Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/24/2023 i The Big Issue

If you wanted to, you could write next month’s local election coverage ahead of time. We know exactly the questions that’ll be asked: What do the results say about Rishi Sunak’s attempt to save the Conservative Party? What do they say about Keir Starmer’s efforts to win the general election? You can also predict the one thing they won’t mention: the performance of local government. And that tells us something profound about the constitutional make-up of Great Britain. It tells us that local government simply doesn’t matter. Power has been remorselessly centralised to Westminster. So the only pertinent question about local elections is how they reflect upon national politics. They’ve become glorified opinion polls rather than important democratic events in their own right. Things weren’t always quite this bad. Local…

I was Clean Break’s writer in residence from 2016-18. I’ve run workshops in prisons, I taught drama at Blundeston Prison in Suffolk. But I’d never worked in a women’s prison until I began working with Clean Break. As writer in residence, you’re immersed in the company and the people they work with. After 18 months you write something that relates to women and the criminal justice system. I wrote Dixon And Daughters, Clean Break’s first co-production with the National Theatre, off the back of my residency. I wanted to reflect the resilience and courage of the women I met. And I wanted it to be funny. Because there’s so much laughter. I also wanted to talk about the lack of joined-up thinking around trauma. If you experience trauma when you’re…

REVIEWS False memoir divines its own truths Biography of X by Catherine Lacey is the most inventive and playful novel of the year. Yes, it is only April, but surely nothing can surpass this. The literary style of our times is realism; everyone wants to try to capture the zeitgeist, the Twitter age, the social climate and, well, the literal climate. Lacey brushes these notions away like crumbs on a cardigan. Biography of X is the story of the deceased artist known as X, as told by her widow. X’s life, however, is as vast a work of fiction as the novel itself. A master of disguise and pseudonyms, X jumped from career to career, country to country, with a host of fake passports, rubber prosthetics, wigs, backstories and lies.…

I don’t deal very well with stress. Although I appear calm on the outside, even when at rest my default state is constant, bubbling, nail-biting anxiety. I have the amazing ability to worry about everything all at once, from global warming, nuclear war and brain tumours to getting food poisoning from a packet of chicken that was opened more than 24 hours ago. So, when I encounter a drop of actual stress, usually in the form of something earth-shatteringly minor, I MELT. I screech, bang about and generally boil with rage. Or I cry pathetically at nothing until someone else has to step in and try and figure out what’s the matter with me, like one of those remotely controlled plastic babies they give to the couples on Love Island.…

CLAUDIA CĂLIN I must have been 10 years old when my family moved to the UK. I have been with The Big Issue for seven years now. In my first two years I sold the magazine in Bristol, but for the past five years I have sold in Bath. Previously I worked in a warehouse packing cereal. It was easy and enjoyable. As soon as I started there my baby was unwell, and my other child injured himself at school, so I had to take time off. Because of this, I was laid off two weeks after I started the job. I told some of my friends that I got fired, and they recommended I sell The Big Issue, because this is the best job to earn enough to make…

At times I sit and go through the history of The Big Issue. I try and take as objective a view as I can. Recently I sat on a park bench by my local river and reconstructed from memory all of those that had helped lead The Big Issue from its stumbling first beginnings to its present order and professionalism. To its current ‘grown-up-ness’, you might call it. What were their qualities? What did they bring to The Big Issue? Of course, as the co-founder with Gordon Roddick, I was the first one. What did I do that was unique and useful and lastingly meaningful? Starting from the fact that I had only ever employed one other person in my life, I was likely to have only rudimentary skills at…

Richard O’Brien has always seen his seminal, naughty musical The Rocky Horror Show as “just a piece of silly nonsense”. That’s what he thought when, as an unemployed actor in the early ’70s, he created “sweet transvestite” Dr Frank-N-Furter and his crew of glorious misfits. It’s what he thought when, 50 years ago this June, Tim Curry stepped into the lead role and the stage show became a hit. He still believed it when the movie version – The Rocky Horror Picture Show, starring O’Brien, Curry and a young Susan Sarandon – became the longest-running cinema release of all time. It’s what he told curious fans, reporters, and pop historians over the decades as the show cemented its place as the cultiest of cult hits. This has, of course, put…

