Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/11/2024 i The Big Issue

N Smith stuck out like a sore thumb in our detention centre in 1960, where a few hundred boys were being punished with a ‘short, sharp shock’. N Smith walked differently from us. When he marched it was as if he was a toy soldier. When he spoke, he spoke with rounded vowels and careful diction. We were surprised. We who ran words into each other, who cut the corners of a word by dropping the ‘h’. Did not march like toy soldiers. Did not exude culture and careful rearing, good food and clean laundry. N Smith was picked on and humiliated – though not by me, I hasten to add – for the peculiar, middle-class culture he brought into our working-class world. I was reminded of this last week…

CULTUREART Regular Street Art contributor Zakia gets colourful with this Jackson Pollock-esque paint splash artwork. As a child Zakia was enchanted by the aesthetics 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. Zakia submitted this artwork via the 240Project, an activity centre empowering West London’s vulnerable community. 240project.org.uk The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com. At least half of the profit goes to the artist.…

REVIEW Unhealthy origins How do you adapt a popular non-fiction book for the big screen? In beefy biopics like Oppenheimer – based on the critically lauded doorstop American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer – the filmmakers are usually gifted a literal character arc. For more abstract bestsellers – like the stat-filled baseball analysis Moneyball or the jargon-heavy subprime mortgage investigation The Big Short, both adapted into award-winning movies – it feels like screenwriters try and find a narrative thread or two to latch on to, then just simplify and streamline the rest of the material to make it digestible. With her latest film Origin, Ava DuVernay (director of the Oscar-winning civil rights drama Selma and the excellent Netflix miscarriage of justice mini-series When They See Us)…

ANALYSIS Hall or nothing We all know Liam Gallagher (above) isn’t shy about speaking his mind. Still, his reaction to the news that Oasis are among this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees (“I’ve done more for rock’n’roll than half of them clowns on that board, so it’s all a load of bollocks”) has scandalised American news outlets. It’d be easy to put Gallagher’s attitude down to a very British mistrust of all things self-congratulatory, but fellow nominee Cher shares his sentiments. Despite being eligible since 1991, the pop powerhouse has somehow only been nominated this year, even though she said back in December that, “I wouldn’t be in it now if they gave me a million dollars… They can just go you-know-what themselves”. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney has…

RAHELA BUJOR, 30 I’m volunteering in The Big Issue office at the moment helping another vendor get the right benefits. I also sell the magazine and I’ve been doing that for while now. I started it because I heard from a friend that it was a good thing to do so I gave it a try. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so busy, it depends on my customers coming to buy it. I love my customers and I would like to have more of them to come and buy the magazine. I do have a few regular customers and some of them know me very well. Sometimes they help me just by saying something nice and I like to talk to them, and some of them will tell you…

HOMELESSNESS The number of people sleeping rough in Britain is ‘a source of national shame’ as Westminster and Holyrood lose their grip on the homelessness crisis Damning official rough sleeping statistics have laid bare the Westminster government’s total failure to deliver on its empty promise to end street homelessness for good. The annual rough sleeping snapshot, released last week, found an estimated 3,898 people were homeless on the streets on a single night in autumn 2023. That figure is up more than a quarter on the 3,069 people counted in 2022, although down on the 2017 peak when frontline workers counted 4,751 people. With a general election on the horizon, the official count was the last opportunity for ministers to show they were on track to meet the 2019 Conservative…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Class wars There is a lack of appreciation of the impact which mobile phones have in the classroom or indeed on the mental state of our young people and I say that as someone who has taught in schools [Editor’s letter, Issue 1604, 26 February]. Of course, mobile phones can be used sensibly in the classroom as a learning device –for example in the case of Google Classroom which is quoted in the article. What the article does not address is the immoral influence which mobile phones via social media have on our young people as well as being DESIGNED to be addictive. There has been a rapid deterioration of behaviour…

SPECIAL REPORT Lorraine Byrne scrubs and scrubs the walls, but the black mould keeps coming back. She lives in a damp and cold two-bed council flat with her husband and four children on the Nags Head estate in East London. Last winter she moved the chest of drawers in the bedroom where her three eldest children sleep, and mould covered in fluff stretched up the unit. “I just want to know that my kids aren’t suffering from breathing in those damp spores,” Byrne, 38, says. “There’s only so much you can do. We can mask it but it’s still there. It’s in the air. It’s in the walls. It’s like one of those horror movies.” Byrne’s neighbours face similarly dangerous living conditions – black mould causing respiratory problems, slugs coming…

REVIEWS A story of recurring nightmares Lucas Rijneveld is known for his debut The Discomfort of Evening, which won the International Booker Prize (and my heart), in his discomforting, visceral vision of a child’s life on a farm in the Netherlands. This second novel, My Heavenly Favourite, offers another nightmarish vision, set in the Dutch bible belt in 2005. Rijneveld’s prose is slickly stumbling, translated with shuddering brilliance by Michele Hutchison. But the narrator here is a paedophile – a middle-aged vet who, in a feverish stream of trailing sentences, confesses his obsession with the unnamed 14-year-old daughter of a local dairy farmer. He goes on to abuse this child repeatedly, just as he does to cattle. Revealing his own horrors as a boy, the narrator rationalises his repetition of…

CULTUREINTERVIEW French Senegalese writer and director Ramata-Toulaye Sy is practically glowing. On a Zoom call with The Big Issue, her eyes crinkle at the corners as she recalls how she swore she’d write, not just a love story, but an African love story and that it would be “the most beautiful and the most greatest love story” ever to be told. The result is her first feature film, Banel and Adama, which was received with acclaim at Cannes last year when Sy became only the second black woman in history to be nominated for the Palme d’Or. On the day that we speak, she is waiting to hear the outcome of her Oscar nomination as Senegal’s entry for Best International Feature Film. It’s a hugely impressive start for the 37-year-old,…

