Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/15/2023 i The Big Issue

I left school at 15 and my outlook on life was the same as it is now. I was always a hopeful child if not always a happy one. I was outgoing, sociable, funny, and I was accepted by my peers. All I was interested in was music and escapism. I don’t think I’ve changed much. Obviously circumstances have changed along the way, but I think my core values are still the same. I’ve never been the kind of person that thinks negative thoughts about myself. If my upbringing taught me anything, it was resilience. I got that from my mum. She also gave me the notion that no one’s gonna give you anything. The only way you’re going to get what you want is through hard work. Unless you…

PHOTO WALLETS THE DEVELOPING WORLD With more than 90 per cent of the UK population now having a smartphone in their pocket, taking a quick photograph and immediately seeing the results has become an unthinking gesture. Phones are used to take quick snaps of opening hours and timetables, to do a quick mirror check of your hair and teeth, and to communicate everyday activities with social media acquaintances. Look at my lunch! It is easy to forget that this instant photographic practice is very different to what went before. For most of the 20th century, cameras were much less widespread, and photographs were much slower to produce. Until the early 1990s, when sales of digital cameras overtook film, most people shot just one or two rolls of film a year.…

HOUSING The Renters’ Reform Bill is imminent. Here are five things to expect from it The long-awaited Renters’ Reform Bill is finally set to be introduced to Parliament, according to housing secretary Michael Gove. The landmark bill promises to improve renters’ rights in England. It was first announced in June last year but since then there has been no sign of the bill making its way through Parliament despite rents hitting record highs as the cost-of-living crisis bites. Gove told Sky News the bill would be published last week, promising the legislation would “change the way in which the relationship between landlords and tenants works.” At the time of publication there were whispers from Politico’s Playbook that it would be delayed for “a week or two” due to “procedural delays”.…

A lifetime of storytelling, and a hive of literary activity Once upon a time I was at the Edinburgh Festival – oh, circa 1988 – watching a truly gifted comedian telling a story. Confessions of a Furtive Nudist by the late and great Ken Campbell was a monologue delivered in a voice that was a cross between Ken Livingstone (former London mayor) and Russell Brand, current campaigner for all manner of social good. The story was gripping, and in the audience I fell into conversation with comedian, performer and writer Anna Chen. And it was she who told me about Phil Ryan – singer, songwriter, storyteller, author and the first appointee I made when launching The Big Issue a few years later. We took tea after the introduction, and when…

Leighton Moss is protected and managed for the benefit of some key species of birds. Bittern being the primary one. In very recent history, this rare type of heron was down to less than a dozen pairs in the UK. Through the management of sites like ours, we’ve now increased it to over 200 pairs across the UK. That’s a conservation success story. We live in a massively manufactured landscape. Farming and housing and roads and railways, all those things impact on the countryside. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. We want people to engage with nature as much as possible. Programmes like Wild Isles and Painting Birds with Jim and Nancy Moir can be really powerful in bringing people in. When the reserve…

As a child Zakia was drawn to the shapes and colours of the natural world around her in Dhaka, Bangladesh where she grew up. It was this passion for the wonders of the landscape that led her to pick up pencils and brushes, playing with colour and shapes to capture moods and express feelings. Recently she began working with mosaic, quickly developing her work from rigid, linear forms, governed by shape of the tiles, to more expressive shapes, using broken ceramic and found objects. Zakia submitted this artwork via the 240Project, an activity centre empowering people in West London. 240project.org.uk…

CLASSICAL ‘It is an honour to be connected to music through words’ “More mud than mist these days. More rain than shine. Leaves to scuffle; berries and nuts to squirrel away,” reads a familiar voice. “The house hunkers down, heaves and creaks. In the monster gale that shakes windows and doors... it’s not Wordsworth, but that gives you a flavour,” says Michael Morpurgo, smiling out from the screen. Occasionally, this job has its perks, and Sir Michael giving an impromptu reading of work-in-progress via Zoom is certainly one of them. The War Horse author has written a new piece to complement Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the evocative violin concerto that captures the essence of spring, summer, autumn and winter. He’ll narrate the words alongside violinist Daniel Pioro, who has curated…

