Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/9/2023 i The Big Issue

About two years ago, my daughter, who was 15 at the time, told me about a new trend going round her school. She told us that dozens of pupils were getting together in the school toilets to vape, that it seemed like almost every kid in the school was getting into the habit and despite the fact that it’s illegal to sell vapes to under 18s, you could pick them up from pretty much anywhere – at school, online, and in the shops. What’s more, she said most people were using supersize vapes with high nicotine content that were illegal, but all of the shops were selling them. She suggested we ought to be talking about it in the wider media. From reading this, you might think that my smart,…

EMERGENCY EXITS & ENTRANCES There is no ideal way to separate from a partner. Over the years, romcoms have portrayed breakup scenarios in various ways and come to the same conclusion: exes need physical and emotional space from each other. But what happens when you can’t achieve that? Living with an ex-partner is not just a consequence of Covid lockdown. Rising rents, soaring mortgage interest rates and a cost of living crisis have left many unable to afford to move out and move on when their relationship ends. According to a study by Direct Line around nine million people in the UK have, at some point, been forced to live with their exes post-breakup. Former partners will typically find themselves living together for an average of four months until they…

CULTURE Nearly 30 years on from the famed charity exhibition Little Pieces From Big Stars, War Child UK and Flowers Gallery have announced an important autumn exhibition and fundraiser. Opening to coincide with the UN International Day of the Girl Child, Lost Girls boldly addresses the profound challenges faced by girls affected by war. The line-up includes Ai Weiwei, Maggi Hambling, Caroline Coon, Tracey Moffatt, Penelope Slinger, Owanto, Pam Hogg, Peter Howson and Linder Sterling. The painting pictured is by Ethiopian artist Tewodros Hagos, whose work explores social injustice experienced by migrants. Lost Girls is at Flowers Gallery in London from 10-14 October; artworks are on sale now via artsy.net The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To…

LABOUR PARTY ‘Keir Starmer can flip-flop as much as he likes – it won’t make much difference’ Just as the country hunkered down for the Covid-19 lockdown, a bright-eyed five-a-side fanatic took control of the Labour Party. He promised another future was possible, making the “moral case for socialism”. A short three years later, Keir Starmer’s leadership looks very different. Strong stances have been watered down as he eyes a stint in No 10. With Labour gathering in Liverpool for what is probably its final party conference before the next general election, here’s a reminder of how Starmer’s scraped the barnacles off the boat. BENEFITS A leadership promise to end the two-child cap fell by the wayside in July, leading to the former director of public prosecutions being branded ‘Sir…

Last week and this week I am conference hopping. I have with me a pocketful of the smallest manifesto in the world and have been going up to those in the political field and inviting them to think beyond the stale and damaging structure of current government response to social crisis. I have carefully written a few hundred words and had them printed onto a folding sheet of paper in two separate editions. One blue for the incumbent government, one red for the aspirant government. All of this will be sorted out next year in a brouhaha of claims, counter claims, accusations and counter accusations of effete and ridiculous insipidity between the parties, flowing from all mouths. I, though, went to petition and implore in my petite manifesto that through…

With my Netflix subscription cancelled and avocado toast a long-forgotten dream, I still can’t afford to rent, let alone buy a house. I graduated from my masters degree with no money, stable job prospects or clear way forward. So I moved back. In with my dad, that is. Moving home isn’t always an option, but my dad owns his house and can just about tolerate me, so it wasn’t impossible to persuade him to have me back. Still, heading home felt like giving up my independence, my life. But life continued. It even got better. It’s not just me out of the 4.9 million people who, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), have moved back in with their parents that have found this to be true. Smriti Joshi,…

REVIEWS A seductive tale of failed communication JM Coetzee is a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest still around. His success is all the more extraordinary for the sheer uncanniness of his prose, the sparsely elegant feeling of obsession and neurosis that we take from his characters. That sense of the irrational and borderline absurd edges the superb writing in The Pole, a new short story now published together in a collection. This is Coetzee at his most lugubrious and beguiling: if it turns out to be one of his last works, it can easily claim to be one of the best occasional utterings from a novelist who is as notoriously reclusive in person as he is piercingly acute in writing. The Pole tells a simple, bewitching, narrative. A…

