Table of contents for 11/24/2025 in The Big Issue

→ It was after Southampton Airport that I thought I’d better have a word with myself. And it was the TV adaptation of Trespasses that reminded me. That’s the show set in and around Belfast in 1975, taken from Louise Kennedy’s novel. It’s a love story at heart, bubbling with the idea that deep, complex inner lives are coursing despite darkness and paranoia all around. And that small, barely noticed actions can have the most dramatic of consequences. Being Belfast 1975, the Troubles are a character all of their own, shadowy and malevolent, always lingering, dead-weighted with threat. There is an audio motif in that show, a constant news report in many scenes, from radio or TV, detailing the attacks, the bombings, the shootings and the dead. When Lola Petticrew’s…

“Yeah, he loved the whole thing,” says his bandmate, Queen drummer Roger Taylor. “You know, the house would have been full of all these decorations. He loved his decorations. And he had a great, unerring eye.” Queen had special reason to celebrate 50 years ago, when their creation Bohemian Rhapsody changed the world. Number one in the UK for nine weeks between November 1975 and January 1976, it’s the epic that turned the group into global superstars and household names. It’s the third-best selling single in British history. And until Wham! reached the top spot in 2023 with the near-40-year-old Last Christmas, it had been the only single to be the UK Christmas number one twice in its original form. It still is, if you don’t count streaming. In saying…

Bohemian Rhapsody is not the only singalong British classic celebrating an anniversary this Christmas. It’s 25 years since Bob the Builder’s Can We Fix It? secured the coveted (at least it was back then) Christmas number one spot. The single version of the kids’ TV theme saw off Westlife, Eminem and S Club 7 to top the charts in 2000. Not bad for a cartoon character voiced by Neil Morrissey. Of course, the positivity of the tune and the idea that we can fix anything in so-called Broken Britain could be just the tonic we need in 2025. To evaluate the song’s legacy, Big Issue caught up with Paul K Joyce – the man who wrote those immortal words. A composer by trade, Joyce constructed all the melodies and chorus…

CHRISTMAS PRESENT What’s at the top of this year’s letters to Santa Instructions for Santa’s elves in 2025: we want small plush toys with round fluffy bodies, gruesome grins and spiky teeth, rabbit ears, large wholesome eyes and keychains to hang on our bags. We want Labubus. A craze swept the world this year as adults and children sought to get their hands on these strange furry things which look a little like rabid bunnies (but cute). People have queued for hours for Labubus and sometimes pay thousands, even tens of thousands, for limited editions and rare kinds. How did we end up here? Labubu has existed since 2015, created as a character by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung for his picture book series The Monsters. Toy company Pop Mart…

A single snowflake is all it takes. If the Met Office is to declare a white Christmas, there just needs to be a single flake falling anywhere in the UK. By that measure, there’s a 50% chance any Christmas will be white. But that’s not exactly what Bing Crosby was dreaming of. What benefit does a flake in Falmouth bring to Fife’s festivities? We want deep, we want crisp, and we want even. The Met Office measures whether snow is lying on the ground by its stations at 9am. Here, 2010 stands out as the UK’s last widespread white Christmas. It was the whitest on record, with snow recorded on the ground at 83% of Met Office stations. Before that, 2009, 1995, and 1981 stand as the only truly white…

Hampshire-based artist Shaw graduated from UCA Farnham in 2018 with a degree in Fine Art. The highlight of his career so far was his solo exhibition at Gilbert White’s House (Selborne) in 2021. He strives to invite curiosity from the viewer with his use of vibrant colours and strong graphic forms. Life as a disabled artist has shaped Shaw’s artwork in unpredictable ways, influencing different methods of expression. He does not want to be defined by being disabled, yet he seeks to use his experience to communicate ideas and promote awareness. Shaw’s latest work was part of an inclusive arts festival that took place at the weekend. Hosted by DAiSY (Disability Arts in Surrey), DAiSY FEST was hosted at the G Live in Guildford, and featured a diverse line-up of…

