Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/5/2025 i The Big Issue

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Cover stars It was lovely to see the front cover on Big Issue by Ashton Whitaker [Issue 1662, 14-20 April], and well done for showing all of the entrants: VERY ENCOURAGING for the children and lovely for us. What a variety. I liked your comments, Chris Packham. I liked Nola’s flamingo [left]. I hope she remembers her gran with love. Helen Smiley Hidden talent I appreciate Big Issue’s need to appoint high-profile ambassadors so that the big issues of the day are highlighted. Big Issue’s five new ambassadors, Chris Packham, Michelle de Swarte, Mike Soutar, Kwajo Tweneboa and Rotimi Merriman-Johnson [Issue 1661, 07-13 April], fit the bill. I am sure…

During World War II there were 75,000 members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. The recruitment slogan was: “Join the Wrens and free a man for the fleet.” They carried out a wide range of essential roles, from air mechanics and radar operators to meteorologists and bomb-makers – and visual signallers like Dorothea – as well as being members of the Bletchley Park code-cracking crew. They were stationed both at home and overseas. The Wrens was originally established during the First World War and was restarted in 1939. Initially, 20,000 women volunteered, despite at the time there only being 1,500 available roles. This is partly due to the success of the recruitment poster that suggested women could take on Navy roles – but no women were allowed to serve on…

In 1787, freedom of speech was written into the Constitution of the United States. Today, we’re fighting a war over what we’re free to say, read and think. Here in the US, librarians have found themselves holding the lines on one high-profile front. Book banners are pushing at our libraries’ defences, eager to yank all those Judy Blume novels and erotic cake cookbooks off the shelves. Yes, book banning is wrong. But little has been written about just how ridiculous it is. While these self-righteous culture warriors are busy ‘saving’ young people from the titillating prose of Sarah J Maas, their little darlings are hopping on YouTube to sit at the feet of Andrew Tate. A quick Google search will serve up images too racy for the Kama Sutra. Wanna…

I am back to my traditional regime of touring around village halls, deconsecrated churches and public libraries. Despite usually performing in two to three towns a day, I always hope to arrive at my destination early enough to explore. Usually, if I find that there is more than 20 minutes on the platform when changing trains, I will walk out of the station and see how much I can experience in these few spare minutes. Over the last month I have enjoyed Tamworth and Kettering. I watch the flowers, see what grows in the cracks. I marvel at the boarded-up bingo halls that were once mighty Odeons entertaining the nation with war movies and then kitchen sink dramas of abortion and heartache, before the death knell of Carry on Emmanuelle.…

ROBYN WOOF, 38 I’ve been selling the magazine since September I think and I like it, I love my pitch. It’s busy and you get lots of different people because it’s in the middle of a uni campus, but it’s by a big park as well and it’s pedestrianised so there’s no traffic and lots of trees and green space. There are lots of people that stop for a chat and some people who stop for a chat aren’t buying the magazine. It’s one of the things I like about the job, just getting to speak to people that you would never normally speak to. I’ve got a card reader and that’s helped a lot because, just with the nature of the pitch, there are lots of people who are…

Each Wednesday morning I rise early and begin the process of writing my 800/900 word column. For 30 years I have been doing the same. That’s about 45,000 words a year, multiplied by 30 equals 1,350,000 words. One day I hope to go through this mountain of words and extract the most useful of them. Some, I remember, are precise and clever, thoughtful and clear. Others are ponderous, obscure, unworthy of a second read. And wrong. Yes, I have been wrong. I remember, although not swallowing the shite about weapons of mass destruction under the tutelage of Tony Blair’s thinking, I had my own beef, because Saddam Hussein had murdered the Marsh Arabs who lived in the flooded waters of Iraq, and I had had a great personal attachment to…

In a shuttered cafe in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, two soldiers are cooking lunch of grilled chicken and fermented cabbage salad, buckwheat and slices of dark Ukrainian bread. It’s the kind of comforting meal designed to keep men sustained after hard days and stressful nights at their frontline positions. Dmytro and Artem were both cooks before they volunteered for the army, motivated by the traumatic impact of Russian occupation on their home town. Dmytro had worked as a chef for high-end restaurants in Kherson and Kyiv, while 19-year-old Artem had only just qualified. Now they cook together for the 79th detachment of the State Border Guards, preparing hundreds of meals a day for their unit. They often pack food into large thermos containers which are delivered to forward…

