Innholdsfortegnelse for 19-06-2017 i The Big Issue

This is Glasgow’s George Square as you’ve never seen it before. Jo Adamson is a famous face in the city. After selling The Big Issue for a time, she began to pursue her passion for art, all while being registered blind. “I’m a happy-go-lucky person and I want my drawings to make other people smile,” she says. Jo sells her work via her Etsy store (search for Jo Sunshine Art) and opens her second public exhibition this week. Her pictures show a unique perspective that shine light on different parts of her life and experience, whether it’s Glasgow icons like the traffic cone-topped Duke of Wellington statue, or one picture called simply, ‘Sleeping rough one night is more than enough’. Jo’s exhibition is at The Arts Spaces at Cass Art…

Perfume is such an incredibly powerful thing, perhaps the most accessible form of art. But it has become somewhat diminished in this age of massive marketing budgets and celebrity hype. I’m sure that for most people their relationship with perfume begins with incessant advertisements on the telly, showing improbably beautiful people escaping from impossibly glamorous situations, and ends with the rather depressing experience of acres upon acres of perfume, all seemingly smelling the same, in the duty free at the airport. If you’re one of those people, bored by and indifferent to perfume, I urge you to reassess and to start thinking about it in a different way. Next time, rather than rush through the perfume department trying to avoid being spritzed by a sales assistant, stop and try just…

For my money Don Winslow is one of the best writers working in any genre today. The American crime writer has a hugely impressive backlist that blends poetic sensibilities with hard-bitten realism, and he’s brilliant at depicting how ordinary people can get sucked into terrifying extraordinary circumstances. His towering achievement so far has been his two remarkable books about the Mexican drug cartels – The Power of the Dog and The Cartel – sprawling epics that between them amount to more than 1000 pages detailing the brutal violence, widespread corruption and institutionalised cover-ups that occur on all sides of that war, on both the large scale and the personal. His latest book, The Force, rivals those books and mirrors them in terms of structure and style, and it might be…

Only Light and Shadow showcases pieces by Francisco de Goya, the Spanish romantic painter and printmaker, including this etching, Animal foolishness (Other laws for the people), pictured above. Notice his deft use of chiaroscuro – that delicate balance between light and shade. The Peninsular War had a huge impact on him and that echoes through much of his work here. The exhibition runs June 23 to October 22, Birmingham (barber.org.uk). Think you know about smells? Think again. Perfume: A Sensory Journey Through Contemporary Scent describes itself as a “multi-sensory exhibition” and will feature 10 game-changing perfumes from the past two decades that have twisted our olfactory preconceptions and what we understand to be nasally attractive. The exhibition runs June 21 to September 17, Aldwych, London (somersethouse.org.uk) The BP Portrait Award…

Bones is back for its final season, and as the crime-busting team get stuck into their most dramatic cases yet, we have an exclusive competition for one lucky Big Issue reader to literally get to the bones of the show – by winning a genuine skeleton hand prop! Series 12 picks up with Hodgins (TJ Thyne) navigating life in a wheelchair after last season’s dramatic finale. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) investigate the death of a public defender. Did a defendant from a previous case kill her? Deschanel (Spider-Man 2) and Boreanaz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) are joined by Michaela Conlin (Enchanted) as forensic artist Angela Montenegro and Tamara Taylor (Lost) as forensic pathologist Camille Saroyan. Bones (15) is out now on DVD and…

The Grenfell blaze tragedy has focused national thoughts on social housing. And it has put the issue of housing and rights for residents at the top of the political agenda. Yet the UK government’s housing minister is still relegated from meetings of the Cabinet. Housing minister Alok Sharma – the sixth person to hold the role since 2010 – vowed last week that the hundreds of Grenfell survivors left destitute and homeless will be rehoused locally but he is still not invited to sit at the heart of government to make any housing-related case. The Big Issue asked No 10 why this was and we were told: “There is a minister of state who reports to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [Sajid Javid, who sits in…

I grew up in the countryside then went to school in central London at the height of the Thatcher government. I didn’t take to the dog-eat-dog ethos of that time – full of the sound and fury of the Falklands war – at all. I wasn’t remotely political with a big ‘p’; I just stared at politicians on the telly and thought they were from a different galaxy, as I’m sure many teenagers stare at me now. But my family had been shaped and buffeted about by big events in previous decades. My mum spent her formative years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and my grandmother had lost much of her family in the Russian revolution and was part of that diaspora of so-called White Russians who moved to London.…

Brand new research by Professor Yvonne Kelly, based at UCL, provides evidence for something that we knew to be true but have not been able to quantify or prove before – the enormous benefits of reading to a child. This is the first research undertaken in Britain to isolate the potential benefits to a child’s mental and emotional development of being read to on a regular basis. Using the Millennium Cohort Study, which has followed the lives of 20,000 children born between 2000 and 2002, Kelly’s findings clearly demonstrate that regular reading helps with children’s behaviour and enables them to do better at school. Kelly, and her colleague Christine Garrington, who together edit childofourtimeblog.org.uk got in touch with us after following our #WhyBooksMatter campaign, which is fighting to ensure everyone…