Around the age of 16, I changed a bit. Until my early teens I was quite into sport. When puberty kicked in I, like most people, got interested in girls. Which led to me joining the drama club at the all-boys grammar school I went to [Harrow County School for Boys] and doing a lot of Shakespeare plays and comedies, because doing plays meant becoming involved with the girls’ school. So I know full well my first impulse to act was motivated by wanting to meet girls. When I was young, I had a few little stays in hospital. So when I was asked, What do you want to be? I said a doctor. Well, there aren’t many parents in the world who don’t think that’s a good idea. But…

CLASSICAL Live performance thrives outside the capital given a chance Conversations around ‘levelling up’ – the policy introduced by the Tory government to close gaps in provision across the UK – often give the misguided impression that anywhere outside Central London is a cultural backwater. When Arts Council England announced – apropos of nothing – that the English National Opera should leave its home at the Coliseum in London’s West End and move to Manchester, it seemed to forget that the area is already served by Opera North. In response to patronising comments insinuating that no one from Manchester would want to go to the opera (demonstrably untrue: Damon Albarn’s Monkey: Journey to the West opened the inaugural Manchester International Festival to sold-out dates in 2007, to give just one…

Last week a woman rang Nicky Campbell’s radio show on BBC’s Radio 5 Live and burst into tears. And, frankly, it was hard not to do the same. Identified as Jane from Blackpool, she was talking about the spiralling cost of food. It had just been revealed that food prices were rising at their fastest rate for 45 years. Jane explained that she and her husband were in their sixties and both worked, but because of the cost of everything they were barely managing. They were eating jacket potatoes for dinner. Every night. There was no lunch. She said that now and again they’d have some cheese on the potato, if they were feeling flush. It’s all they can afford. She didn’t shout or get angry, she calmly explained how…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Climate of fear I share the despair of Davis Guggenheim [Issue 1557, March 27], although I started to worry about climate change much earlier. Back in the 1960s I joined a number of others in a call to save mankind and our planet Earth. In 1962, Bob Dylan sang about the sound of a wave that would drown the whole world and pellets of poison filling our oceans. Others, like Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Mike Pinder of The Moody Blues were calling on governments to bring in legislation to combat climate change. Here we are 60 years later and they have done very little in this regard. Now Gaia, Mother…

“Life is better when you paint it,” says long-time regular Street Art contributor Forman, who is in her late fifties, lives in Brighton and copes with physical and mental health challenges, including rheumatoid arthritis and bipolar. “I make space in my mind to gently move into my own creativity. Building routines that work like taking care of yourself. “Finding your balance is the gift you give yourself,” Forman continues. “We are all creative in whatever we do. For example, painting, drawing, collage. We are creative beings and meant to express our creative side. Having the creative time helps to relax me and gives me a break from stress. Life takes courage.” The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here.…

CULTURE INTERVIEW Niamh Algar New ITV drama Malpractice opens on an ordinary night on an ordinary NHS A&E ward. It is, in many ways, an unremarkable shift for Dr Lucinda Edwards. Sure, she is overworked and under-resourced as she takes life-and-death decisions, and the A&E department is understaffed. But this, we quickly gather, is not remotely unusual. Dr Edwards, played brilliantly by Niamh Algar, is treating a young woman overdosing on opioids when a child with gunshot wounds arrives in A&E reception – alongside a man brandishing a weapon. Moments after having a gun waved in her face, Edwards must make a crucial decision. There are insufficient beds and her only back-up is an inexperienced junior doctor. Who to treat? Who to prioritise? Where to focus her attention?…

WASTE Fighting food waste, one banana skin at a time Growing up, Max La Manna, like every child, needed encouragement to clear his plate. “My mother would always say make sure you eat your food – there are starving people on the other side of the world.” Now, with a cost-of-living crisis pushing more families into poverty, La Manna knows that hunger is no longer an abstract, distant notion. “There are millions of children across the country right now who are struggling to get meals,” he says. “It’s happening all around us. It’s happening to people around the corner from us, it’s happening next door. It’s not this faraway place where we don’t see it – out of sight out of mind. It’s happening everywhere.” A record number of people…