Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/2/2024 i The Big Issue

Big Issue is built on work, literally and any other way you want. It’s the grain from which the whole thing has grown. Every person who has stood on the street to sell Big Issue has been working. They are also trading entrepreneurs – they buy for half the cover price and sell for cover price, that’s the income. They manage their micro-businesses. So much of a sense of value and self-worth comes from the agency and control work brings. Countless men and women who have moved out of dire situations with this job have repeated this message. I’ve proudly stood on many platforms and stages representing Big Issue with our vendor colleagues when this has been the core line. It’s quite something that 33 years after launching, the foundational…

What is the most unique Christmas tradition you keep? Odd and beautiful – about 30 years ago a Chinese neighbour gave us a big red paper lantern. She’s long dead now but the paper lantern is still – just about – in one piece. We hang it from the ceiling every year. Then pack it away as if it was the Dead Sea Scrolls. There’s something cheering about being able to keep something so fragile in one piece for so long. What do you think the world got right this year? Giving the Labour Party a massive landslide still feels like it could be a great opportunity. What has been the standout moment of 2024? Well it was pretty great being announced as the new Waterstones Children’s Laureate. All my…

Dogs are more than just pets; they are emotional support animals, mental health pillars, and sources of purpose for so many of us. For people experiencing homelessness, who often face significant challenges and institutional barriers, a loyal canine companion can be a lifeline. Beyond emotional support, dogs can also significantly improve mental health. Interacting with dogs has been shown to alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression. For those experiencing homelessness, many of whom may feel isolated and alone, the companionship of a dog can provide a much-needed sense of belonging. Caring for a pet can also provide a sense of purpose and responsibility. This can be particularly important for people who may struggle with feelings of hopelessness and a lack of direction amid the challenges of homelessness. By focusing on the…

What has been the standout moment of 2024? For me it was the TV debates ahead of the general election – in particular that first BBC debate. I was really nervous at the start but after the first question I realised I could do it and that I was a match for the other candidates. What’s your biggest failure this year? Trying to do it all and pushing through exhaustion which has resulted in me getting ill and unable to work at times. What do you think the world got wrong this year? Electing Trump and the general moves to the far-right in a number of countries across the world. And of course, failing to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. What is the oddest family Christmas tradition you keep?…

INTERVIEW Cindy Ngamba “The crowd went crazy when I stepped onto the podium,” says boxer Cindy Ngamba, picturing the moment she made history this year as the first athlete from the IOC Refugee Team to win an Olympic medal. “They were all cheering for me. They were supporting me and giving me love. I can still visualise it. I felt, ‘Wow, this is crazy. These are people who don’t know me, but they’re all happy for me.’ I will cherish that for the rest of my life.” This sense of total acceptance was unfamiliar to the Cameroonian-born refugee who arrived in Bolton aged 11. Throughout her life, she has faced worse opponents than in the boxing ring – teenage bullies, the Home Office, who repeatedly refused to give her refugee…

EMPLOYMENT Labour has revealed its plan to ‘Get Britain Working Again’. It’s an ambitious move, but safeguards must remain to protect our most vulnerable Labour’s long-awaited proposals to transform employment support, reduce the benefits bill and change the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) itself has been mostly welcomed – but charities have warned the government against using “scare tactics” to drive people into work. Benefit claimants need to be able to afford food and to put their heating on before they can engage effectively with Jobcentres, experts and activists have also told Big Issue. The ‘Get Britain Working’ white paper revealed on 26 November outlined plans for devolved and tailored employment support, with the Jobcentre system transformed into a new national jobs and careers service, focused on people’s skills…

