Innholdsfortegnelse for 08-05-2017 i The Big Issue

I came from a very happy family. I’m an only child. I wouldn’t say I was indulged but life was pretty good. I was a glass half full sort of guy. I still am. I don’t think I’ve changed much. I didn’t know what life was all about when I was 16 but I made a good job of pretending. I enjoyed school, my dad took me to see Man United, I went to local dances. The serious dancing boys would take their shoes with them. I just hung around for ages and waited for the last waltz: “Hello, can I have the last waltz please? Thank you very much.” I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school. I’m sure my mother would still have loved…

MICHAEL SMILEY: Hero number one in my eyes, Barry. Being in a boxing environment with Ireland’s greatest fighter was a real buzz, a real fanboy moment. BARRY McGUIGAN: You took to it like a duck to water, understanding the role of a trainer. The majority of young kids that come into boxing are hard to handle. I think the euphemistic term is ‘hard to reach’, so difficult kids. A coach in many ways is a parent to them. MS: I ended up going to Fitzroy Lodge, which was Johnny’s old boxing gym. It was like a community centre, it was like a front living room, it was like a court. There were all those aspects of honour and discipline and old-school values and it really opened my eyes. In inner…

“Colour, which had up until that point been painfully slow in returning, exploded back into my life” Patient H69: The Story of my Second Sight is the true tale of how one morning I woke up to find myself blind and paralysed. A terrifying and unique story, I describe the events in a diary-like style offering you the reality of what it is like to suddenly lose two of your major senses. I was a TV producer and mum to two small children at the time, juggling a busy home and work life. My illness hit my family like a high-speed train, but as I started to recover my sight my curiosity to comprehend what had happened to me was to take me on an incredible journey. Adopting the pseudonym…

Frantz begins in provincial Germany in 1919. We’re in a quiet, handsome, outwardly respectable small town, but it doesn’t take long to see how much of the place has been ruined by the recent war. In the opening scene a young, elegantly dressed woman walks through the busy market square. She ignores the crowds and the horse-drawn carts to head straight to the graveyard, where she lays flowers at the headstone of her fiancé, killed in battle just before peace was declared. The war dead are the town’s most attention-demanding constituents; the film is even named after one of them. A visit to the doctor prompts a howl of grief from the medic over his fallen son. The arrival of a young Frenchman stirs speculation over the German deaths he…

I recently explored Ireland’s border from end-to-end. I wanted to get to know the border’s true character, to meet it on the ground. I also wanted to learn more about its past and what it might become in the future. The Brexit vote brought much anxiety to the borderland, worries about how the United Kingdom’s only land frontier with the European Union would operate. A hard border, with mandatory stops for customs, would not just be bad for business but could threaten the peace process. The anxiety was exacerbated by Downing Street’s refusal to commit to anything, apart from leaving the single market and the customs union. The European Council are no less intransigent but they are much more open about what they want from the divorce. Just over a…

“You could condense most stories down to them being about someone coming home – or if it’s a tragedy someone failing to make it home.” Johnny Harris, 43, is talking about Jawbone, a film he wrote, produced and stars in. It follows a crisis point for his character Jimmy, a 40-something unemployed man struggling with alcoholism who, after being evicted from his flat, becomes homeless and has nowhere to turn except the boxing gym he went to as a younger man, the only place he ever felt he belonged. Jimmy is offered an unlicensed fight that could either be a shot at redemption or his final round in life, but far more fearsome than any opponent in the ring are the demons he battles outside it. Rocky meets I, Daniel…

Callum Myles was described as “unmanageable” at primary school. On one occasion he dislocated a teacher’s finger and had been arrested multiple times by age 11. “When I was young I mixed with the wrong crowd,” Myles, now 19, says. “I used to get in a load of trouble. School was just not for me.” The police brought in George Turner, who works for Carney’s Community, a charity that turns around the lives of young people by getting them to engage with boxing. It was founded in the memory of Mick Carney, who Johnny Harris credits as saving him, as well as countless others. “The first ever time George took me to the gym I never looked back,” Myles says. “The gym was a piece of me. You meet the…

I want a band called God Dethroned (above) to sound like a band called God Dethroned, and they do. They are a Dutch death metal band. I double-checked they are death metal, as otherwise the metal historian Andrew O’Neill will mock me for my inability to tell sub-genre from sub-genre. Doom metal, folk metal, black metal, grindcore... I remain almost as lost as I am amongst jazz aficionados, but this metal was definitely morbid enough for death. I consider such havoc jaunty now. It was first on the most recent playlist of Resonance FM’s Artrocker show, presented by Paul and Lewis. It is a good double act for musical experiments. Paul, the jovial man, versus Lewis, who wishes to remain hidden in a silent corner, highly suspicious of Paul’s motives…

