Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/26/2023 i The Big Issue

When does Martin Lewis take an official position in directing the fortunes of Britain? It can’t come too soon. Clearly, he already exerts a positive influence over millions of us with his MoneySavingExpert platform. He’s the living embodiment of George Berkeley’s tree falling in the woods – if the saving isn’t presented on MoneySavingExpert is it really a saving at all? While potent, Lewis is still an independent. When it comes to the big decisions that direct our lives, he’s a mitigator rather than an instigator. He’s a lone voice and not a regulator. That needs to change. The peril many face as mortgages get set to leap hugely has prompted the chancellor Jeremy Hunt to call in bank bosses for a meeting to ask them to be “flexible” with…

Home life was good when I was 16. We didn’t have much, but we didn’t want for anything. I couldn’t see the point of school once I’d learned to read and write. Education and academia had absolutely no purpose for me. My main preoccupation was forming a band and listening to music. The only thing I could really envisage was being in a band. I listened to pretty much everything. Radio in the late ’70s was far more eclectic, DJs like John Peel played virtually everything. Including us later [on Young Guns (Go for It) in 1982]. That was an accolade. Anyone of our era would have seen that as a real stamp of justification. Yog and I met when we were 12, in second year at school. We became…

REVIEWS Lost classic predicted our dystopian future There can be few greater pleasures in literature than the recovery of a previously lost classic. The slim dystopian novella Termush by Sven Holm is one such rediscovery, having languished in the Faber archives for decades until uncovered recently by their classics editor. The book was originally published in the author’s native Denmark in 1967 and translated into English by Sylvia Clayton in 1969. This repackaged edition comes with an effusive introduction by Jeff VanderMeer and rightly so. From its opening page, Termush is a creepy and enigmatic masterpiece, setting a tone of weird paranoia that drags the reader headlong into a wonderfully realised post-apocalyptic world. The unnamed narrator is one of a host of rich guests at Hotel Termush who, at great…

Life is almost permanently confusing now. It continuously feels like the moment just before you fully wake up, when you’re trying to work out whether you’re alive or dead. I used to understand roughly what was going on. Now everyone seems to dress in tomato-coloured jackets or upside-down bikinis, saying things like “It’s giving main character energy!” while forests burn, sea levels rise and the news gets worse. Meanwhile, I am standing in the doorway of life, wondering what I came in for. Is this age, or just what it feels like to witness the slow and inevitable crumbling of civilisation? When I was giving birth, back when time was relatively linear, the midwife told me that the pain is worse when you tense up. Somehow you have to find…

I first went to Manchester when I was 18, driving a drunk who had picked me up in his car and then collapsed. It was a good thing I had picked up the rudiments of driving stolen cars so that I could help the drunk and me get to town. It was a phenomenal place to arrive at in 1964. Now, 59 years later, I am here to help grow Big Issue Invest’s Growth Impact Fund, in partnership with social investor UnLtd. I do my usual loud, over-the-top talk and then have to leave and go to sit in a cafe and write this. Write about the incredible transformation of Big Issue as it develops ways of investing in helping people get out of poverty. I always tell people about…

Feast on this: other countries are already dishing up free food at school for all children with great success. Wales and Scotland have promised to start offering free school meals for all primary age children, but the UK as a whole lags behind. These countries are leading the way. INDIA 125m India has the largest school meal scheme in the world. It gives free lunches to children aged between six and 14, meaning that around 125 million children are fed every day. The scheme is improving nutritional health and educational outcomes. Studies have shown mothers who have benefited from the scheme have given birth to fewer short children (which can be a sign of malnutrition). SWEDEN Sweden dishes up hot meals to all students aged seven to 16, and to…

George Michael was as generous with his money and his fame as he was with his prodigious talent. Music lovers were left bereft when Michael died aged 53 on Christmas Day 2016. As the desperately sad news filtered out, so did stories of the star’s generosity. The vast sums of money he donated in secret, the hours he spent volunteering, the charities and individuals he helped. So many stories of selflessness came out in the days and weeks that followed. This was no surprise to The Big Issue. He had supported our work for a long time, showing us that kindness, that generosity with both his time and his words. In 1996, after recording Older – the album considered by the singer and many fans and critics to be his…

