Tabla de contenidos para 8/19/2024 en The Big Issue

I like the French. I like their food, I like their climate, particularly further south, and, at the risk of pushing a thin line that bumps into clichéd national characteristics, I like their attitude. You’ve got to hand it to the French – whatever happens, they’ll be French about it. In the teeth of any storm, as any crisis builds, or anything that is being said, they’ll shrug and move on in their own inexorable way. Or park a load of tractors to prevent access to a major city. The Paris Olympics closing ceremony saw them build things around the performance of Phoenix, a band with limited international appeal, who peaked over a decade ago and who have songs that are not bothered by the idea of an anthem. Not…

COVER FEATURE “I’m one of those wacky wild swimmers,” he says. “Rain or shine, summer or winter, regardless of what country I’m in, I try and find someplace.” To justify the appeal, he draws on nature writer Roger Deakin’s description, that “you jump in with all your devils and leap out a giggling idiot”. “I highly recommend it,” Cave continues. “If you’re the kind of person that wakes up feeling a little despondent, go and jump into freezing water. It’s so fucking catastrophic to your nervous system that it recalibrates everything. It’s amazing.” This is not what people expect from Nick Cave. From raw post-punk roots he has grown into an icon of gothic otherworldliness, a modern-day prophet, with songs about love, loss and redemption delivered with a voice that…

REVIEWS Strange pinch of salt One of the great joys of speculative fiction is that it can tackle big themes without being as hamstrung by the minutiae of the everyday world as so-called realism. This week we have two cracking books that fall into this category, novels that create vivid, off-kilter worlds that live long in the memory. First up is Rachelle Atalla’s The Salt Flats. This is the third novel from the Scottish-Egyptian writer, following on from the highly acclaimed The Pharmacist and last year’s Thirsty Animals. Both those books demonstrated a writer willing to take risks in form and subject matter, and the same goes for The Salt Flats, a kaleidoscopic novel set in a remote wellness retreat nestled in the eponymous flats in the middle of the…

CULTURE INTERVIEW: FILM Pascal Plante Every generation has voiced the fear that technology desensitises us to real violence, but the social media age may have triggered a more mundane desensitisation we might all fall victim to. The number of stories, perspectives and desires we consume in truncated doses every day is so huge that our empathy responses start to switch off altogether when scrolling through the faces calling for our attention. We stop thinking the people in our phones are as real as we are. When this impulse combines with the current cultural craze of true crime, the relative safety from a dangerous world that a screen provides can lead us astray. Amateur detectives, spurred on by whatever echo chamber they inhabit, who want to feel involved or righteous, can…

BENEFITS Big Issue takes on DWP and wins after disabled woman wrongly accused of owing tens of thousands • Big Issue stepped in when a disabled woman was left in “disbelief ” after her benefits were stopped and she was wrongly accused of owing £28,000 in overpayments to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). In July, Michelle Burns was told she should never have been granted personal independence payment (PIP), six years after she was awarded it. Her PIP was stopped and the DWP said she would have to return all the money. Burns has a number of health conditions, including congenital dislocation of the hip and osteoarthritis. She has learning disabilities and went to a special needs school as a child. After Big Issue contacted the DWP, they…

I’ve been a refugee twice, I have to remind myself. I tend to forget the second time. I was a teenager then. “Leave the country, take early retirement, or die,” was what the chief martial law administrator, General Ershad, said to my father, who was renowned as an honest man, at the top of a civil service department under a military dictatorship that wanted to corruptly take aid money. The upshot was we left Bangladesh. Honesty at the time was not conducive to life expectancy. The first time was when I was much younger, during the civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh, splitting off from Pakistan. My father was jailed as a political prisoner and the rest of the immediate family fled the country, here to the…

