Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/22/2025 i The Big Issue

Pole vaulter Armand Duplantis is some pup. He is a global sports icon, the closest to proper world-striding recognition in athletics since Usain Bolt. He is effortless in what he does. His winning world championship jump was 6m 30cm, 30cm more than second place! That could take him over your house, if you live in a two storey. He looks like a movie star, he keeps jumping higher than any man who has ever lived and he makes pole vaulting very cool. The only thing that could derail Duplantis is if, for some reason, he signed for Manchester United. That would soon take the wind of his sails and make him very, very average. He wouldn’t be able to clear a regular high jump with a pole after time there.…

“I’m in rehearsals for this Beatles film. But I’ve got a week off, so…” Harris Dickinson is in the middle of an intensive spell at Beatles school when he welcomes Big Issue to his office in East London. The actor is preparing to play John Lennon – alongside Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan – in four Fab Four films from director Sam Mendes showing the story of the biggest band in history from each individual Beatle’s perspective. He’s got blisters on his fingers that tell their own story. Dickinson is playing a lot of guitar. He loves it, though. And off-screen, a band is forming among the lead actors. “We’re trying... We’re trying,” he grins. “We’re doing a lot of music. It’s been an incredibly enriching, challenging and…

In 1981 in the east end of Glasgow, there was no call for maracas made of papier-mache. “The idea of ‘community art’ was a big thing at the time, where an artist would come in to paint a brick mural and the members would maybe get to paint a brick,” says Jamie Tracey, recalling the days when the would-be artists of Cranhill painted themselves a better future. “We didn’t want a big set of giant papier-mache false teeth or maracas in the park. We wanted to experience the stuff the artists had learned at university. We wanted to be taught how to do it, rather than have someone else doing it and asking us to fill in a wee bit here and there.” Cranhill Arts was established in 1981, a…

There’s something about an understated prose style in fiction that can make a novel more immersive in my eyes. Compared to overblown descriptive passages or soap-opera plotting, a more subtle narrative draws the reader into the simply evoked world with greater power, and that’s certainly the case for this week’s books. American author Helen Phillips has written six novels, half of which have had a speculative edge. This is also true of Hum, a type of domestic drama in a near-future dystopia that is scary in its similarity to today. In order to make some money after losing her job, May agrees to an experimental face surgery that makes her unidentifiable to the totalitarian, machine-run government. She blows her money on a trip to the Botanic Garden with her husband…

IAN DUFF, 59 I’ve been doing this for 16 years. It’s a great magazine. I’ve got my regular customers who support me. But sometimes, people come up and say ‘Oh, I haven’t bought one in a while, is it still a pound?’ It wasn’t a pound even when I started! Before Big Issue, I was running pubs for a living, and then my company went into liquidation overnight. So I became homeless. I’d been a chef, done chef work all over the world. I trained here, but then I did sauces for six months in France, so I know how volatile chefs can be! You learn very quickly, it’s very rigorous. If you did something wrong, you’d get a pan thrown at you. But it’s also what you make of…

FOOD BANKS Revealed: Millions of disabled people went to a food bank last year as Labour plotted benefit cuts Three in four people who used a food bank last year were disabled, damning new figures shared with Big Issue have found, while the government planned to slash disability benefits. Trussell, Britain’s largest network of food banks, has published a landmark report showing that 14 million people faced hunger last year due to lack of money. The vast majority (79%) of people who turned to food banks were either disabled or lived with a disabled person. By comparison, 38% of people across the UK live in a disabled household, suggesting significant overrepresentation of disabled people and their families at food banks. Nicole, a disabled 31-year-old who works at a Trussell food…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Enough is enough “Another one.” My exact words reading the article about the disgraceful treatment of wrongly convicted Gareth Jones [Issue 1682, 01-07 September]. The words “learning difficulties” buzzed in my head. How many more people with learning difficulties will be fitted up, abused and scapegoated, manipulated, coerced, cornered and bamboozled, seen as an easy target for a lazy, incompetent and rotten to the bone legal system? The life-long miscarriage of justice faced by another man with learning difficulties, Peter Sullivan, for a murder he never committed was only quashed this spring after 38 years of life were stolen from him. It served us another reminder that the ghosts of…

At the end of a prison sentence, regardless of their crime, all prisoners need to find their place back in society. It’s preferable to know that ex-offenders have had an opportunity to consider a future more positive than being drawn back into the spiral of reoffending. Penned Up, a new drama by Suffolk-based playwright Danusia Iwaszko, draws on her 17 years of teaching in men’s prisons. In her experience, the majority of men she’s taught share similar patterns of past struggles that have shaped their lives, the most prominent being a combined lack of good role models and self-confidence. She has witnessed students opening up and developing skills they were unaware of, tackling subject matter they hadn’t previously explored and opening up ways of seeing themselves in a new light.…

