Jessie J shares breast cancer update after undergoing surgery
Jessie J has shared an update on the 'lows and highs' of her breast
cancer
journey following her surgery.
The Price Tag singer announced in early June that
she had been diagnosed with early breast cancer
and that she would be undergoing treatment.
The artist, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, posted a carousel of images and videos on Instagram on Monday evening documenting the 48 hours before and after her surgery.
She said: 'This post is some of the honest lows and highs of the last 48 hours.
READ MORE
'I will always show the good and hard bits of any journey I go through. Grateful to my doctor / surgeon and all the nurses who cared for me and all my family / friends who came to visit.
'I am home now, to rest and wait for my results.
'Still hugging everyone going through something tough right now. We all got this!'
The carousel included photos and videos of the singer in the hospital, her partner Chanan Safir Colman, and their child, Sky Safir Cornish Colman.
In one of the videos the singer is seen singing the words: 'I've now been at the hospital for 6½ hours and I'm still waiting to go down to the theatre.'
The singer-songwriter, best known for her hit songs Domino, Price Tag, and Bang Bang, performed at Capital's Summertime Ball at Wembley Stadium, England, on June 15th and made an emotional speech promising to 'beat breast cancer' in her final performance before her surgery.
She said: 'I feel so proud to be feeling okay, to be this honest person where you say what you feel, and this being my last show before I go and have surgery.'
The artist has dealt with ill health throughout her life, having been diagnosed with a heart condition aged eight, suffering a minor stroke aged 18 and having briefly gone deaf in 2020. – PA
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
The days of families huddling around the Late Late Show or Glenroe are gone - and that's no bad thing
By the end of the latest season of Doctor Who , it was clear the BBC 's once high-flying franchise was on life support. Ratings had collapsed. Lead actor Ncuti Gatwa was keen to move on to Hollywood. Whatever the television equivalent of urgent medical attention is, the Doctor needed lots of it. The real surprise, though, was that the decline of the Doctor went largely unnoticed. There had been widespread speculation among hard-core Whovians that the BBC and its international partners in the franchise, Disney +, were considering pulling the plug on the Tardis (the eventual twist was far more shocking, with former Doctor's assistant Billie Piper revealed is to be the new custodian of the venerable blue police call box). What was most telling, however, was that, amid all the online chatter, nobody in the real world much cared. The entire saga of the Doctor's rumoured demise and the character's bombshell resurrection in the guise of the former Because We Want To chart-topper passed without comment – in contrast to the widespread anguish that had attended the cancelling of the series for the first time in 1989. Billie Piper in the final episode of Doctor Who. Photograph: James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios Such has been the pattern in recent decades – and not just in the context of time-travelling British eccentrics. Contrast the present-day television landscape with that distant time when The Late Late Show on RTÉ ranked as unmissable viewing. Or what about Montrose's perpetually okay-ish soap opera Fair City, which once held the entire nation in its thrall - including when it aired Ireland's first on-screen kiss between two men in 1996. Or in November 2001, when 800,000 viewers tuned in to the soap to see abusive sociopath Billy Meehan beaten to death by the son of his partner, Carol. People were talking about it at the bus stop and in the pub (back when the pub was a place we frequented in numbers). Even if you wanted to, you couldn't get away from bad Billy and his bloody exit. READ MORE Those days are clearly long over. According to RTÉ, some 280,000 people watch Fair City each week (with more tuning in on RTÉ Player). But when last did you hear someone discuss a Fair City plotline – or even acknowledge its existence? It's still out there, and fans still enjoy it, but to the rest of us, it's gone with Billy in the grave. The fracturing of television audiences has long been a source of dismay to those who care about such matters. In 2019, Time Magazine fretted that the end of Game of Thrones would be 'the last water cooler TV show'. That same year, author Simon Reynolds despaired of the great geyser of streaming TV and how it had deprived us of unifying cultural milestones. With so much entertainment jetting into our eyeballs, how is it possible for any of us to hold dear any particular film or show? 