the morning away, under the watchful eye of superstar choreographer Wayne McGregor. “We are putting the dance in the Dancing at Lughnasa,” McSweeney says, as she enters our interview room on the fourth floor of this modernist maze. McSweeney and a cast including Derry Girls co-star Louisa Harland and Father Ted’s Ardal O’Hanlan are just weeks from opening night on the Olivier Theatre stage. For the second time in her career, McSweeney plays Maggie – one of the five Mundy sisters in Brian Friel’s classic. “I did it well over a decade ago, playing the same part in Birmingham Rep. It was marvellous but I knew there were bits of the character I…

What is it about this story that makes it worth telling? For me, it was less about the game itself and more about the struggle for the game, and the time period and the era it was set in. The Berlin Wall was falling, and the Cold War was coming to an end and you had Gorbachev and perestroika and everything. The ridiculousness of this one guy travelling into the Eastern Bloc, which we were told at the time was like going into the deepest, darkest sort of hell, basically. The propaganda at the time was coming both ways across the Iron Curtain. And we were told these people over there were not to be trusted. And the fact is, probably the most heroic person in the film is Alexey.…

REVIEWS Follow-up to a masterpiece could have been a call to arms There have been numerous points over the past 10 years where I have found myself gazing longingly out my window wondering when Eleanor Catton will return with a new novel. Her last book, 2013’s The Luminaries, came out of nowhere and steamrolled everyone. Published when Catton was just 28, this 800-page Victorian pastiche was a technical masterpiece and, for my money, the best Booker winner of the 2010s (sorry Dame Hilary). I suppose I cannot blame Catton for disappearing for so long; if I wrote a novel as vast and complex as The Luminaries is, I too would demand to take a decade off. But thankfully she has returned. And her new novel Birnam Wood is nothing like…

INTERVIEW James Norton loves a challenge. Physical or mental, he’s there for it. Move over Wim Hof, Norton freezes his fear on a daily basis with an ice bath, cold shower or, ideally, a cold-water swim. The actor, most recently seen producing a career-best performance in the final series of Happy Valley began the year swimming in the sea every day. “I do believe in it,” he says. “This is not a fad.” Now Norton is immersing himself in something equally exhilarating. The actor is taking on the role of Jude in a stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, A Little Life. This is a book that means so much to so many people. A depiction of love, of friendship, of survival and the scars of abuse that is so…

GLOOM MERCHANTS Why goth captures the spirit of the age In these most dystopian of times of 2023, even the darkest imaginations of centuries of gothic writers and musicians could never have concocted a story or song to mimic the world’s current gloomy malaise. Birthed in another dystopian time, goth, with its embrace of the dark side, perhaps is the perfect soundtrack and culture that captures the spirit of this age. In its post-punk birth, it was a culture that unintentionally embraced the gloomy decay of the late Seventies and early Eighties when the dysfunctional UK was in disarray. Not directly political, it somehow captured the claustrophobic groove of the helter skelter of post-industrial post-punk when things felt febrile, tribal and broken. This was a time when the remnants of…