Some would have you believe that queer histories can only really be written about from the late 19th century onwards, when words like ‘homosexual’ first appear. But spend a little time in dusty old archives and a very different reality soon emerges. Regardless of the words used to describe same-sex attraction or gender non-conformity, you’ll find a plethora of histories that detail queer tragedy and persecution, yes, but you’ll also discover stories of joy and love, of hope and of belonging – long before Oscar Wilde arrives on the scene. With this in mind, I spent the past several years looking at the Georgian era (1714 to 1837). It’s a period sandwiched between the indecisive Stuarts and the often-moralistic Victorians, both of whom tend to hog the historical spotlight. Yet…

Morecambe is a very friendly place. Waiting for the pedestrian crossing to give me permission to cross, a man approaches me with a beaming and open face. I am here for the poetry festival and presume I have met him somewhere before. Usually, that is how I interact with people who I don’t recall, so I am friendly to strangers. At times, they have had to explain to me, “By the way, we don’t know each other, we’ve just come to your gigs a few times.” I don’t think Chatman even knew me from that. He was just convivial. Wrapped up in his anorak, he couldn’t believe I was just in my T-shirt on the seafront.“You must be chilly.” “Oh no, not yet.” He feels the skin of my forearm.…

Watching an increasing amount of people in the UK becoming incensed and angry about refugees coming by boat across the English Channel is deeply worrying. The large demonstration in London the other weekend underlined the fear and hatred that is being engendered in some quarters by these arrivals. Around 180,000 have arrived by this method since records began in 2018, though compared to other European countries this may not seem so significant. But the important thing is the perception and the questions that it raises, the sense that government has no way of making the UK’s borders safe. It makes people who would not normally get angry and upset become incensed at what looks like government failure. It joins other failures that people are feeling about government. It’s failure to…

In the past two years we have seen a rise of 82% in the number of people coming out of prison homeless – the highest number since record keeping began five years ago. Recent MOJ data showed we are now seeing more than 1,000 people a month come out of prison homeless, a 39% rise in the past year alone. There are a number of reasons for this dramatic increase. Firstly, it’s important to note that over the past two years we have also seen an increase in the total number of people being released from prison, as the current and previous governments sought to deal with the prison capacity crisis. However, the number of people leaving prison has only increased by 38% in the last two years, so proportionally…

My 16-year-old self wasn’t confident. I wasn’t sure of myself. I was quite a quiet child, and I’d been an only child until I was 10, when my sister came along. And so I was used to my own company. But I was never lonely, because I always had music. If you’d met me, I was the sort that might have got bullied in the playground. But most of the boys at our school were actually very nice, and music was considered quite cool. I was terribly shy with girls, because I’d been to a boys’ school, and you didn’t meet many girls in those days if you were at a boys’ school. Perhaps that’s something to do with why I didn’t get married until my mid-30s. But it was…

If you’ve seen almost any action movie classic you’ll be familiar with the self-surgery trope. Usually it means your Jason Bourne or John Wick or whomever has been injured and must briefly lay low to patch themselves up. It’s an efficient way of showing that while our hero may be physically vulnerable they are mentally strong enough to do what needs to be done. For one-man army John Rambo, it’s an occupational hazard. In First Blood (1982), the handle of his wicked combat knife conceals a fishing line so the combat veteran can sew up a deep gash on his arm. In the more bombastic Rambo III (1988), he cauterises an abdominal shrapnel wound by sprinkling it with gunpowder and putting a burning stick to it. Set in the remote…

I’ve just returned from Australia, lured by Brisbane’s BIG-SOUND festival, a showcase for emerging Australian and New Zealand acts, and the prospect of discovering some new glimmers of musical brilliance. All genres can be found here; from sounds deeply rooted in First Nation traditions to artists wearing their baggy and Britpop influences firmly on their sleeves. Across three nights and 18 venues packed into a strollable section of the city known as Fortitude Valley, over 130 acts performed 30-minute sets for locals and music industry delegates, hoping, like me, for their jet lag to be overridden by goosebumps. For me, that moment came while watching Australian singer-songwriter Georgia Knight wrap up her brilliant set, performing songs from her forthcoming album Beanpole by singing languidly into a red rotary phone, accomplishing…