The Black Cat cafe down a side street in Chelsea was at most times full of men eating food that would eventually destroy their health; big breakfasts off a greasy spoon menu. Doris befriended me because I was rough sleeping and my dishevelled and dirtied appearance brought out her humanity, 63 years ago. Surrounded by men from the roughest of places, doing the roughest of jobs, eating the worst of all food. Even now after all these years I can’t pass by the little Chelsea street, the area now gentrified into hundreds of millionaires’ rows, without having a kind of pang of memory. A memory of the beauty of humans helping humans. Doris feeding me for free and plasterers, scaffolders, plumbers and drivers tolerating a boy from a Dickensian London.…

DOGS OF BIG ISSUE Marlene was born on the streets of Macedonia and for the first nine months of her life was a stray, struggling to survive. “She was picked up and neutered, then put back on the streets,” says Marlene’s owner Ian Duff. “Two days later, she made her way back to the kill shelter – imagine, trying to get into a kill shelter! – then she was rescued.” Marlene was lucky to be picked up by an organisation called Dia’s Legacy, which rehomes street dogs in other parts of Europe. “I got her in November last year,” Ian smiles. And this week she’s starring on the cover of Big Issue. Now that’s an incredible journey. Ian Duff is a beloved Big Issue seller and coordinator in Bath. For…

Richard Curtis knows his way around a Christmas movie. As That Christmas comes to Netflix, he is leaning into what he does best – exploring love and community – while gently updating the Curtis playbook for his first venture into animation. Curtis was at the peak of his powers when his first seasonal hit, Love Actually, was released in November 2003. That Christmas film came off the back of a spectacular run of box office successes – Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary – and before that, TV greats Blackadder, Mr Bean and The Vicar of Dibley. Love Actually showed us what a rock star actor Bill Nighy is, established teenager Keira Knightley as a grown-up A-list star, and gave us Hugh Grant as prime…

I am not usually up to watch the sunrise. Decades of working nights has given me an aversion to the dawn chorus. But here I am, looking at a reddening and purpling sky as I change trains at Milton Keynes Central. I have been lured to a 6am alarm call by the offer of a day on the road with a mobile library. Darren has been a mobile librarian for almost four years and it is the greatest job he has ever had. It is about connection. As we pull into a retirement home, a woman comes straight out of the door, wearing a vivid red coat and moving at speed with her walking frame. She is eager for a new novel of bloody crime, having finished one that promises…

For Sebastian, Christmas Day 2023 was not what most people think of when they think of Christmas. He took some food from the prison canteen back to his cell. The meal in the canteen wasn’t where the action was. Sebastian made fritters with the chicken, cooked in his kettle. Others made rice, dumplings and fried chicken. “It wasn’t all that,” he says of his year inside, but adds: “Christmas Day was actually all right, not too bad. Everyone in the cells was making food.” This year, Sebastian will be plating up meals in a very different environment: Home Kitchen, a restaurant run by two-Michelin-starred chef Adam Simmonds, where diners in London’s well-heeled Regent’s Park will come for a festive treat. Opened in September and backed by organisations including Big Issue…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Not your average Joe I just read Sam Delaney’s article [Issue 1642, 18-24 November] and his claim that Joe Rogan’s (etc) worldview is “broadly conservative, laced with provocative humour and righteous anger” and that the content is aimed at “angry young men: socially isolated spoiled brats who don’t understand why guys aren’t allowed to be arseholes any more”. That sweeping generalisation and mischaracterisation really saddened me. Based on this assessment I’m wondering how many full episodes of Joe’s podcast Sam has listened to. I am a middle-aged, middle-class woman. I am a wife and mother of two teenage children, I have a degree in psychology, I run a business with my…

DOGS OF BIG ISSUEOffice MVP* Crumble is not your average Big Issue employee but that doesn’t stop her being a valued member of the Nottingham office. Her owner, Chris Hawke, has worked at Big Issue for eight years. “And to be quite honest, I’m waiting to be found out,” Chris laughs. “I have genuinely got imposter syndrome, because the skills you need to do this job, you can’t train for at university.” As a frontline sales development worker, Chris is a familiar face in the community, accompanied by the six-year-old fox red labrador on outreach in the city. We join the pair on their rounds today and after locking up the office, Chris explains why Crumble plays an important role. “Homeless people in general tend not to talk to me,”…