'There is,' he wrote in the Guardian, 'always something new to watch… an endless, relentless wave of pleasures lined up in the infinite Netflix queue.' More recently, Stephen Bush wrote in the Financial Times that 'everywhere in the rich world, the era of truly 'popular culture' is over'. This, he posited, 'is bad news for modern states, which are held together to some extent by the sense that we are all part of a collective endeavour ... the decline of shared viewing is eroding shared cultural reference points'. The death of monoculture is generally presented as a negative. Weren't we all better off in the old days, when Biddy and Miley's first kiss in Glenroe held the nation transfixed, and the big reveal as to who shot JR was a global news event that pushed trivialities such as the Cold War off the front pages? But is that such a loss? It's easy to look back with nostalgia, but the age of the monoculture was the era of having everyone else's tastes forced on you. Consider the great cultural tragedy that was Britpop, where lumbering, flag-waving Beatles cover acts became the dominant force in music. Liam Gallagher (left) and Noel Gallagher of Oasis. Photograph: Simon Emmett/Fear PR/PA Those bands never really went away, and some of them are back in force this summer – asking you to pay an arm-and-a-leg for the privilege of a ringside seat (or, indeed, a seat miles away). The difference is that today, you have the option of not participating. Instead of going to Oasis in Croke Park, I'll be in London watching the K-pop band Blackpink. Thanks to streaming and the general fracturing of popular culture, I can, moreover, essentially put my fingers in my ears and pretend Oasis doesn't exist. Thirty years ago, that option was not available. They were everywhere – in the summer of 1996, it felt as if Wonderwall was stalking us. But because mass entertainment has splintered, you no longer have to feel as if you are being followed around by Liam Gallagher every time you leave the house. It is also important to remember that the monoculture is still occasionally capable of making its presence felt. Let's go back to The Late Late Show, which, according to the latest statistics, is watched by about 400,000 people. That may be a long way off the annual Toy Show spectacular, which in 2024 drew 1.6 million viewers, but it remains a national talking point – every bit as much as Billy Meehan getting his just deserts. Adolescence. (L to R) Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller, Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, in Adolescence. Photograph: Netflix © 2024 The same effect can be seen in streaming. Granted, the extraordinary response to the Stephen Graham drama Adolescence , which streamed on Netflix earlier this year, was in some ways a product of a moral panic more than an epoch-defining cultural moment. But while the show had some astute points about misogyny in our schools, its depiction of what it's like to be a 13-year-old boy was painfully wide of the mark. Still, it did capture the public imagination. And maybe there will be a similar response to series three of Squid Game, which was released on Netflix this weekend. So it isn't as if we aren't capable of bonding over our favourite TV shows any more. It's just that such instances are far rarer than they used to be. But is that a bad thing? Nowadays, we are free to follow our own interests, rather than having someone else's forced on us. And when we do come together, that moment of shared excitement feels all the more precious. The water cooler is dead; long live the water cooler.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
An Irish woman's life in the circus: ‘It's six months of living, eating, working, crying and laughing together'
'Pie and mash today,' calls the cook behind the ad-hoc kitchen that has been set up in a car park in Hereford. It's 4pm, dinner time for the performers of NoFit State , who will be going on stage in the small English cathedral city at 7.30pm. Gracie Marshall, the only Irish member of the circus company, has been given a bag of Tayto crisps – useful extra carbohydrates – by Adam Fitzsimons, who has come over from Galway International Arts Festival to see what technical aspects of tonight's performance might need to be tweaked for NoFit State's headline run in the city next month: it's bringing the show, Sabotage, plus the company's distinctive mushroom-shaped tent, to Nimmo's Pier, in the centre of the city. I'm sitting at a picnic table with Tom Rack, who is artistic director of NoFit State, and has a long, full beard. He was one of the five people who started the company in 1986. 'We were juggling and roaming around in the summers, and then in the winter we came together to make shows for schools, so we could avoid getting proper jobs,' he says. 'We fell in with a chap with a big top, back in the day of local-authority festivals and events, and he realised if he hired the five of us we'd drive the lorry, and do the workshops, and do the shows, and work the bar, and that was our introduction to the big top.' READ MORE Where did the name of the company come from? Rack laughs. 'It was the 1980s, and there was a Moscow State Circus, and the Chinese State Circus, and we were just a bunch of long-haired reprobates. NoFit State was a joke, but it stuck.' Rack is the sole remaining member of the quintet still working in circus, and roaming the land. Their circus, like most these days, is animal-free. They have an office base in Cardiff, rehearse in March and April, and then tour during the summer. How would he describe their type of performance? 'It's so far removed from traditional circus,' he says. 'It has traditional skills and tricks and excitement, but instead of being a traditional succession of acts it's a completely theatrical experience: a rollercoaster of a show. It's called Sabotage, but who are saboteurs, really? The misfits, the outcasts, the asylum seekers, the drag queens, the gender fluid. In Sabotage they are telling their stories. And we don't have a big top, because we're not a traditional circus.' The NoFit State big top It may not look like a traditional big top from the outside, with its muted ecru canvas, but it looks a lot like one inside. It's perfectly round, with circular seating all in jolly pink, as is the interior of the tent, where someone is tuning a violin. 