Innholdsfortegnelse for 8/14/2023 i The Big Issue

Like millions here in the UK, I’m a football supporter, and like hundreds of thousands of those, I’m lucky enough to be able to afford to watch my team every week. However, unlike the vast majority of this demographic, I have the privilege of watching the most successful team in the country right now – Manchester City FC. Bear with me, there’s something here for all football fans I promise! Along with a few good mates, I’m part of a group called MCFC Fans Foodbank Support (MCFC FFS). For the past three and a half years we’ve been collecting food donations outside our club’s weekend home games, come rain or shine, to support members of the local community who are struggling to put food on their families’ tables. Football supporters,…

I was a very academic teenager. I’d loved books since I was quite small. I had a real passion for learning but it got me into trouble. I was really badly bullied at junior school because I liked books and I wore glasses. I was always in the corner with my nose buried in a book. But that bullying when I was in primary school didn’t put me off, it actually made me even more determined. When I was 11, I knew I wanted to be a medical doctor. So by 16 I was on that course of learning. It was a kind of lifeline for me because I had a really deep sense of insecurity as well, anxieties about what the future held and where my path would lie.…

DEBT HELP More of us are turning to loan sharks to deal with debt. Here’s where to go instead The cost of living crisis is driving people to loan sharks, debt charities have warned, as the number of people seeking debt advice soars. Debt advice organisation Step-Change has seen client numbers climb by nearly a fifth (17.7%) between the first half of last year and first half of 2023, new data shows. In June, more than a quarter (26%) of StepChange’s clients attributed their mounting debts to the ‘cost of living increase’ – up from just 7% in September 2021. Stubbornly high inflation and soaring interest rates are pushing household budgets “to the limit”, warns Richard Lane, StepChange’s director of external affairs, forcing people to turn to borrowing. “In the…

Planning a life of efficiency I was trying to explain to someone at The Big Issue the other day that I have been in hot pursuit of efficiency all my life. I can remember the stirrings of the love of efficiency in my childhood, living in the slums of Notting Hill. It took the form of asking my mother why she threw old tin cans of Heinz baked beans out of the window into the communal garden, which was really a dug-up rubbish heap. She said there was no other place to sling them. I said but can’t you not just throw them out so that when children run around they don’t cut themselves? She laughed at me and enquired if I came from another planet. She would smoke all…

CULTURE Siou is a vendor who sells street paper L’Itinéraire in Montréal, Canada. Recently he rediscovered an old magazine that belonged to his father. It contained a feature celebrating the long and loyal service of workers of a smelting factory, with job titles like “crushing operator, skimmer and matte tapper, lubricant dispenser operator.” “The pages have yellowed and almost fallen apart,” Siou says. He decided to draw portraits of the men pictured. “I look at these portraits of workers with new eyes, and I inevitably think of my father,” Siou continues. “He never worked in the mining industry, but he did work very, very hard all his life. He owned a farm, then worked in the forest as a foreman, then as a storeman at a lumber mill. “You could…

CULTURE INTERVIEW Ella Lily Hyland is a rising star. The 24-year-old from Carlow in Ireland made her debut in a leading role opposite Poldark star Aiden Turner in Prime Video series Fifteen-Love. She plays Justine Pearce, a tennis prodigy who accuses her former coach of sexual abuse, five years after her career was wrecked by injury. The complex and provocative exposé of power, trust and abuse within coach-athlete relationships follows multiple real-life scandals. It highlights the struggle to be believed when speaking out against powerful people. Hyland’s debut film Silent Roar opens the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which has mercifully been saved from closure, this week. It’s a brilliantly offbeat tale of grief, surfing and faith filmed on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. And Hyland also has…