INTERVIEW: JAMES BLUNT James Blunt calls Big Issue from a forest somewhere in England, his cut-glass voice bouncing off the trees like a BBC presenter from the 1950s doing an arboreal outside broadcast. The shaky video call sits somewhere between The Blair Witch Project video diaries and covert footage of a reconnaissance mission. Blunt, formerly a captain in the British Army, has plenty of experience of the latter. As for the former, plenty of people knee-jerkingly frame his music and his success as some sort of horror story. Blunt, of course, darkly relishes the social media hatred of his music and has – ironically – turned skewering those who criticise his art online into something of an art form in itself. “Fundamentally, social media is an awful place,” he says.…

When I was 16 my dad was in jail, so I didn’t really see him. My mum got pregnant when she was 16, and had me when she was 17. So she was always a really, really young mum. She was an older sister type. She was still growing and becoming a young adult herself. I remember she set up her first hairdressers and when I was a kid I spent loads of time in the hairdresser showing my magic to all the customers. At school I was getting beaten up every day by these two guys. I was a very skinny kid, I probably weighed about five stone when wet, so the bigger kids could just throw me around. My grandpa used to pick me up from school on…

REVIEWS Acid-tongued meditations It’s hard to place Nate Lippens within an obvious lineage. His writing, which has been championed in the UK by Pilot Press, is fragmentary and exists in that weird liminal place where you’re not exactly sure if what you’re reading is memoir or fiction. Lippens’ latest book, Ripcord, is subtitled “A Novel” but with its close first-person narration, its constant asides and frequent essayistic journeys into popular culture, you’d be forgiven for believing it to be pure memoir. Lippens’ narrator is a middle-aged gay man who works at a bar in Milwaukee. With only a handful of close friends, he lives a fairly hand-to-mouth existence, lamenting his reluctant entry into middle-aged queerness. “I’m in an abusive relationship with time,” he says at the beginning of one chapter.…

There would be no point claiming that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1993 flop The Last Action Hero is secretly a cinematic masterpiece. But it does have one great joke: an action movie-obsessed kid falls asleep in a Shakespeare class and dreams about Hamlet if it starred Jack Slater, his favourite meathead actor. Cut to a minute-long trailer where Arnie plays the indecisive Dane as a hard-charging, cigar-smoking juggernaut, machine-gunning an aghast Polonius and throwing Claudius out of a stained-glass window. “To be or not to be?” wonders this not-so-fair prince. “Not to be.” Cue massive explosion. That mash-up of casual Hollywood violence and Shakespeare’s deathless verse came rushing back to me when watching Grand Theft Hamlet, a homegrown documentary about killer drama in a video game. Grand Theft Auto Online is a…

What’s your Big Issue for 2025? I would love to see people not caring about what others think about them. Social media has made it so that we are all performing for each other’s approval rather than being your true authentic self. It’s cute dressing up for the camera but when the doors close and nobody is around, what makes you you? That’s the only thing that really matters in life. What would your browsing history say about you this year? That I am very heavily invested in the success of Chelsea FC. Silverware is coming soon. Are you more or less hopeful than at the start of 2024? At the start of 2024 I wouldn’t have said I wasn’t hopeful, but I didn’t have a clear plan of what…

COLIN, 66 I was brought up in the East End of Glasgow and I lived there with my mother all my days. And then, when mum died, that was it, I did not really have anywhere else to go. I lived and cared for my mother all those years. I had a power-washing business with a friend and we did well at it to be honest, but he hurt his back and, by that time, I was in my sixties and we decided to call it quits. Then I was in the house for about a year and a half, bored out of my skull. I was not in that dark place, but it was getting darker. When you sit in that house, your confidence definitely goes down and you…