'There are no bad seats here. It's a democratic space,' says Rack. It's true. Every tier of the 700 seats has essentially the same view of the ring. Marshall, the Tayto recipient, comes to join me on one of the tiers. It's still a couple of hours to showtime, and the company have a little downtime before getting rehearsal notes and warming up. The 30-year-old grew up in west Co Cork, near Rosscarbery. She's in her fourth year with NoFit State, specialising in hoop work and handstands. 'I did a lot of dance classes when I was younger,' she says. 'Then, when I was 16 and in transition year, I wrote to a circus dance company in LA' – Lucent Dossier Experience – 'and asked if I could do an internship with them.' They said yes, and Marshall went out for a month, which must rank among the more unusual transition-year placements. By the time she came home she was convinced this was the career for her. 'I told my mother that I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue with ordinary school; I wanted to go to circus school.' So she moved to London, did some training there and then came back to Cork for more training, at the city's Circus Factory . After that, as for any freelance artist, there was a jigsaw of grants and courses, including money from the Arts Council and training in China, Ukraine and Austria. 'It was really uncommon to leave school at 16,' she says. 'But I was so sure that I was going to do it, that there are other pathways in life.' Gripping: Sabotage. Photograph: Mary Wycherley Has Marshall ever been asked to talk to transition-year students about creating a career in such a singular field? No, she says, but she'd love to. 'I started off as an aerialist, with hoops,' she says. 'I got really injured in a fall; I injured my hip. It wasn't fully dislocated but enough to ground me. So I made up tricks with hoops. I fly a lot.' The circus trucks include two bunk wagons, where the company members and technical staff sleep. 'I feel like it's really community based,' she says. 'It's a supportive environment and everyone takes care of each other and supports each other – six months of really living, eating, working, crying and laughing together.' At 5pm the tour manager, Rebecca Davies, gathers everyone in the centre of the tent for notes and warm-up. Some people are flopped out on a black mattress; one is doing his make-up; a few others are rummaging in a suitcase and reassembling white plastic flowers that get pulled apart during each performance. We're used to the wildlife. Foxes come in at night and steal our costumes Davies runs through the assembled nationalities for me. 'Irish, Welsh, Argentinian, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, English, Scottish.' Everyone gets their notes, most of which are technical. Someone is blocking someone else while up one of the four tent poles. Catch this a different way. Remember to exit at that point. The company also has a live band, and performers in the ring slip in and out of musical roles too. There's no such thing as having only one talent. This is a ensemble company through and through. What are the challenges of running a two-hour show such as Sabotage? 'Weather,' says Davies, who came to work for the company for 10 weeks 10 years ago and is still with them. 'Weather can dictate what we can do on a day-to-day basis.' In Hereford, for instance, 'we know the ground will flood, and we know where those areas are.' Sabotage. Photograph: Mary Wycherley I recall the lattice of planks and walkways laid over puddles as I made my way earlier to the tent entrance. 'It's weatherproof in terms of wind, but a tent is still a temporary structure, and enough wind will still move the tent.' They'd better have stout tent pegs for Nimmo's Pier, in a city where the Atlantic wind can shear in relentlessly at any time of the year. Whatever temperature it is on the ground, it's 10 degrees hotter at the top of the tent, where riggers and performers alike are frequently working, says Davies. She stops talking to attend to an intruder: a seagull has come in, probably looking for any dropped food. Eventually it's escorted outside. 'We're used to the wildlife,' says Davies. 'Foxes come in at night and steal our costumes ... They use them in their dens, for nests. We know it's foxes because we have motion-sensor cameras, and they go off at night. We have to get up and investigate. In Brighton a fox came into the dressingrooms at 3am. We went out and found it running away with one of the girl's bras. Another night a fox ran off with a pair of shoes.' Working for a travelling circus is 'not really a job. It's a lifestyle. You have to live and breathe the whole community. Part of it is that you want to get up at 3am to go and see what's happening in the tent, because the tent is our livelihood and part of our home.' At 7.30pm I take a seat. I wonder about the stress levels of the technicians who rig the four central towers, called king poles, and assorted gantries overhead. For the next two hours performers will climb up and down the poles, swing from them, and be suspended from unseen rigging, most of it without safety nets (although they do have harnesses). To rig the show safely, and in so many new locations, is a huge responsibility. The show starts with a remarkable appearance by Besmir Sula, a