QI , created by comedy genius, lexicology maven, brainbox and friend of The Big Issue, John Lloyd, is the juggernaut TV panel show that has been filling homes around the world for almost a decade and a half. Fourteen short years ago, the opening episode of the multi-award winning BBC Two show was broadcast to the nation. The QI world then expanded to include bestselling books, sister radio show The Museum of Curiosity, mobile-user game Qiktionary, and the super-successful podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, starring none other than the QI Elves who now have their own BBC Two spin-off show, No Such Thing as the News. Now, for the first time, you can start collecting the complete box-set of ‘The Stephen Fry Years’ of QI with volume…

THE PROCESS BY RENE ROBBINS Rene, the daughter of an architect, is in her 90s and lives in London. Following the death of her husband and son, she experienced a period of homelessness but doesn’t like to dwell on misfortune. At a low point, one of her friends invited her to attend an art project and she has been going there ever since. Perhaps inspired by her father, her work has an architectural quality, whether line drawing or collage. She works slowly and patiently due to a degenerative eye condition. Her work has been published and sold at exhibition. THE FUTURE BY DELE OLADEJI They are dying daily in numbers, these Children of our world – They have nothing To eat, no clean water, no food, No medicines, no toys,…

One of the inscriptions at the great Temple of Apollo in Delphi was ‘Know Thyself’. Like Socrates’ idea that the unexamined life is not worth living, the virtue of self-knowledge was promoted by Roman philosophers including the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, who thought that understanding yourself also helped to temper life’s disappointments. This classical tradition of serious thinking continued into European culture: by the end of the 16th century a combination of literacy, affordable paper and space you could annotate in almanacs, which partnered a calendar year, meant that people started to write daily memoranda in handy forms. A big boost came from Puritanism, which encouraged people to write down a day in order to review it for sinful behaviour. Recently a moral form of diary has reappeared in gratitude journals,…

I’d always wanted to do a film score but wanted it to be something ‘arty’ and not mainstream. I met Johnny Harris for a meeting in Bar Italia and he outlined the story. I was so vibed up by it that I started to construct the main theme and overall idea of what I thought the music should be before they started shooting – which was totally arse about face, but just as Johnny had a very singular idea of what the film was to be about so did I with the music. I’m tired of seeing/ hearing the street/London type films with a banging techno or big drums soundtrack. I saw this as more abstract and evolving from tenderness and calm to violent and disturbing. I thought that captures…

There is nothing remarkable about the parents who bore Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Ford. That much is made clear in Between Them , Ford’s memorial to the travelling salesman and his dedicated wife who loved and raised their only child with much love but little drama or intrigue. It is this consistent ordinariness, of personality as well as circumstance, on top of the family’s propensity not to discuss personal issues of any depth, which makes this such a curious book. In the end, we learn little about the internal life of the people it is dedicated to remembering. But we can be sure that love endures, long after memory begins to erode. The facts are commonplace, but, like all gossip, interesting. Parker, as Ford saw him, was an affable,…

After the blockbuster Bowie and Rolling Stones exhibitions in recent years, it’s now the turn of the act that redefined the album and the live spectacular in the 1970s. Their Mortal Remains (May 13 to October 1, South Kensington, London; vam.ac.uk) marks the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s debut album with a lavish display of iconic artwork by Hipgnosis, posters from when the Floyd were the house band at the UFO club, stage props, instruments and more. They are that rare thing – a band whose legacy and audience grows with each subsequent generation. Another major exhibition – albeit of a different stripe – can be found at Alberto Giacometti (May 10 to September 10, Bankside, London; tate.org.uk). It is the Swiss sculptor, painter and draughtsman’s first major retrospective in…

FACTS ABOUT ME... IF I WON THE LOTTERY I’d give half the money to The Big Issue to help others, then I’d head off to Crete. I’d buy a little taverna and sit outside in the sun for the rest of my days. MY FAVOURITE TEAM Chelsea FC. I was a Chelsea fan long before they got all their money from Roman Abramovich. You have to stay loyal to your team. I’ve sold the magazine here in Cardiff for around 18 months now. It’s been going well because I work really hard at it. I’m out almost every day of the year. I’ve built up my pitch, so there’s quite a lot of loyal, regular customers. I enjoy chatting with them because they’re interesting people. I’ve worked all of my…