Table of contents for 9/23/2024 in The Big Issue

This week I am opening my page up to an outburst of artfulness supplied by Brian Maguire, Sahaja Budzilla, Perry Wharrie, Paddy Maguire, Tam Carrigan, Louie Simpson, Danny Jones, Ax, Contra and Eddie Cahill. Ten artists who came by their art the hard way. An exhibition that breaks out of the usual mould. Banged up in my teenage years, a new reader, buckling down to not running away again from a Young Offenders’ Institute, I discovered art – 62 years ago I swapped having no future other than wrongdoing to a future full of being creative. What a blast of common sense that was, not just for me but the screws and the custodial system who recognised that a painting, drawing boy was better than some arsehole planning his next…

Toby is holding a plastic bag full of red liquid a little too light to be blood. Strawberry soup, to go on a panna cotta, he tells me: “Strawberry and basil, it works quite nicely.” Taps run, fans murmur and metal clicks on metal as he pours the soup into tiny jugs. Toby, bald and wearing a striped apron over chef ’s whites, places five strawberries upside down in the bowls on the counter. Walking over to a workbench in the corner, he cuts a strip off a foamy green slab, slices the strip lengthwise into two, then dices one of the strips into tiny cubes and puts the cubes at the base of the strawberries, ready for the strawberry sorbet in the middle. “Chef, this is ready to go?”…

A brand-new annual exhibition and auction raising money to support children living through conflict sees 33 leading artists respond to one iconic David Bowie lyric – “we like dancing and we look divine,” from the singer’s 1974 glam anthem Rebel Rebel. Chosen to mark the 50th anniversary of Diamond Dogs, the album on which Rebel Rebel featured, the project is a partnership between War Child UK and Art on a Postcard, and includes pieces by leading artists such as Stuart Semple, National Portrait Gallery BP Portrait Award-winning painter Ishbel Myerscough, Harland Miller, Jonathan Schofield, Andrew Pierre Hart, and Bowie’s lifelong friend George Underwood. The artwork pictured is by Underwood, who is renowned for his legendary David Bowie album covers, including Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust…

There are many reasons why Letter to My Younger Self is one of the Big Issue’s most popular and long-running features. It encourages self-reflection, thoughtfulness and honesty when they can sometimes seem in short supply. Because the subjects tend to be celebrities – musicians, athletes, politicians and more – it can be a useful reality check. It shows that even people who have achieved dizzying success have regrets or wish they’d done things differently. Then there is the daydreaming pleasure of joining in with the premise: what hard-won knowledge would you transmit to yourself to help cope with the challenges you know are on the horizon? The affecting new teen drama My Old Ass – in context, the title is more affectionate than it looks – is basically Letter to…

My husband has a cold at the moment and he’s feeling sorry for himself, which makes me want to kill him. Perhaps this is why the other day I started binge watching Couples Therapy, a documentary series that shows what goes on in the consulting rooms of Dr Orna Guralnik, a New York clinical psychologist. Of course, my predicament would be water off a duck’s back for Dr Orna, who for four series has been calmly presiding over petty squabbles and toxic dynamics with not one but two quizzical eyebrows, like a turbocharged Fiona Bruce. She’d probably tell me to ‘hold space’ for my husband’s annoying cough, while she sips mindfully from a series of incredibly large and expensive-looking coffee mugs. (If anyone knows where Orna gets her mugs from,…

Since the spring, Everton in the Community, the charity branch of the Premier League football club, has hosted a weekly Breathlessness Hub in The People’s Place, a stone’s throw away from Goodison Park, the club’s home stadium in Liverpool. Each Wednesday, two nurses and a GP based at the hub see up to 30 people for early diagnosis and treatment for heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “We’re in the 1% most deprived [areas] in the whole of the country,” Jon Jones, director of adult services at Everton in the Community, tells Big Issue. “Cardio and respiratory conditions are a big risk within the area.” The majority of work Everton in the Community does is in the Kirkdale and County wards of Liverpool. A third of children are living…

WILL HERBERT, 64 I’ve been living in Newington Green for 10 years. I really love the area and the people. My neighbours are all Arsenal supporters, so I’ve turned into an Arsenal fan. If I’m not selling papers I like to watch the games. I only went to a match once. One of my customers said she might try and get me a ticket to a match one day. They’re not cheap at all, so that’d be a big plus in my life. I’m a true Londoner. I was in South London most of my life, but I kept on getting in trouble. I had problems with drink and drugs. People kept on dying around me, I felt like I had no one. But then I met a probation officer…