BIG ISSUE RECIPE COLLECTION Be full of beans then go bananas We’ve been delighted by the delicious recipes that readers have sent in since we launched our drive to collect budget-friendly dishes. But we’re still hungry for more The Big Issue recipe collection of budget-friendly dishes continues to grow. And we’ve had some great feedback from readers who have tried out some recipes. Alison Oakes sent us this email: “Fab new recipe recently for flatbreads! Thank you. I made it to go with dhal and roasted veg. Each flatbread was perfect, like a cross between naan bread and pitta. “I found that they cooked faster on a higher heat, and that wrapping them in a tea-towel ensured that they stayed soft not crispy. Definitely a recipe I’ll try again!” And…

In 2009, Jamie Oliver surveyed the British government’s provision of food education and found it severely lacking. In response, he set up the Ministry of Food to provide lessons on cooking, nutrition and sustainability in Bradford, Rotherham, Leeds, Newcastle and Stratford, East London. Fifteen years later, the Ministry of Food is still going strong, with 74 sites across the UK and 18 more planned for this year, which will deliver Oliver’s mission to reach 40,000 more people from underserved communities. It is now a certified B Corp, recognised for its positive impact on people and the environment. In Bradford, Oliver’s work continues at The Storehouse, where local organisation Inn Churches supports and empowers people experiencing homelessness, poverty and other forms of marginalisation – including through food provision. “We reclaim tonnes…

COLLABORATION In the corporate world, profit is often the number one goal, but certified B Corporations are different. Although they want to make money, B Corp companies are equally concerned with environmental impact, employee wellbeing, and community transformation. This drive takes away competition and replaces it with a passion to work together with other like-minded businesses. “All B Corps want more B Corps,” Philip Everett-Lyons, founder of the B Corp Hattiers Rum, told The Big Issue. “We’re all changing the world one step at a time. We’re unified, singing from the same song sheet. That strong need [to change the world] eliminates competition regardless of what sector you’re in.” Since his company became B Corp certified in November 2020, Everett-Lyons has celebrated each announcement of a new B Corp in…

Going green has become non-negotiable for many consumers in recent years, with over half of us trying to make sustainable choices where we can according to Nielsen IQ. This has led to a series of brands announcing ethical changes, with companies from Tesco to TK Maxx implementing plans to reach net zero. But as almost every firm is promoting sustainable credentials, how can you identify businesses really prioritising planet over profit, rather than just creating a green-tinted smokescreen? Corporations that can’t back up their promises are often accused of greenwashing – the practice of making false or misleading claims about how sustainable a product or service really is. It’s become commonplace as shopping habits change but is also being exposed more readily. High-profile investigations into misleading claims have been launched…

I paid careful attention. I wondered when the chancellor in his budget statement would get to issues around a genuine national shame and unveil details on how he would deal with it. But the answer came there none. Last week, it was revealed that temporary accommodation had contributed to the death of dozens of children in the UK. Between April 2019 and March 2023, 55 children in England died unexpected deaths, with the place where they lived being a factor. Of these, 42 were aged one or under. Imagine that. You have no home. Your family is placed somewhere non-permanent, it might be a hostel or some sort of B&B or some other place that, due to the national chronic housing shortage, is damp and unsuitable. And then your infant…

COVER FEATURE “It’s very, very volatile at the moment,” says Cate Blanchett. We are talking, as you do, about religious and political dogma, colonialism and white supremacy, misogyny and the perilous state of democracy. This time last year, Blanchett was at the Oscars, where Tár was nominated in six categories. Her latest venture is altogether different. In The New Boy, a film by Warwick Thornton, Blanchett plays a conflicted nun in a story of colonialism and Christianity in 1940s rural Australia. The film opens by spelling out the context in brutal black and white: “For most of the 20th century, it was Australian government policy to breed out the black. This involved separating Indigenous children from their parents and their culture. The church and its missions were integral to much…

My passion was always rugby and sport. At 16 I had nothing else in my life. I lived in a sporty area and really understood that in Bridgend, the town I was brought up in, the definition of if somebody was happy on a Monday was if Bridgend played rugby on Saturday and won. I don’t even know if my passion was rugby, I just felt the amazing influence rugby could have on whether people had a good day or bad day, a good week or bad week, a good life or bad life. I understood I was different but didn’t know what that difference was. I never explored it. I put it behind a locked door and thought I would never open it, because I was afraid of what…

Therapy speak is now so popular that you can’t buy a pie at Big Joe’s Food Van without hearing someone talking about boundaries. I have to confess – because I have no filter and will tell anyone anything – that I’m one of those people who go to therapy. This is for a number of reasons that I won’t go into (hey, check out my boundaries!), but I enjoy it because I’m curious about the way my mind works. It’s baffling to me that I’m still a mystery to myself at the age of 51, but there you go. Also, maybe one day I will understand simple cases of cause and effect, such as: ‘I get angry when I’m tired’ and ‘When I’m stressed, I need to go for a…

Chocolate tastes even sweeter when it’s made by a company transforming lives. Harry Specters, a producer of luxury chocolates in Cambridgeshire, has helped more than 300 autistic people to gain experience in the workplace. The company was sparked from an idea Ash Shah had when he was 11 years old. He has already started dreaming about running his own restaurant. Asked what he would call his eatery, he said, “Harry Specters!” a name plucked from his imagination. His parents, Mona and Shaz Shah, worried their autistic son wouldn’t have the opportunities to gain work experience. “The problem is there’s no jobs that are suitable for autistic people,” Mona told the Big Issue. So they decided to create their own workplace where Ash’s strengths could shine. But why chocolate? After enrolling…