Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/7/2025 i The Big Issue

These ethereal pictures look like mysterious underwater sea creatures but in fact they symbolise an urgent danger to them. They are fragments of (clockwise from top left) a tank top, patterned blouse, synthetic fur hood, Jersey boxers, coat lining and fishnet tights. “In 2012, I found a piece of material in a rockpool that changed my life,” says photographic artist Mandy Barker. “Mistaking this moving piece of cloth for seaweed, I started the recovery of synthetic clothing from around the coastline of Britain for the next 10 years.” Barker collected over 200 ‘specimens’ from 121 beaches across the country and created these images inspired by botanist Anna Atkins, who pioneered using a cyanotypes process to catalogue algae found in our waters, published in a groundbreaking book in 1843. The fashion…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Party’s over I think the government’s claim of wanting disabled people to ‘live with dignity’ is a far-off dream when you are bladder and bowel incontinent, as I am, and have to rely on your family to help you with the smallest things that other people take for granted. I would be happy just to be allowed to live. I am medically retired and have two lifelong, incurable, degenerative diseases: multiple sclerosis and severe arthritis, as well as neutropenia. I have also had a stroke and cannot walk more than a few steps. A friend of mine killed herself rather than go through another dehumanising assessment for PIP. Why do…

I left school very young with not many qualifications. School didn’t suit me at all – I wasn’t academic and if you have a creative brain, I don’t think you’re supported enough. If you’re also poor and from a big, Irish working-class family it’s even more tough. I had a lot of hand-me-downs and was on free school meals and I remember being picked on quite a lot. I wasn’t a confident kid – I was a bit of a loner. I wanted to leave home, leave school and get a job. I needed to earn money – I’m the youngest of nine children, so there wasn’t going to be anyone bailing me out. I’d also lived with so many people my whole life. So I wanted to get on…

After his Oscar-nominated turn in top-of-the-popes thriller Conclave – and all the attendant awards season hoopla – we’ve seen rather a lot of Ralph Fiennes recently. But you’ll see a whole lot more of him in The Return: his hero of yore Odysseus is introduced, zonked out and butt naked, after washing up on the shore of his homeland. Being unconscious on a Greek island beach in your birthday suit is usually a sign of hedonistic excess. But for this rather careworn Odysseus it is the culmination of two decades of exhausting graft. Every schoolkid hopefully still knows it took Homer’s warrior-king 10 years to fight the Trojan War, and then another decade to find his way back to his family on Ithaca via a gauntlet of sirens, witches and…

What was the big defining moment of your youth? Finding something that made me feel like life is worth living beyond whether things go as you planned or not, or if things go your way or not, or if you have many friends or not. When I found music around nine or 10, this calmness washed over me. I figured out that I’ll be settled for life. No matter what happens, I love writing songs. That’s a wonderful feeling to find when you’re struggling to fit in the world. It steered me on a very good path. Who were your biggest influences? Enya and Leonard Cohen. I often got very overwhelmed by a lot of noise. My mum would put on Enya and Cohen [pictured] because that’s really calm and quiet…

A dental surgery on wheels is hitting the UK’s streets to help people facing homelessness with their teeth. The team of dentists and nurses pop up near hostels to bring care directly to vulnerable people who may be suffering with pain in their teeth or who simply want to feel more confident with their smiles. It is run by charity Dentaid and funded by the Bupa Foundation, who work with charities including the Single Homeless Project to reach the people who need their help most. “It is a pretty comprehensive dental surgery. We can provide X-rays. We can do tooth extractions. We can do fillings,” says Neil Sikka, director of dentistry at Bupa. Inside, the van looks much like an average dental surgery – the key difference is that it…

Last month Health Secretary Wes Streeting said there was an “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions. His comments on BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg came in the context of impending benefits cuts, so he was less addressing the rise in conditions, more justifying steps the government wants to take to reduce the benefits bill and get people back to work. We spoke to Dr Alastair Santhouse, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London, who has literally written the book on the subject, No More Normal: Mental Health in an Age of Over-Diagnosis. Santhouse believes psychiatry is at a crossroads. More people are seeking support but health budgets have not increased. In the last five years, the number of 17- to 19-year-olds with a probable mental health disorder has risen…

FOOD BANKS ‘Frustrated, angry, exhausted’: Food bank volunteers forced to ‘throw out food donated by supermarkets’ By Isabella McRae Big Issue Senior Reporter Food banks are throwing out donations from supermarkets and retailers, often because it is “expired” or “nutritionally inadequate”, new research has revealed. Environmental experts at charity Feedback Global found that 91% of food aid workers have had to throw out donated food, mostly because it is “damaged” or “inedible”. Some food bank workers reported “bizarre” items being donated. This includes six turkeys frozen together, 10kg of crème fraîche and new experimental flavours of mayonnaise. One worker spent £375 on carpet cleaning after a donation of rotten bananas. Jessica Sinclair Taylor, deputy director at Feedback Global, said: “Despite the heroic efforts of food aid employees, food donated by…

Last week, when due in parliament at a very early hour, I stayed over in a hotel in Fulham, South-West London. This was where, as a 10-year-old, after the slums of Notting Hill and a Catholic orphanage, I arrived with my family to live in a block of council flats. It was here that I realised that I was a little proletariat. A worker, delivering meat and then paraffin as a means of beefing up the meagre family income. But a worker also in that I was like all my compatriots in labour, in that I served only one purpose: and that was to serve the interests of the propertied and the better classes. Managers in shops directed you in the harsh tones of the recently finished war; as if…