HEALTH Don’t ‘privatise the NHS by stealth’, Starmer told, after damning Darzi report tells tale of health service failing By Lottie EltonBig Issue reporter “Privatisation is not the answer,” Elizabeth Pfiester told Big Issue. American by birth, she has lived with type 1 diabetes since the age of four and was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2018. The NHS treatment she received saved her life and she is grateful that she didn’t have to deal with the medical system in her native United States. “I didn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops like I did in the States,” she said. “In the US, if you don’t have insurance it’s terrifying.” Campaigners have warned that a health system similar to the one in the US could be on the…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Generous John How wonderful is this – John, in Colchester High St, saved me a previous week’s edition of the Big Issue that came out in his holiday break. He insisted I take it free when he found out I hadn’t been able to find one. For 20+ years we’ve nurtured each other, what a wonderful relationship. Pat Rudkins, Colchester System of failures I just watched the Cardboard Citizens film about Terry. Brought up in care, was then homeless so he couldn’t do his homework, and excluded from school. What a system of failures. It costs £100,000 to house a prisoner – more for a juvenile – and £46,000 to pay…

Since becoming a professional screenwriter I have written 12 dramas about working-class life. From Clocking Off through Ordinary Lies, Come Home and The Driver to Ten Pound Poms and my Sky Comedy drama Brassic. Aside from ‘the master’ Jimmy McGovern, this may be more than any other living UK screenwriter. I grew up in a very working-class home, dad worked in a factory, and mum was a secretary – as they used to call them – to a solicitor. We didn’t have bags of cash, but we weren’t on the poverty line either. But growing up in the north of England in the 1980s was hard. Thatcher was destroying northern cities. Unemployment was high. Crime was high. Social unrest was high. There was a feeling that our part of the…

Just like a novel, a good nonfiction book can change the way you look at the world, even if just a little bit. The best and smartest non-fiction is the stuff that looks at something that seems everyday and normal, then casts a whole new light upon it. This week we have two very gifted authors who do just that, delving deep into their subject matters with a heady blend of passion and authority. First up is The Happiness of Dogs by Mark Rowlands. The author is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami and has a large backlist of popular philosophy books under his belt, most famously The Philosopher and the Wolf, his 2009 memoir. The key focus of this book is revealed in its subtitle: Why…

Last year, after Kola Bokinni and his Ted Lasso co-stars travelled to Washington, DC to meet Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, he posted photos to his socials with the proud caption: “From Peckham to the White House.” Londoner Bokinni and castmates including Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham and Brett Goldstein were invited to the White House to discuss mental health, a topic explored with tremendous empathy on the hit sitcom about a fictional Premier League team. He was particularly impressed with Harris, though no one was certain at the time (March 2023) that she would become the Democrats’ presidential nominee. “She was really on the ball and spoke to all of us,” he recalls. “Joe told a lot of stories, but it was kind of like: ‘Does he know why we’re…

The sinuous saxophone solo stretches across the BBC Concert Orchestra, its toe-tapping refrain framed by a tinkling triangle accompaniment. Henry Mancini’s (1924-94) gift for melody and orchestral colour is distilled in this iconic music, with its instantly recognisable ‘dead ant, dead ant’ figure. My official reason for taking up the saxophone as a teenager was that I had discovered swing and Glenn Miller. While this is true – and playing Pennsylvania 6-5000 in a big band remains a cherished memory – what I really wanted to learn to play was this, the Pink Panther theme tune. Aged 13, this seemed a particularly embarrassing justification (why I perceived 1940s hits such as Little Brown Jug as more respectable is unknown). Saxophonist Martin Williams’s recent Martini-worthy rendition at the Royal Albert Hall…

At 16, I was just finishing secondary school. And school had been a miserable existence. I think it sort of sucks for everyone, because everyone’s trying to find out who they are and your hormones are running wild. There’s this bizarre economy of popularity that exists – if you want to see Darwin’s theory in perfect motion, go to any secondary school playground and watch how it plays out. That environment was not good for me. I was at the bottom of that ridiculous food chain. And you don’t realise how ridiculous it is until you are years removed from it. Then you look back and think, that was all so dumb. I was wildly unpopular at school. But I also handled things badly. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how…