Innholdsfortegnelse for 8/18/2025 i The Big Issue

All part of the masterplan Is there a moment? There are many moments, the entire thing has been moments since it was announced. But if there is one MOMENT, it’s this. Noel, looking taken aback by the scale of it all, says he’s delighted there are so many young people present. And there are, so many. And then he says, if you ever wondered what it’s like to sing this song with tens of thousands of your fellows, then here we go. And the piano for Don’t Look Back in Anger hammers in on a clear, balmy Edinburgh night and then, well, it’s just about everything. Everything about the Oasis comeback shows has been an exercise in scale. Some 14 million applications for 1.4 million tickets. A payday of £50-£100…

Peter Jeffrey is a Glasgow-based artist with a longtime practice in observational drawing, figure studies and traditional illustration, all carried out from his home studio in Govanhill. Due to a complex chronic health condition that causes extreme sensitivity to electromagnetic frequencies, Jeffrey has lived in near-complete physical isolation for close to a decade. He cannot be around phones, wifi or most electronic devices, which has made it incredibly difficult for him to stay connected to the outside world. “This is a drawing of my friend Bee who also models for me,” says Jeffrey. “It was based on an ink portrait I’d previously done of her. It was created using a combination of ink and soft-core colour pencils. After many years of only working in monochrome I’ve now discovered the joys…

As Steel, Zack George is one of the most formidable Gladiators on the BBC’s hit reboot series. But his definition of strength has changed. In April, his son Leo died after being born prematurely. On social media George posted: “It’s hard to put into words the pain of losing a child. The grief is heavy, and it’s taken so much strength just to begin piecing ourselves back together. Our beautiful Leo taught us the true meaning of strength, courage and bravery in his 13 precious days with us.” Inspired by the memory of Leo, George has set up a charity with his wife Samantha called Leo and Friends, to support other families who find themselves in a similar position. To raise funds and awareness, George is taking on the 13…

EDUCATION Mark was homeless and living in his car. Now he’s just graduated and is working to help others like him By Liam Geraghty Big Issue Deputy Digital Editor Mark Eaton-Lees has just graduated from Swansea University with a first-class degree – it’s a far cry from the spell he spent homeless and living in the back of his car. Eaton-Lees, 47, from Wolverhampton, was working as a transport manager back in 2014 when he decided to leave his home in Chorley, Lancashire, to pursue his dream of running a scuba diving centre in Devon. But when it came to moving into his new rented room, he learned the property was no longer available. With no alternative accommodation and limited savings, a hotel wasn’t an option and he was forced…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @thebigissue /bigissueUK @bigissue RE: ASYLUM HOTEL PROTESTS ARE SPREADING [Issue 1679, 11-17 August] • There is a strong groundswell of local opinion against these hotels and there are plenty of ordinary people involved in organising and turning up to protest them. Local politicians (particularly Reform) are trying to make some hay by getting involved. There are also far-right organisations who turn up, either because they like feeling like they’re on the popular side for once or to start violence. The article says, “This is not just concerned local mums” and sure, it’s not just them. But it certainly is them as well as lots of other people who are in no way far…

At the age of 16 I was mostly thinking about boys, of course, and basketball. I was a Lakers freak way before it was trendy. I was the oldest of seven. My real father left when I was five. And then my mother remarried when I was seven. We had no money. They did a great job for us even though we didn’t have much. So I grew up in a pretty normal, dysfunctional family. Barbecues, baseball, camping… my parents made a little bit go a long way. My stepfather had his problems, but he took care of us. I used to buy 45 records with my babysitting money. And I listened to the radio. That’s how I got most of my music. And California radio at the time when…

On Monday 4 August, the UK-France treaty targeting illegal Channel crossings came into force. Home secretary Yvette Cooper did the usual media rounds senior government ministers are wheeled out for during big policy announcements, sitting down with the BBC, Sky and other legacy broadcasters. What was different this time was her parallel push onto social media. Not repurposed clips from TV but planned interviews for three different audiences: Simple Politics (with 880,000 followers on Instagram), Politics UK (367,000 followers on X), and the Daily Mail’s TikTok account (2.3 million followers). It’s one of the first noticeable times a senior government figure has included social media accounts in what has been a historically closed media round for traditional outlets. The move comes as the government plans to lower the voting age…