performer who uses crutches in his daily life. What he does while on them in Sabotage is worth the admission price alone. His performance is a marvel of speed, skill and grace. I feel agonised watching an aerial performer suspended by a metal ring through her hair. She does beautiful work, and is all smiles, but I can't help wondering if it hurts. I have no idea how she must train for her routine. The costumes are very Wes Anderson , shuttling between some fantasy, cartoonish world and the 1950s, with a lot of uniforms and hats. Marshall says she wears 15 costumes in the show, so an unseen element of everyone's performance is clearly the ability to change at speed. There are threads of themes through the show: political protests, riot police, huge papier-mache heads of international politicians, arrests, ambulances, casualties. At one point the four king poles take on the appearance of sinister camp checkpoints, guards staring down at inmates. As NoFit State advises, this is a show that children can watch, but it is definitely not a show made for, or aimed at, children. Despite the framing of some scenes with social protest and its effect on society, Sabotage is at its core a brilliantly creative and technical show, featuring hugely talented aerialists. In a world of AI and CGI, it's astonishing to be reminded of what the human body can achieve. Watching Sabotage in Galway, in a tent raised above the rushing waters of the Corrib, and under the mercurial west of Ireland sky, will be a very special experience. Sabotage is at Nimmo's Pier from Friday, July 11th, to Sunday, July 27th, as part of Galway International Arts Festival
Irish Times
15 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘I'm a free man': Kneecap perform at Glastonbury, as BBC opts not to live-stream set
Kneecap led Glastonbury crowds in chants of 'f*** Keir Starmer' during their set at the English festival on Saturday. The Belfast group has been in the headlines after member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the name Mo Chara, was charged with a terror offence in a London court . As he took to the stage, Mo Chara said: 'Glastonbury, I'm a free man.' In the run-up to the festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, several politicians called for Kneecap to be removed from the line-up and prime minister Keir Starmer said their performance would not be 'appropriate'. READ MORE Member Naoise Ó Cairealláin, who performs under the name Móglaí Bap, said: 'The prime minister of your country, not mine, said he didn't want us to play, so f*** Keir Starmer.' [ Kneecap's Mo Chara appears on stage with tape over mouth after terrorism charge Opens in new window ] Ó hAnnaidh, 27, wore a keffiyeh during the set, while member JJ Ó Dochartaigh, who performs under the name DJ Próvaí, wore his signature tri-coloured balaclava as well as a T-shirt that said: 'We are all Palestine Action' in reference to the soon-to-be banned campaign group. News broadcasts criticising the hip hop trio that played from the sound system before they walked onto the stage were booed by the Glastonbury Festival audience. The trio opened with the song Better Way To Live from their 2024 album Fine Art and also performed tracks including 3Cag and Hood. Access to the area around the West Holts Stage was closed around 45 minutes before their performance after groups of fans arrived to form a sea of Irish and Palestinian flags. Rap punk duo Bob Vylan performed on the stage before Kneecap and led the crowd in chants of 'Free, free Palestine' and 'Death, death to the IDF'. Earlier on Saturday, the BBC confirmed it would not be live-streaming the Kneecap set but said the performance would likely be made available on-demand later. It is understood the BBC needs to consider the performance before making a final decision. The band said on Instagram: 'The propaganda wing of the regime has just contacted us….They WILL put our set from Glastonbury today on the iPlayer later this evening for your viewing pleasure.' Ó hAnnaidh was charged with allegedly displaying a flag in support of proscribed terrorist organisation Hizbullah , while saying 'up Hamas , up Hizbullah' at a gig last November. On June 18th, the rapper was cheered by hundreds of supporters as he arrived with bandmates Ó Cairealláin and Ó Dochartaigh at Westminster Magistrates' Court in 'Free Mo Chara' T-shirts. He was released on unconditional bail until the next hearing at the same court on August 20th. Ahead of the group's performance, Gemma Gibson (41), from Newcastle, said she was 'really excited' to see Kneecap perform. Asked if their set should have been cancelled due to the controversy, she said: 'Well, that would be completely against everything that Glastonbury stands for… This is where they should be.' Festival-goer Greg Robertson (30) said: 'I don't think politicians should really have too much of an impact on a weekend where everyone's trying to have fun and trying to maybe create a more optimistic future.' Sara Majid (29) said she liked what Kneecap stood for. 'I'm intrigued by them,' she said. Irish singer CMAT , who played the Pyramid Stage on Friday, performed a secret set at the BBC Introducing stage on Saturday. Neil Young , best known for songs such as Rockin' In The Free World, Like A Hurricane and Cinnamon Girl, will headline the Pyramid Stage on Saturday night with his band the Chrome Hearts. The BBC will broadcast Young's set after previously saying it would not be shown 'at the artist's request'. - PA/Reuters