It’s not all about getting money, it’s about feeling you’re a valued human being I’m selling Big Issue basically to make sure I feed myself. I get help from the government as well which I try to send to my wife. So Big Issue keeps me going and keeps me alive. I came back from Australia for a funeral and I became unwell and then things just were ongoing from there so I ended up with no money. I was staying in Dundee in the ex-servicemen’s quarters and I was ready to go back. I paid for my flight, went to Edinburgh Airport, went to get on the plane and they said I had the wrong visa. So I lost all my flight money and I’ve got to reapply for…

→ For 40 years, George Michael’s Last Christmas was the bridesmaid. The nearly-but-never-quite. The most successful single never to reach number one, it was pop’s great injustice. And then the spell broke. In 2023, lifted by Spotify’s algorithm and a wave of goodwill, Last Christmas finally reached the top spot at Christmas, giving the much-missed pop icon and friend of Big Issue – a man fanatical about the season – the result he’d always wanted. And having scaled the mountain, the song decided it liked the view. In 2024, the song marked its 40th anniversary by becoming the first in UK history to claim consecutive Christmas number ones. Now, heading into December 2025, it’s poised to do it again. Current odds hover around 1/2. It may well be Christmas number…

→ Faithful or Traitor? I’d rather be a Faithful. But a lot of people have said that I might surprise people being a Traitor, because people might not believe I could do it. → What do you know about yourself you didn’t in January? Confidence comes from within. I’ve been searching for the confidence I’ve been lacking over the last few years – particularly post-football career, when I was going into a new chapter of my life and figuring a lot of things out without football any more. Strictly makes you step out of your comfort zone, where you’ve got to find the fire and confidence within yourself. → What did you make of England’s footballing summer? I was at the final and afterwards I was pretty exhausted from broadcasting…

Turkey: Mexican → When the Tudor poet Thomas Tusser wrote of “Turkey wel drest” as part of a Christmas feast in 1573, he was in fact taking part in a trend new to these shores. Turkeys, those red-necked birds who gobble and are gobbled, were brought to Europe by Spaniards returning from the conquest of Mexico in the early 16th century. The birds settled well into the English landscape, giving rise to the Norfolk Black variety. By Victorian times turkey had become more ubiquitous, though a prohibitive cost meant goose was often more popular. Queen Victoria described a “regular Christmas dinner, with turkeys, Baron of Beef, Plum Pudding & Mince Pies” in her diary entry for Christmas Day 1843. She was also a fan of roast swan. For those outside…

Men In the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories is a blistering collection by the trailblazing author Ghassan Kanafani, featuring works he crafted across the 1950s-60s. In these pressing translations by Hilary Kilpatrick, Kanafani homes in on the lives of Palestinians in diaspora, flight and exile after the Nakba in 1948 – considering cruel ironies of survival in incisive prose. The eponymous novella explores the terrible journey undertaken by three Palestinian refugees of disparate ages – Abu Qais, Marwan and Assad. They leave a refugee camp in Iraq to find new work in Kuwait to support their families – enduring indignities as they cross borders, in increasingly absurd, emasculating encounters. ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ tenders a child’s perspective on their family’s expulsion from Palestine, and the agonies that pervade their…

↓ GET IN TOUCH The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK thebigissue ISSUE 1693 Big Issue gets some seriously great exclusives. I buy it from a guy outside my church every Sunday. @iamchrislindsay, Instagram MY WORLD AS I FIND IT ← Christmas is coming The first signs of Christmas have arrived in Cornwall. In this image is the number of people on the council’s housing list. There are probably whole towns in the county which have a lower number of people living in them than that figure. Despite everyone knowing about it, homelessness can be hidden; disability can be hidden. People don’t tend to say they have a disability or are homeless, the stigma attached can be huge and dividing. People…