Things tend to happen to István. The 15-year-old protagonist of Booker-nominated David Szalay’s fifth novel, Flesh, has a habit of becoming embroiled in dramatic events well beyond his control or understanding. Within a few pages of this sure-footed, fast-moving novel, Hungarian schoolboy István is enticed into a sparky sexual relationship with a saucy older neighbour. He surrenders – initially reluctantly – to the 42-year-old’s appeals, imagines he’s in love, then gets caught up in a violent struggle with the neighbour’s husband which leads to a murder charge. He neither initiated the affair nor deliberately killed the victim but he doesn’t have much to say in his own defence, so it’s a confused shrug and off to a young offenders’ institution for three years. Fifty pages in, he’s out of the…

A cancer diagnosis is a distressing event in anyone’s life, triggering a whirlwind of appointments and gruelling, life-saving treatments. Imagine confronting that without the stability and security of a home. A new pilot project from the East of England Cancer Alliance and Anglia Ruskin University is installing specially trained ‘health navigators’ in homeless hostels in Cambridge, Peterborough, Wisbech and King’s Lynn to try to make cancer more survivable. The idea is that navigators build up a rapport with people experiencing homelessness and help them register for GPs and attend basic health checks and screenings. They book and accompany people to appointments, explain in understandable terms what clinicians are telling them and also advocate for healthier lifestyle choices and organise health workshops. The project is still in its early stages after…

Seeing my mother, Simpsons- colour jaundiced in a hospital bed thanks to alcohol, wasn’t the wake-up call that stopped me from drinking every day; I served another four years after that. It didn’t occur to me to try sobriety after oversleeping for my uncle’s funeral following a midweek cocaine binge. Demotions at my dream BBC job, a canyon of debt, fist-fights I’d forget, and self-harm were not enough to convince me that maybe me and booze were not meant to be. But after coughing up a violet collage of cheap red wine and blood on a Monday morning just over four years ago, aged 30, I did it. I stopped. It was the defining decision of my life. My upbringing was comfortable in that my parents were and still are…

My name’s Emily-May Stephenson. I’m 18 and living with multiple chronic health conditions. I write this from my bed, to which I am currently bound. While we’re all aware of recent decisions regarding cuts to disability benefits, most do not fully grasp how anyone can become disabled at any time – I certainly didn’t. I was an active and healthy child. Aged six, I watched Matilda the Musical in London and walked out of the theatre announcing to my parents that I wanted to play Matilda. After years of working incredibly hard, I landed the role aged nine. Off I went with a comically large suitcase, temporarily leaving home a few years earlier than most. After my run in Matilda, I was cast in the West End production of Annie,…

I don’t recall the road to Mandalay as vividly as the journey from it. In 2012, my friend and I were traipsing around Southeast Asia. Myanmar was just reemerging as a travel destination after years of a widely held boycott to stop the tourist dollar going into the military dictatorship’s pockets. Mandalay was our first stop. We did some temple-spotting, walked across the 1.2km-long, teak-built U Bein Bridge and watched a group come together to fell a particularly tricky tree. There was a boat trip across the Irrawaddy River to Mingun, and the beautifully ornate, pearl-white Hsinbyume Pagoda, a 90-tonne bell and immense 50-metre-high stupa. Climbing to the top, you have to be wary of the giant cracks caused by an earthquake in 1839. On departure we arranged an overnight…

“Growing up, I had to learn to instinctively read people,” says regular Street Art contributor Cassisa. “I could tell someone’s mood from the sound of their footsteps, I felt I could sense when a person was potentially dangerous, or if I could trust them. I learned to avoid danger, and to find protection from people I could trust. “This has been a major factor in my development as an artist. I am both a fantasy artist as well as a portrait artist, and lately I have been concentrating more on my portraits. My ability to read people has now integrated itself into my work, which is why I can capture a ‘presence’ of someone. When I paint or draw a portrait, I don’t feel it’s finished until I sense a…

I genuinely thought that the pandemic would finish it off, yet The Apprentice rumbles on regardless, wheezing through its 20th year like a burnt-out exec coming up to retirement. By now, it really should be playing golf and shouting at clouds. Everything about the format is comically redundant, including the ultimate goal – becoming Lord Sugar’s business partner. Surely that was never a real prize in the first place. But now it would be career suicide, like volunteering to be the Smithers to Mr Burns. Anyway, I’ve been ignoring it for years, but I decided I would dust off my Amstrad VHS player and watch it, just to keep it company. But it turns out I needn’t have bothered, because this series is doing really well in the ratings, even…

DAVID POPA, 19 I started selling Big Issue last year. My first day was on 6 February. I’m from Romania but I spent some of my childhood in Spain, so I’m fluent in Romanian and Spanish. When I came to the UK, I did not have work, so my friend helped me register with Big Issue. He told me that it is very good to sell the magazine. Sometimes it is good on my pitch. Of course, there are other times when it’s not so good. I like it because it means I get to learn and improve my English. It helps me make some money and I also have made friends here through selling Big Issue. The Big Issue team helped me find a good spot to sell the…

The cost to society of alcohol-related harm is £21.5 billion a year; the equivalent for drug use is £10.7bn. These are significant costs – both financially and in terms of lives impacted – so positive steps should be celebrated. In January we reported on The Thistle, a groundbreaking initiative in Glasgow that provides drug users a safe place to inject with clean equipment and nurses on hand. This revolutionary change in thinking is to treat addiction as a public health matter rather than criminalising addicts. Since its opening on 13 January up until last month, 168 people had used the service over 1,435 visits. There were 17 medical emergencies but each was resolved without fatalities. Scotland is the drugs death capital of Europe, with an average of 277 deaths per…