Table of contents for 7/15/2024 in The Big Issue

There’s a man I meet sometimes when I’m out walking the dog. This is not a Deacon Blue song. He lives a street or two away. I don’t know his name and our conversations are brief. There is a nod, or a wave, and on we go. He’s probably well into his 70s, and dresses well, always wearing a formal white shirt. He walks neither too quickly nor too slowly, his hands tucked behind his back. He never seems concerned by any weight of worry and he always has a contented look on his face. In fact, he’s one of the most zen people I’ve encountered. The other evening we happened to stop at the top of the path leading into the local park. He made a bit of a…

CARDBOARD CITIZENSMORE THAN ONE STORY 2/9 A new series of short films exploring why people become homeless has been made by Cardboard Citizens, a charity that uses drama to transform the lives of those with lived experience of homelessness, in association with Black Apron Entertainment. Each film is written and performed by people who have experienced homelessness and can be watched at bigissue.com. This week’s film is Sabbir at the Estate Agents, written by Sonali Bhattacharyya and performed by Mansa Ahmed. It is told from the perspective of 15-year-old Sabbir, a thoughtful Bangladeshi boy who moved to East London with his mum when he was a toddler. Now, he has to act as translator as his mother tries to find a home for them. Sitting in an estate agency, Sabbir…

REVIEWS Feast your eyes Variety is the spice of life, and this week we have two books that have virtually nothing in common, except that the writers are expert in making readers keep turning the pages. First up is The Eyes Are The Best Part by debut author Monika Kim. Set in California, the story is narrated by Ji-won, a Korean-American student who’s struggling at college, as well as at home and with her friends. The book opens when her father has just left her mother for another woman, and Ji-won’s umma is struggling to cope. Her mother has been an intimidating presence in the lives of Ji-won and her little sister Ji-hyun, but now she’s falling apart in front of their eyes. But surprisingly quickly, Ji-won’s mother starts dating…

I like it in Cardiff but it is very expensive, and especially now I’m struggling with my rent because my landlord put it up. I pay £1,295 per month, which is very hard for me. It went up from £1,095 a month recently. My landlord wants to sell his property. He says I have to leave the house in July and he will forget about the arrears I owe. Some of my customers know about this and they have asked me if I have found anywhere else to live. They’re also trying to help me by asking friends if they have anything for me. But there is no news yet. It has also been difficult to keep up with bills. My husband works at a car wash but doesn’t earn…

In our political classes, all roads lead to Oxford I love causing Oxford students to giggle. When I speak at the Oxford Union I always tell the next generation of students the story of the first time I came to Oxford at the age of 14. I arrived in handcuffs and was not going to an S&M party but to Oxford Detention Centre, for a ‘short, sharp shock’. Mixing humour with serious social and political observations is my intention. With the ascendancy of Keir Starmer and his chancellor of the Exchequer, Oxford again came to mind. For they are both Oxford bods, causing me to do a simple bit of research. Of the last nine PMs, seven have been through the Oxford privilege mill. Only Gordon Brown (Edinburgh) and John…

I went to boarding school at eight. My parents were in Malaysia and Hong Kong, so they were 10,000 miles away. It probably made me who I am now. Whether it’s a good thing in the world? I’m not sure. But it provided me this incredibly intense opportunity of education. You develop a real sense of a different type of identity because you’re spending all your time with other boys your age. There are no women there. No parents. My younger self was very driven, very self-conscious. I passionately wanted to live a life on a very grand scale. I was obsessed with huge figures. So Tolstoy as a novelist. Wittgenstein as a philosopher. Alexander the Great as a general. Lawrence of Arabia as an explorer, a freedom fighter. Charles…

I was delighted by the outcome of the general election. If I was an intelligent and rational grown-up, my response would now be about hope and optimism. And healing the wounds of division that have afflicted this country over the past 14 years. But I am not, so I can’t respond that way. Because the last 14 years were so painful, so shameful and so damaging to us all that the wounds can’t just heal overnight. In the days that followed Labour’s victory, the better Keir Starmer did, the more horrendous the past 14 years seemed: every astute appointment, every smart policy announcement and every straightforward, encouraging, no-nonsense assessment of the national predicament that this new government delivered, just made me angrier with their Conservative predecessors. It was all so…

The recent general election happened to be the first to be held in July since 1945. Taking a cartoonist’s perspective, the 1945 and 2024 elections had other similarities. Both ended with crashing Tory defeats and a consequent Labour landslide. However, thanks to polling, today’s cartoonists were already expecting Labour’s gargantuan victory. In 1945 it came as a complete surprise to virtually all the cartoonists. After all, Churchill was immensely popular, having been given the credit for keeping Britain afloat during the dark days of 1940 and for having just led the country to victory over Germany. He was cheered by huge crowds on his election tour across the entire country. What cartoonists did not know was that the public would applaud Churchill but vote against him. Unlike today, there were…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue RE: ELECTION REACTIONS Labour got in thanks to Reform voters splitting the Tory vote. Ironically millions of people becoming more right-wing led to a Labour government, thanks to first-past-the-post. Labour have a huge majority and potentially the support of Liberal Democrat MPs to help pass as much progressive legislation as possible over the next four years; budgets that actually help people. Matthew Coussell, Facebook Well, the Conservative party have been screwing things up for the past 14 years so Keir Starmer’s got a lot to fix. Maybe he can restore people’s faith that not all politicians are lying scum and show that he can put the British people first. After all,…

Regular Street Art contributor Howard’s latest is one of a series of abstract pieces he has created in A2 size, by placing together shapes cut from coloured card. “I make them quite quickly,” he says, “each taking about half an hour. I then photograph each design, and then use the shapes again to make a new picture. I’m interested in colour and shape, and this technique makes it easy to explore how to produce a satisfying abstract work. “None have titles, but one or two make me think of things like coffee pots, Cubism or group interactions and identities.”…

REVIEW Look out! Here come the Spider-Men Here’s a Peter Parker poser: who is your favourite Spider-Man actor? With apologies to Nicholas Hammond, who gamely pulled on the red-and-blue tights in the short-lived 1970s TV show, it is probably one of the more recent big-screen Spideys. So Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire or maybe even Andrew Garfield. If those three web-slingers stretching back to Spider-Man in 2002 seem surprisingly fresh in the mind, it is probably because they all appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home in late 2021 thanks to multiverse shenanigans. The result of that Spideypalooza team-up made just under $2 billion at the global box office at a time when Covid still felt like a genuinely existential threat for cinema. There was lots going on in No Way Home,…

JAZZ There’s a place for everyone at Worthy Farm If sartorial bias is anything to go by, Shania Twain’s easy country anthems, Charli XCX’s pacey hyperpop and The Last Dinner Party’s intellectual indie rock divided and conquered at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. Novelty cowboy hats and touches of Charli’s signature lime green encircled the main stages and one of the many vintage clothing stores on site had a rack entirely dedicated to The Last Dinner Party’s notorious baroque neo-gothic style. Huge audiences drawn by Sugababes and Avril Lavigne, leading to additional crowd-control measures being put in place, demonstrated an insatiable appetite for pop nostalgia. However it was electronic music, traditionally relegated to smaller stages and later time slots, which truly reigned supreme at Worthy Farm this year. Orbital invited Tilda…