JAZZ Return of elusive classic a fitting tribute to a jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, a titan of the spiritual jazz movement, passed away last autumn, having recently enjoyed a resurgence of mainstream interest in his free form, ethereal sound. Sanders, a tenor sax player, was a bandmate of John Coltrane in the 1960s, and continued brandishing that torch of meditative, provocative music after Coltrane died in 1967. Sanders kept me company during my lazy, listless student years and again during 2020’s lockdown when an abundance of free time gave me an opportunity to really sit with his records and let them sink in. In 2021 Sanders, British producer Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra created a minimalist, tranquilising album together called Promises, released on the Luaka Bop label and…

JUSTIN, 53 I was born in Bury and grew up in London but came back up here around 20 years ago to look after my gran when she was ill. When she died, I stayed up here working, but the company I worked for went bankrupt. I had nowhere to stay because I had been living on site, so I ended up on the street. That’s when I started selling The Big Issue for the first time. In about 2014 or 2015, I stopped selling the magazine because I managed to get a place for myself and got another job, but then that fell through because of life and my mental health. I started selling again in 2017. It was a lot harder than before, but Covid was the real…

A fleeting glimpse of a brighter future Glasgow was alive with bikes last week. The place was transformed for the UCI Cycling World Championships. There were over 2,600 competitors, all gunning for world titles. Many were in the velodrome, out in the east of the city. There were BMXers in Glasgow Green and mountain bikes down in Glentress Forest, closer to the Borders. But it was the road racing right through the place that grabbed me. There is something phenomenal about cycling road racing, particularly at elite level. It is the link between the physical and mental, at the very extremes, that fascinates. Watching racing, particularly up close in town and city circuits, you get a sense of the energy. They really move. There is no fear, just pace. In…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue RE: DISABILITY BENEFITS ‘We are in exactly the same position!’ Readers continue to share their stories in response to our articles about how the benefits system is failing those it exists to support • We are in exactly the same position [as Keisha Holmes (above), the 19-year-old with MS forced to use food banks, Issue 1576, 7 August]. My son was born with a learning disability. As he is now an adult he has to claim universal credit in his own right. Not knowing the three-month waiting time clause, UC will only pay the additional amount from the start date of the doctor’s note! As we were unaware of this clause…

Imogen hands me her mobile phone as she keeps her eyes on the road. She is in the driving seat of our van and we are leaving a site for refugees in Dunkirk. We have just spotted a convoy of eight vans of armed police headed towards the unofficial living site. I type out a message she dictates to me for a WhatsApp group of colleagues, warning that an eviction may be afoot. A week earlier, the entire site of hundreds of men, women, young children and babies had been evicted; people’s possessions and tents confiscated leaving them with just the clothes on their backs. The morning before, riot police circled the camp, armed with guns and shields, staring at the volunteers and refugees for around an hour before leaving.…

REVIEWS Social lubricant in a postwar Scotland The Black Eden is about the discovery of oil in the North Sea off Scotland in the period from the late 1950s to the 1980s. Knowing this, it would be easy to construct a narrative, even a whole novel, in line with much of the fiction to which readers in the 21st century have grown accustomed: traditional area, discovery of new industrial resource, upending of tradition, youth meet experience. The injection of a few regional dialects often gives a veneer of legitimacy. May I go far as to say that we know how the story goes? Richard T Kelly’s novel is therefore important for going beyond this. It is an excellently evoked literary document of its time and place. His novel has many…

One of my earliest memories is watching TV, naked, at my childhood home. I would dance and sing along to the theme tunes and mimic the action as it unfolded. It was the late ’70s, so I must have been about three. My favourite show was called Animal Kwackers. It featured a four-piece rock’n’roll band consisting of men dressed in life-size animal costumes. The leader was Rory, a terrifying blue lion with skinny limbs and a gigantic, mutated head. Rory’s bandmates were called Bongo, Boots and Twang. One was a tiger, one a dog and the other one a species that I couldn’t quite identify. Maybe a goat? The tiger wore an eye patch. The dog wore shades. They all hip-thrusted around the stage with their instruments like members of…