As a teenager I loved life. I loved sports. I loved swimming. I was captain of the football team. I also worked hard in school and was very quiet. I had friends, but I was not talkative. To the extent that people said, that boy is mentally defective. Why doesn’t he talk? Then when I came top of the class, they said, What? He must be cheating. But I was not cheating. I was just working hard because I loved academia. I read huge books, and people said, That’s ridiculous. What are you doing? I said, I’m enjoying it. I’m acquiring new knowledge. I wanted to do heart surgery because of two things. One, I had role models. My dad was a doctor, but even more influential was my aunt,…

→ The Beatles’ story has been told, retold, remixed and reimagined for every generation that came after them. Decades since their break-up, they remain a living presence in our cultural imagination, not just as nostalgia, but as something enduring and evolving. When the original eight-part Beatles Anthology began to be restored and remastered last year, I had the great privilege of being asked to direct a brand-new Episode 9. The Beatles Anthology has become not only a record of The Beatles’ history but a cultural artefact in its own right, a snapshot of how they once chose to remember themselves. This new episode offered a chance for the Beatles story not just to be revisited, but reexamined for what it tells us about memory, legacy, loss, and the enduring human…

Cast your mind back to September 2019. A general election was on the way, which would see Boris Johnson trouncing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party to win a landslide victory and majority of 80 seats. But that wasn’t the end of the story. With the pandemic on the way, nobody got their happily ever after. The mood of the times was perfectly captured by surrealist cartoonist Ralph Steadman, who has been the agent provocateur of political satire, capturing the monstrous and maniacal for six decades. His exclusive cover for Big Issue features in A Life In Ink, the definitive retrospective of his work, alongside other significant collaborations from his career including that with gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson, who described Steadman’s art as “filthy scribblings”, capturing its raw and wild essence.…

It’s Christmas Eve. You should be at home, decking the halls with boughs of holly. Or at the pub, gay apparel donned, mulled wine in hand. Instead, you’re in a queue at TK Maxx. Shuffling miserably toward the till, white-knuckle gripping a candle / pair of novelty socks / discounted bath bomb, you make a penitent promise: “I will never leave present shopping this late again.” Inevitably, you will: 12 to 14 million Brits hit the high street in the two days before Christmas. Part of the problem is decision paralysis – people just don’t know what to buy. What if there was a better way? More than seven in 10 consumers will use generative AI to help them choose their Christmas presents this year, new research shows, up from…

→ What has been your standout moment of 2025? A really small moment, something I just happened to overhear. When I dropped my daughter off at pre-school, she told her teacher “I just love my daddy so much!” She tells me she loves me all the time but to hear her talk about me like that with no prompting, simply because that was how she felt, was very special. → What do you know about yourself now that you didn’t this time last year? Gratitude... and DIY! I love an adventure, but I think I often fall into a default of ‘what next’ – always looking for the next thing to make or problem to solve and never pausing to admire the view. We moved out of London to the…

I have reached the stage of the touring year where each morning I wake up uncertain of where I am and what day it is. Waking in Woodbridge on Tuesday, I was in Manchester on a Friday. In Hull on Thursday, I was at home on a Sunday. I am still arriving in the right place at the right time, but maybe that will change in December. I had a lovely night in Shoreham-by-Sea at Chapter 34 books, having spent the afternoon in the vintage emporium with my friend Katherine leafing through their old postcards and photographs. We love finding old scrawls on the other side of images of Corfe Castle, or a family under a parasol at Camber Sands. Something like, “please don’t tell Hans anything I told you,…

→ What have been your cultural highlights of 2025? At the David Lean Cinema we’ve been doing All of Us Strangers walks this year. So there is a sort of pilgrimage walk to all the locations. And there’s a really strong fan base for that film and for Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. It’s gone on beyond the cinematic release and become something wider and more experiential. It’s fascinating. → Did you see Oasis in 2025? I didn’t see Oasis – I was jealous of my niece because she went and loved it, but I can’t stand amplified concerts in general. I love acoustic concerts but the sound in a big concert just doesn’t do it for me. Call me a little old lady who just doesn’t want to go…