The Graduate is 50 years old. Celebrated as a classic of American cinema, this 1967 comedy concerns Benjamin Braddock, a disaffected young man back in his family home in LA after graduating from an East Coast university. Dustin Hoffman – was he ever so boyish? – plays the title role, and Anne Bancroft is the older woman who seduces him, addressed throughout by Ben with strangulated formality as Mrs Robinson. If she has a first name, she keeps its hidden under all that cigarette smoke and dark mascara. “How old are you?” Mr Robinson asks Ben, oblivious that he’s carrying on with his wife. The 20-year-old replies. “That’s a hell of an age to be,” the older man proclaims. How well has The Graduate aged? It’s worth asking because The…

If you can’t count on Katy Perry for a bit of fun any more, then who can you count on? Describing her latest era as one of “purposeful pop” – rather inferring that all those previous sparky bangers of hers so beloved by legions of young fans were just tossed out aimlessly – the Californian has contracted a touch of the old ‘serious artistness’ on her fifth album Witness. ‘Woke’ lyrics? Check. Lots of lingering in the minor key? You bet. Bit of bad language? Inside the first 30 seconds. That’s not to suggest that Perry ought to stay in her lane or something. She’s long been a powerful advocate for LGBT rights, and as an avowed feminist her fierce public endorsement of Hillary Clinton during last year’s US election…

“One of my customers gave me a kiteboard. I like high-adrenaline sports” FACTS ABOUT ME... MY FAVOURITE AUTHOR Terry Pratchett. My favourite book of his is Going Postal, part of the Discworld series. I think Pratchett captures the sheer diversity of the real world in his own weird alternative universe. MY FAVOURITE SPORT Formula One. I like to back the British drivers in a big way – Jenson Button, David Coulthard and Lewis Hamilton. I have a very diverse group of customers. It’s a garrison town, so you have military families, you have a big student contingent, and you have tourists here to see the National Marine Aquarium and the Mayflower Steps. I get on well with all my customers, and I work hard selling six days a week. This…

A restaurant owner in Bristol was so frustrated at seeing people sleeping on the streets of his city he launched a project to convert shipping containers into homes for them. Jasper Thompson, owner of Jaspers Jamaican Diner, kickstarted a drive among his friends, neighbours and patrons to make a liveable home from a second-hand container donated, for free, by a local shipping container business. “I just wanted to see if I could make a real difference to their housing situation,” explained 58-year-old Thompson. He also persuaded local tradesman to give up some of their spare time installing insulation, electrics and plumbing. Then others in the community rallied round to paint the place and provide flooring, lights and furniture. The cost of all the equipment and furnishings was £5,000. Thompson says…

Last week’s appalling tragedy at Grenfell Tower shocked the nation. The massive fire that engulfed the building claimed countless lives – authorities fear the exact number may never be known – put dozens in hospital and made many more residents homeless. It has also left people searching for answers. How could this happen in one of the richest and most safety-conscious countries in the world? An investigation is now under way into the cause of the fire, with experts pointing at the exterior cladding’s polyethylene core. One residents’ group at the west London estate warned last year of a fire risk at the council-owned block. The Grenfell Tower fire has prompted a wider debate on the standard of social housing blocks across the country. Back in 2000, when Gordon Brown…

I have recently come home from an operation at a teaching hospital in central London. It was almost too efficient: I saw a friendly Italian surgeon in clinic, and two weeks later I was in his operating theatre. I am sore but healing gradually. I have worked as a doctor in the NHS for 25 years, a fact of which I am extremely proud, and I have never been at the receiving end before, except when I had my children. Only perhaps in a war zone do you place your life so completely in someone else’s hands, as when an anaesthetist and a surgeon “consent” you for surgery. I was immensely grateful for the competence and kindness of the anaesthetist who said to me quite formally, just before we walked…

“Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Twenty years ago we were all normal. How boring. Back then we didn’t know of Hogwarts, Muggles, the joys of quidditch, the fear of Dementors. But with that opening line, struggling writer JK Rowling began to cast a spell that would transform our normal world into a far more fantastic place. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published on June 26, 1997. Two decades on we’ve had seven books (not counting the spinoffs), eight films (not including the prequels), a blockbusting West End show, studio extravaganzas, theme parks. And the world is still under Rowling’s unbreakable spell: last year the UK publishing industry hailed her as…

Brendan Gleeson is a familiar face to millions. Known for playing Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter films, he has appeared alongside the great and good of the film business in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, 28 Days Later, Mission Impossible II, In Bruges, Suffragette and Calvary, and later this year stars in Paddington 2 as shifty-sounding ‘Knuckles’ McGinty. But his latest film is something new. Hampstead is a gentle romance, in which the Dubliner stars as Donald Horner, a man living quietly and self-sufficiently off-grid in a shack on the edges of Hampstead Heath. Dismissed as an eccentric, ridiculed, ignored – or worse, beaten up by local youths and dismissed as a ‘tramp’ – Horner is living an isolated life. A combination of Diane Keaton as wealthy local…

“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in” is as true for stand-up comedians as it is for gangsters, at least fictional Hollywood gangsters. Few comics who announce their retirement ever manage to remain planting gooseberries in their allotment. Alexei Sayle managed nearly 15 years of being an author and motoring correspondent for the Telegraph, but then… His wife, Linda, thought a return was not a good idea. He had been placed 15th in Channel 4’s top stand-ups countdown and she worried a return would “dilute the legacy”. I saw those first few return gigs. Initially Sayle presented himself in the avuncular fashion of the novelist regaling his readers with a few pithy anecdotes and occasional scabrous quips. One night, an overly excited punter, brought up…