CULTURE INTERVIEW Nathaniel J Hall In 2019, Nathaniel J Hall wrote and performed First Time, in which he confronted his HIV diagnosis. Two years later, he landed a role in It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s critically acclaimed Channel 4 miniseries about the early days of the Aids crisis. The programme – which marked the continuation of a recent resurgence of fiction exploring HIV following Matthew Warchus’s 2014 film Pride – had a substantial impact, quickly becoming Channel 4’s most-watched drama series of all time. The Terrence Higgins Trust reported that the broadcast of the first episode alone sparked a 3,100% increase in searches for “Why was Aids so deadly in the ’80s?” and a 2,150% increase for “Can women get Aids?”. The Trust also received 8,207 tests orders during…

JAZZ ‘Creating something out of wood is a very down-to-earth analogy for life’ “I don’t think music is really separate from living,” the musician and composer Bex Burch tells me from her home in Berlin. We are discussing her new album, There Is Only Love And Fear, released later this month on the renowned Chicago-based label International Anthem. I had been searching for the right words to describe the subtle force of her music; it strikes me that this integrated approach, drawing no boundaries between life and work, has truly allowed her to make music to live by. Burch, primarily a percussionist and pianist, graduated from Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2007. The following year she was invited to Ghana to join Thomas Segura, a professional maker of…

NIKKI SMITH moved to Washington DC earlier this year. An artist and activist, she sells Street Sense while helping other women experiencing homelessness My name is Nikila Smith, but I prefer to be called Nikki. I am a married woman who’s homeless. I love to say that, it doesn’t bother me. I’m new to Washington DC. I just was not happy with my life. I had a marriage and I had a family, and it was like I was at a dead end. So I just picked up and I left, thought I’d start over fresh. I always wanted to write and ask questions, but it was hard to do because people don’t have answers or they don’t want to hear you. So I never would have imagined I would…

Which tribe came to Britain from northern Europe in AD 410? Britain was victorious against which countries at the Battle of Trafalgar? Who was the first man to run the four-minute mile? Answer these questions and you could win British citizenship! My better half has just taken the Life in the UK test. It’s one of many steps that could lead to a passport, and allay the fear that the hostile environment could become so intense that people who have spent a dozen years here, married a native and contributed thousands to the economy may at some point be told to go back where they came from. The above are some of the 24 multiple-choice questions she had to answer. Score 18 to pass. Living such a culturally rich life…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Serving notice Will you please stop saying that the Section 21 notice is an eviction notice [Issue 1583, 25 September]. It is not. It is a notice that the landlord requires the tenant to leave the property. If the tenant does not leave by the required date THEN and only then the landlord can START eviction procedures, which can take many months and during which tenants can put forward any mitigating circumstances. A landlord who wants to sell or move back into their property must be able to do so. You cannot hold people captive as unwilling landlords. Anne Farthing Big words I have personal experience of homelessness. No job…

The clock is ticking for the victims of the contaminated blood scandal. They are still dying at the rate of one every four days as the government continues to prevaricate over the establishment of a compensation scheme. Even now as they await the findings of the Infected Blood Inquiry, which has just been delayed again until March next year, they fear that justice could still slip between their fingers. Why? The reason was summed up succinctly by Jeremy Hunt when, as a backbench MP, he gave evidence to the public inquiry in July 2022 and said that the state can sometimes “close ranks around a lie”. At the heart of this tragedy is contaminated blood. In the 1970s and 1980s, nearly 5,000 UK haemophiliacs contracted HIV or hepatitis C after…

When I was 16 I was at boarding school, with a very strict discipline. I was always getting hit with sticks and didn’t really like my life very much. I enjoyed the games, and I enjoyed the rule breaking, that was fun. We were given a printed list of rules and we used to just break them for the sake of it. It they hadn’t printed them we probably wouldn’t have done it. The school had an old-fashioned idea of discipline, it was set up mostly to cater for kids from army and forces backgrounds. They wanted to build the next generation of empire builders and sailors and airmen. I didn’t want to be any of those things, so it didn’t really work on me. And they were all very…

When I’m in the kitchen, there are frequently dramatic scenes, usually when I burn the dinner because I’m looking at my phone. Most people don’t realise how pressurised cooking oven chips is, especially if you’ve had a long day. Combine that with trying to heat up a cauliflower cheese grill AND boil peas, AND scroll Instagram ads about skincare over 40, and the result is usually a complete and utter meltdown and a personal life in tatters. I think this is why I never saw the film of Boiling Point, the visceral story of life in a restaurant kitchen which was shot in one frantic, unflinching take. It felt a little too close to most Tuesdays, and also, when I look in the mirror, I see Stephen Graham anyway –…