Is there anything more romantic than a mix tape? You can keep your candlelit dinners, your meetcutes, your trips to Paris. Just give me a knackered cassette featuring Joy Division album tracks and Pixies B-sides lovingly recorded off scratchy vinyl, and send it to me with a long letter about nothing. Wow, this scenario feels like such a relic of the past that I may as well be writing about cave painting, but back in the ’90s that’s actually how my husband of almost 30 years won my heart. He bought my fanzine, we started a correspondence, he made me tapes scrawled with tiny, cramped writing in biro, and when his band came to town the rest was history. So how could I resist a drama about two star-crossed, music-obsessed…

It’s a Thursday. It’s lunchtime. And we are in the pub. There could be no more appropriate location to talk with Daniel Mays about his role in the screen adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestseller The Thursday Murder Club – a book that features more references to pub lunches per chapter than any piece of crime fiction in literary history. The book is a phenomenon. It has sold 10 million copies worldwide, spawned three sequels (with another to follow next month) and copycats galore. These stories of septuagenarian sleuths are popular for a reason. Osman can turn a phrase, he knows all the key ingredients for a compelling whodunnit and has created central characters that are smart, funny, quirky and believable – an odd quadruple of crime fanatics quietly raging against…

Astronaut Jim Lovell died this month, aged 97, one of the last of the original pioneers of space exploration. He missed out on Nasa’s early Mercury missions but was selected for the Gemini programme, and then the Apollo missions which saw space travel go from brief suborbital hops to aiming for the moon in only a few trips. The monumental scale of these missions has been brought to new light by Cheshire-based digital archaeologist Andy Saunders, who has painstakingly restored film from the missions (using no AI) that had been sitting in a frozen vault for decades. He tells us how spaceflight’s early milestones compare with the next generation of the space race today. BIG ISSUE: Is ‘digital archaeologist’ a fair job title? ANDY SAUNDERS: As well as an author,…

Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain garnered worldwide praise on its release last year. Its paperback release should do wonders for its readership: a short but tightly packed book, Greenwell’s novelistic voice is best read on an underground train back from work or on long summer breaks. Don’t be surprised to see Small Rain becoming a sensation. That’s not to say that the reading is all plain sailing. Our unnamed protagonist has been admitted to hospital in his native Iowa with a condition his doctors cannot explain. Something life-threatening and mysterious forces a period of intense reflection from the hospital bed. Given that our bed-ridden host is a writer and teacher, there is much to please the aesthete here. There are plenty of reflections on half-remembered bits of poetry. There are also…

Ratified on 4 August 2025, the UK-France treaty creates a pilot ‘one-in, one-out’ scheme for small boat arrivals. Under the agreement, anyone entering the UK illegally by small boat can be detained and returned to France, while an equal number of migrants who apply through a new legal route (with full documentation and security checks) will be eligible to come to the UK. The government says this will deter dangerous crossings and disrupt smuggling gangs; critics say it risks sidestepping asylum obligations and doesn’t address the root causes of migration. The treaty runs until June 2026, with both countries pledging regular reviews. @sophiassocials…

The summer holidays are drawing to a close and the new university term is just around the corner. It’s not just students who wish they had more of those seemingly endless days. I certainly do. I’ve been carving out more for myself, though not entirely out of choice. Like many Gen Zers, I woke one morning and my body literally refused to get me out of bed. I was burnt out – badly – and no amount of caffeine or iron tablets was going to get me into work. I had no choice; I was signed off. Serendipitously, at the time of my micro-retirement, my dad was actually retiring. He suggested that, rather than rotting in bed, I “slow down” with him – though ‘slow’ was the wrong word for…

MARTIN MCKENZIE, 43 I’m established now. I’ve been on this pitch nearly eight months. I’m getting a lot of regulars. The locals are buying off me, as well as the staff from all the offices. I’m right in the middle of it all. It’s always busy at lunchtime here too. I love it, I should have been here a long time ago when I was previously selling Big Issue. I would have been on my feet a lot quicker. My regulars buy me food and some customers even put the money straight in my bank account so I can buy more magazines. The only thing is because of all the skyscrapers here it is a bit of a wind tunnel! As well as my living costs, I’m saving up to…