At 16, I was at Millfield boarding school. I’d been to school in Bath, where I was born, and ended up on a scholarship to Millfield as a swimmer. It took three weeks to realise they took swimming way too seriously for my liking. So I gave up swimming, much to the despair of my parents, but then started playing rugby more seriously. I’d gone from being quite a big fish in a small pond at my previous school to being surrounded by people who were better than me at everything. It was daunting, but brilliant in terms of development, because you’re trying to catch up. The standard of coaching was unbelievable, the facilities are ridiculous, but you take it for granted at that age. In hindsight, I was so…

A giant butterfly swoops behind me, an avocet parades in front, and a penguin tells me to “protect the poles at the polls”. I am walking in the most flamboyant march I have ever attended. As I walked from Marble Arch, I came across two hand-painted placards of a horse in a forest fire and kingfisher wishing for cleaner rivers. The Restore Nature Now march was very well attended, very beautiful, very spectacular and given very little coverage. When I told some people about its delights, I got a few snippy social media comments from those people who do nothing so are free to criticise everything. One of the misconceptions about a march like this is that it is primarily protest. It is important to show the numbers of people…

Homelessness: Reframed is an exhibition which shares pieces inspired by the artists’ or others experiences of life on the streets The exhibition Homelessness: Reframed is currently running at the Saatchi Gallery in London. It features work from renowned artists including Marc Quinn, Rankin and Simone Brewster, alongside graffiti artist Opake, and one very special artist who comes with royal approval, Big Issue vendor Dave Martin. His piece, Sanctuary, is inspired by his experiences of homelessness. At the launch of the exhibition Dave said: “I think looking at all the other exhibits, mine included, makes me feel proud that I’m part of it. It nearly didn’t happen. I tried to go from my abstract geometric shapes into something more complicated, but last minute I got inspired by these symbols. “There’s a…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Let’s spread the love While naturally concerned with the current unrest and appalled by the remarks of people like Nigel Farage, Elon Musk and others, surely we all need to take a step back. We need to recognise the need to let go of our attachment to particular identities of geographical origin, religious tradition, class and all other kinds of labels and thus affirm our universal humanity. We need to recognise our core human values and virtues – of goodness, truth and beauty, and, of course, unity and love, which are or should be the values and joys of mature human beings that underpin everything. Charles Mugleston, Suffolk The great outdoors…

Charlie Hyman was 16 when he realised that football could be about much more than worshipping multi-millionaire players and enslavement to expensive TV subscriptions. “I was volunteering for my younger brothers’ local park team,” he says. “And I remember seeing the real value of football was building connection. I saw kids from all different backgrounds, some talented players, some just learning, some with disabilities, others who faced other barriers, coming together, building a sense of connection and growing as people. I think I knew from that early age that I wanted to find a way of widening that out to as many kids as possible.” In 2018, after graduating from university, Hyman founded Bloomsbury Football, a youth charity that aims to offer all young people a chance to experience the…

This artwork was created as part of Arthouse, a creative arts programme available to people accessing services offered by London charity Single Homeless Project. It recently featured in an Arthouse exhibition at University of Greenwich Galleries, exploring a variety of themes including identity and climate. “The ruby is a gemstone that encourages the wearer to see their strength and potential from the perspective of their own heart,” says Moriarty, describing some of the symbolism in the piece. “The ruby shining out from the mouth of death radiates the warmth of courage to make the choice to continue with life, as well as the courage to be comfortable with who you are inside.” Prints of this artwork can be ordered directly from Arthouse for £30, with all proceeds going directly to…

FASHION The unsettling nu face of nostalgia “This life as you now live and have lived it,” once wrote Nietzsche, “you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh.” As he philosophised angstily on eternal recurrence back in 1882, we can safely say the moustachioed German deep thinker didn’t specifically have trouser chains, or cargo pants, or Limp Bizkit in mind. But he may as well have done. Like a great many other tropes of the last rasp of flatulence escaping the dying corpse of 20th century culture that was nu-metal, they’re back, as if they never went away. Just take a look around. Amid a wider Y2K music…