DALILA PAUN, 24 I’ve been selling The Big Issue magazine for six years. I couldn’t even spell my name or speak English when I came to the UK. It’s still a bit hard for me to speak and to understand some of the accents because I am still learning. I didn’t have any documents to get a job and I heard a lot of friends talk about The Big Issue. I said to myself, why not start doing this? It started slow, but every single day it built and I started to like doing it. It made me find out more about people who talk to me and are friendly to me. Then I started to really love it and I decided that this is what I wanted to do…

One of the most uplifting stories to emerge from the devastation in Ukraine features refugee sisters Khrystyna and Sasha Mykhailichenko. When they and their mother were forced to flee their home near Kyiv last spring they were taken in by Sheilagh Matheson and Chris Roberts. Sheilagh and Chris live in Corbridge in Northumberland and opened their door through the Homes For Ukraine scheme. They had an old upright piano in the house, not up to much and better suited to “a smoke-filled room with men drinking pints and singing Roll Out the Barrel”, Chris told The Observer. They knew that Khrystyna and Sasha were musical. But what happened next reads like a great film script. When Khrystyna started playing, things happened. As she practised people gathered quietly to listen outside…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue The worst-laid plans Great article by John Bird [Issue 1560, April 17] on stopgap politics. The short-term nature of our current politics makes getting anything done almost impossible. Ministers know that their next move is only months away, so why bother planning for the next 5-10-15 years. Hence our decaying infrastructure (water, electricity, gas, railways). Brexit has compounded this with less support from our European neighbours. For example, how many justice secretaries has the UK had in the last 11 years? Answer: 11. No wonder we have so many problems in the legal system. What company would succeed without a series of plans, short, medium and long term? If we as…

Having a home is about more than just a roof over your head. Photographer Margaret Mitchell’s project An Ordinary Eden focuses on individuals who have experience of homelessness, exploring how their lives are impacted and disrupted by not having a safe, secure place to call their own. She says: “A lot of my work concerns themes such as home, place and belonging. Why the places people live are important to them, why belonging and having roots (or new roots) is fundamental to happiness.” An Ordinary Eden in 2019. “I wanted to look at what happened when people don’t always lead the life they thought – or hoped – would happen. What is the importance of ‘home’, how does a period of homelessness impact a person? What are the practical implications…

REVIEWS Sci-fi meets crime thriller in a polarised future The best fiction immerses the reader in a vividly evoked world, and this week we have two novels that do that brilliantly, while also highlighting the diversity of the form. Nick Harkaway is no stranger to expert worldbuilding, having written four highly acclaimed science fiction novels. He’s also a fan of darkly comic crime fiction, having delivered a couple of terrific slices of noir under the pen-name Aidan Truhen. His latest novel, Titanium Noir, combines these two loves to deliver a story that is simultaneously a down-and-dirty crime tale and a wonderfully expansive and visionary piece of speculative fiction. In the future, a revolutionary gene therapy called T7 has created an elite band of humans called Titans who are giants with…

Melanie Lynskey CULTURE Melanie Lynskey talks quietly. In a cavernous hotel suite in Central London, her soft voice barely carries across the coffee table. But listen up. Because the star of Yellowjackets, The Last of Us and Don’t Look Up has plenty to say. Lynskey has hit new career highs in recent years. Not that she was doing badly by her own metrics. “I already felt so fortunate,” says Lynskey, who followed her breakout role in 1994’s Heavenly Creatures as a true-life teenage killer opposite Kate Winslet with a string of fine supporting roles, from Ever After (1998) with Drew Barrymore to Two and A Half Men, Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! and Up in The Air with George Clooney. “I’ve been a working actor for 30 years, which…