Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/15/2024 i The Big Issue

I’m jealous of Rishi Sunak’s feet. It’s because of the Samba business. He was pictured last week wearing a pair of boxfresh Adidas Sambas. This led to something between a kerfuffle and a furore. Sunak matched the classic cult shoe with a pair of signature tight trousers. While he may have wanted to channel Oasis circa 1995, he was closer to a works function at a No Way Sis gig. The look didn’t land. And Sunak apologised. Which, I suppose, is a way to humanise him. All I could think was, at least he can wear them. I have wide, flat feet. Too many generations of Irish farmers trotting over wet bogs. It means Sambas and me could never get together. They are a narrow shoe. When I attempted to…

At 16, I was trying to be Jimmy Reed. I’m the penultimate son of five boys and my brother Kole, who was five years older than me, was probably the largest influence on my life as a musician. He had an amazing record collection and still has excellent taste. So I grew up listening to the best of blues and modern jazz – Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Monk, Miles, Mingus, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, straight through to Ellington, Bird, Wes Montgomery, Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, Ella, the divine Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé, Little Richard, Fats Domino. That was the musical life that I grew up with, so I was very fortunate. I’ve always been a serious person. At 14 I wrote my manifesto of what I was going to…

LLOYD RUSDALE, 50 I still work for another company doing gardening on Tuesdays and Fridays. They tend to do the softer side of landscaping: grass cutting, cutting hedges and a lot of bed work, weeding, putting plants in, taking plants out. We do all the fancy stuff and we try to make it stand out as much as possible. On the other days I tend to my own private garden which I’m getting more into. It’s nice. Gardening away from everyone, maybe sitting on a bit of land, just you and a couple of other people. You’re listening to the birds singing. I like walking about on my own and listening to birds sing. My mum used to be a twitcher. Some of the sites we’re on you can hear…

HOUSING Britain desperately needs 300,000 construction workers. One social enterprise is providing a blueprint for others to follow A total of 300,000 construction workers have exited the industry in the last five years – one for every house the Conservatives pledged, but failed, to build each year. With mounting housing and climate crises, it would be putting it mildly to say there’s an urgent need to build new homes and retrofit the UK’s 28 million existing residential properties. But the message from housebuilders is that now is not the time. Some of the country’s biggest housing associations recently told the Financial Times they simply cannot afford to build the affordable homes that are desperately needed due to high interest rates and costs in the current recession. But even if they…

The Big Issue created its own children. First it created itself and then it created imitations of itself. Or, more accurately, you could say that Street News of New York created itself in 1989 as the world’s first street paper. And then, inspired by its example, we created The Big Issue, which came into being in 1991. The Big Issue soon became a London example of what could be done for homeless people if you narrowed the field of effort. If you said such things as “helping the homeless to help themselves”. Or “coming up from the streets”. Or “a crime prevention programme” (street living and poverty providing a fecund backdrop for surviving by wrongdoing). Or if you narrowed the field of vision, so to speak, to giving people an…

CULTURE INTERVIEW Mena Massoud swooped onto the big screen as the lead in the live action 2019 adaptation of Aladdin that broke box office records. “That’s something I’ll be proud of forever,” he tells The Big Issue. “An all-ethnic cast to cross a billion dollars… I don’t think it had been done before and I don’t think it’s been done since.” The film shook up the industry, but it didn’t initially grant all of Massoud’s wishes. A few months later he said: “I’m kind of tired of staying quiet about it … I want people to know that it’s not always dandelions and roses when you’re doing something like Aladdin. ‘He must have made millions. He must be getting all these offers.’ It’s none of those things. I haven’t…

RULE, BRITANNIA! An outdated song whose ship has sailed I’m sat on a picnic rug, an oversized coat around my shoulders. There’s a sharpness to the air; the short English summer is drawing to a close and the evening is chilly. In my hand is a Union Jack flag. Sheltered within the bandstand, the orchestra prepares for the grand finale. As we reach the chorus, everyone around me raises their arms, creating a sea of blue, red and white. It is 1994, at a Proms in the Park event, one of many local concerts emulating the iconic Royal Albert Hall Last Night of the Proms. There, internationally renowned musicians and singers close the performance – as tradition dictates – with a rendition of Rule, Britannia!, the piece by English composer…

BIG ISSUE AMBASSADOR I started running in 1989 and was very quickly addicted. I would run 10 miles, five or six days a week. Sometimes more. I did that for 25 years, until the kids came along. I can’t speak highly enough about running when it comes to mental health. When I was admitted to hospital in 2016, a doctor asked my general history. I told him about the running. He said, what you’re doing there is self-medicating. You’ve perhaps always been lower in serotonin than some people and you’re raising it by those mammoth runs. When I was hospitalised, I think not being able to go for my run deepened my depression. And it’s true, I always feel better after a run. Within 20 minutes, my thoughts become more…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Pressure point As someone who’s been in and out of work since my youth in the 1980s, I can honestly say being unemployed today feels like I’m on probation and licence from prison. Not that I’ve been in contact with the criminal justice system. But I know people who have, who tell me about the pressure it is under. I’ve had spells of employment and unemployment including long-term sickness due to my anxiety disorder that I’ve had going back decades. Being on UC is extreme pressure and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone. The rules are obviously coming from the top, and the government has been hostile towards all claimants, sick…

AUTHOR ESSAY A window into the life of Derek Jarman The studio bears the bulk of the scars from Jarman’s time. The paint splatters, blemishes and marks change the feel of the room While its garden is well-trodden, Prospect Cottage’s interiors remained largely private after Derek Jarman, the artist and gay activist, died aged 52 in 1994 from an Aids-related illness. The photographs and essays in my book explain my experience of spending time at the Dungeness house at a transitional point in its history, revealing the care given to it by Jarman’s companion, Keith Collins, across the 24 years following Derek’s death before Collins sadly passed away. I let myself in to Prospect and looked around. Collins’s freshly washed shirt and towels, now two weeks dry, waited patiently to…

What with all the bent politicians and shit-filled rivers, it’s getting ever harder to feel proud of Britain. But there is one thing that we Brits seem to be excelling at in the post-Brexit era: idleness. Our level of productivity (the amount we actually produce per hours worked) is way behind that of workforces in other developed societies such as Germany, France and America. I don’t know about you, but this makes my heart swell. I think it’s wonderful that we are a nation of feckless feet-draggers who refuse to conform to the demented and futile work ethic that governs more conformist societies. It seems we put the hours in at work but don’t really do much with them. And why should we? Hard work offers very few assurances any…