REVIEW Asteroid City is a perfectly timed meditation on grief Twenty-seven years into his idiosyncratic film-making career, Wes Anderson’s candy-coloured formalism has become so immediately familiar that anyone with an iPhone or a passing grasp of AI software can take a shot at making their own super-saturated Tik-Tok parody. Yet there’s always been depths to be plumbed beneath that exquisitely symmetrical surface. Grief – and how people cope with it, or fail to – is central to Anderson’s films. Asteroid City, filmed during the pandemic lock-down and Anderson’s first movie to be released into a post-Covid world, is no exception. The bulk of Asteroid City’s action takes place in the mid-’50s in the titular tiny desert town, mostly known for its huge meteor crater and observatory. Descending on the 87-person…

SONGS OF THE SUMMER Bring on this year’s anthems for that summer feeling Glastonbury and the solstice have passed, and the hot season is in full swing. High time to decide on the summer anthem of 2023 – with a bit of helpful guidance from the experts. In what feels like something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, streaming giant Spotify recently published its annual Songs of Summer predictions and trends round-up, complete with a playlist. A list of “red-hot hits” assembled by their “global curation team”, a crack squad of data-crunching hipster tipsters who I like to imagine all look a bit like the late John McCririck dressed in a bikini (sorry for putting that image in your head). Long gone are the days when summer smash hits were innocently literal…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Law flaw? Under the present system, a tenant who would like to move into a council house only has to ask his or her landlord to serve an eviction notice, and the landlord does not have to give a reason. For a private tenant with a family this is a good option. Under the new legislation this will no longer be possible. Who will the new law be protecting, the tenant or the council who is short of housing to offer? MW, email Together we stand I wish to respond to the article in The Big Issue on universal basic income [Editor’s Letter, Issue 1568, 12 June]. I just think…

When Mustard Tree – a charity that works to prevent homelessness – opened its Food Club as part of a refurb in 2018, keeping it stocked cost £24,000 per year. Now, it costs £25,000 per month, down from £38,000 at the height of Covid. The Food Club is one of a growing number of community grocers across the UK and is open to anyone who receives benefits or is on a low income. Members pay £3 per visit which gets them 10 items, including six cupboard essentials such as bread, cereal and long-life milk, plus four fridge items like ready meals, meat, fish and dairy. For people in a critical situation, these items are free. “If you’ve got no recourse to public funds then you don’t pay,” says Jack Barton,…

Some 400 original postcard-sized works from artists including Jeremy Deller, Corinna Button, Larissa Bates, Kora Moya Rojo, Kate Gibb and many more will feature as part of this year’s Art on a Postcard Summer Auction, in support of the vital work of The Hepatitis C Trust. Bidding for each miniature masterpiece will start at £50, an exceptional opportunity for both seasoned collectors and first-time buyers alike. Proceeds will go towards the Trust’s work to eliminate hepatitis C in the UK by the year 2030, and specifically to support their work with those affected by the infected blood scandal. The artwork pictured, titled Ziggy Says (Use Your Imagination), is by Hannah Gilson, a London-based illustrator and educator whose mixed media practice combines painting, screen printing and drawing. Bidding open 22 June-6…

AN EPIC JOURNEY Fixing my mental health with my grandfather’s tatty old map Through adolescence and adulthood, I have had patches when life became overbearing. A number of years ago, after a single unimportant event left me helpless, I had to admit that I needed help. I found it unusual to see a doctor for mental health, but it should be seen as normal as it is for any illness. When I told my parents about what I’d been going through, my mum told me a story about my grandfather’s experience of the Second World War that would give me a whole new perspective on mental health, as well as spark an interest in my grandfather’s past. In 1941, the German army pushed south to Greece and a small force…

MARTIN WHEELER, 47 Things are pretty good. I usually take in about five magazines and do about two to three hours and I sell them most days really. I love selling The Big Issue. It’s nice to be able to be out in the public, mixing and socialising. Because normally, if I don’t have any work, I stay at home and don’t do a great deal, and that doesn’t work for me really. There are a few people who buy the magazine from me every week. There are quite a few tourists and people visiting and we normally have a chat as well, which is quite nice. It’s good to have that social interaction. It makes me feel energised and like I’m doing something worthwhile, rather than shutting myself off.…