Natasha Brown’s incisive second novel, Universality, begins with the kind of viral long-read article you might DM your mates, featuring an illegal lockdown rave by an anarchist collective squatting on a banker’s farm, an activist bludgeoned with a solid gold brick during the proceedings, and said banker – who wants his missing ingot back. Chaos, clicks and conspiracies ensue. Following publication of this feature, its formerly struggling author Hannah receives a level of success. Her former uni friends can barely conceal their surprise. They rely on their connections, plus help from mummy and daddy to fund their lifestyles, thriving off “the invisible privilege that everyone tried to pretend didn’t exist”. Brown smartly satirises the wheel of class oppression that is forever turning in British society. The novel’s focus shifts to…

Last month we said goodbye to director Ted Kotcheff. The veteran Canadian was prolific in both film and TV so the headlines zeroed in on his most recognisable works: First Blood (1982), the movie that introduced the world to traumatised one-man army John Rambo, and Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), a broad farce about two doofuses puppeteering a corpse. But I reckon the most indelible entry in Kotcheff ’s filmography is Wake in Fright (1971), a harrowing Aussie fever dream where a semi-respectable teacher descends into depravity during a stopover in a hardscrabble Outback town. Featuring genuinely upsetting footage from a real-life kangaroo cull, the movie’s status as an enduring cult object was secured when the original negative went missing for decades (a restored version premiered in Sydney in 2009). Some…

• What would you do if the lights went out, like in Spain and Portugal – if everything closed down? Go for a walk? Go native, and head for the hills, with an air rifle and a Bear Grylls book? Sit at a piano until you’d taught yourself the chord pattern for Werewolves of London? The day of darkness on the Iberian Peninsula reinforced one thing: we are all wholly, completely and embarrassingly in thrall to technology and, because of that, to the power that drives it. For a brief time, the images and stories coming out of Spain and Portugal were like extra scenes from The Last Of Us. The ghost of Cormac McCarthy was circling for source material for a sequel to The Road. In a curious quirk…

We never had any money growing up. Nobody did. I grew up in Hampton, which is the village from which Hampton Court Palace is named. So Hampton Court Palace was where I walked with the dogs every morning before school. My childhood was very happy because of my wonderful grandmothers – one of whom was an absolute darling; the other preferred my sister because she had my grandfather’s nose – and my maiden aunts, who spoiled me terribly. I loved school and couldn’t wait to start. I was super intelligent for my age as a child, reading the newspaper at three. My father recognised I had this ability and when I started to learn Latin, he was over the moon. I won a scholarship to Twickenham County School. I was…

The surge in food banks and food poverty projects in recent years has seen communities across the UK rise to fill the void created by austerity and the cost of living. Meeting rising hunger is not something that people do for the glory, but last month’s Voices to End Hunger Awards celebrated the grassroots activists innovating to tackle food poverty. Organised by political consultancy The Advocacy Team, the awards honoured Volunteers on Wheels – a service delivering supplies to food banks – and Neighbourly – a tech solution to getting food to people who need it – and more at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. Feeding Britain founder Andrew Forsey and Itofa Ivarah, who runs My9jaFoodBank to deliver nutritious meals to out-of-school children in Nigeria, were also among…

Publishers have given author Rutger Bregman over a million euros for his new book. He won’t see a penny of it. Most authors, to be clear, do not get seven-figure advances. But, evidently, there’s belief that Moral Ambition will be a hit. Having packaged the blue-sky ideas of universal basic income, the four-day working week and humanity’s fundamental goodness for the TED Talk-watching, airport-book-reading crowd, Bregman has his next big idea: reframing what we think of as success. And there’s a twist. Bregman has signed a contract which means every single pound and euro he earns from Moral Ambition must, legally, go to a foundation he’s set up, striving to change the world in the same way he hopes his readers will. Talking to Bregman is a lot like listening…

I first became aware of my body aged 14 after being told I had a ‘good figure’. Then someone else mentioned I was too skinny, but later, aged 15, a teenage boy at the running club I was a member of commented that my bum resembled a sack of potatoes. He’d said it to generate laughs while we ran hard for five miles during training. I didn’t find it funny; I went home and weighed myself. I felt ugly and fat and shameful. I immediately went on a diet, masking it as a bit of a joke to my family. In a bid to ‘watch her weight’, which was a pervasive ’80s narrative, my mum had labelled certain foods ‘good’ or ‘naughty’. Taking this as a guide, I consumed only…

Electronic producer and musician Mark Pritchard first met Thom Yorke in 2012 in Australia via his friend Clive Deamer, who was touring as Radiohead’s second drummer. Pritchard had already remixed Bloom for the band the year before, but it was in Sydney, where Pritchard had relocated, that collaborative ideas started to percolate. Yorke and other members of the band went to see Pritchard perform in a club. It was there that he became acutely aware of not only how big they were but also how deeply uncomfortable they were in the spotlight. “I met them as they came into the bar,” recalls Pritchard. “I could see people clocking him [Yorke] and then people started coming up. It was fine for a while, but then eventually it became impossible so we…