It wasn’t all bad

A woman is about to celebrate the 101st birthday of her kidney, 43 years after it was transplanted from her mother. Sue Westhead, 68, from Wearside, received the organ in 1973 after being diagnosed with kidney disease. Her late mother was 57 at the time, and would have turned 101 this November. Transplants from living donors rarely last longer than 20 years, but Westhead has defied doctors’ expectations, and is thought to have the world’s oldest transplanted kidney.

On the island of Lundy, the puffin has come back from the brink. The bird has been breeding on Lundy, 12 miles off the coast of Devon, for centuries. But when its population was devastated by rats, who ate the puffins’ eggs and chicks, it looked as if the population might be wiped out. In 2000, there were just five pairs left on the island. But following a cull of rats by the Lundy Seabird Recovery Project, the island was declared rat-free in 2006, and the bird is now thriving. Wildlife experts recently counted more than 300 puffins there, and about 100 are currently breeding.

Police in Rome have gone beyond the call of duty by cooking pasta for a lonely elderly couple. The officers were called to the home of the pair, named only as Jole, 84, and Michele, 94, when neighbours heard crying from their flat. The couple explained that they had been overcome by loneliness because no one had visited them in months. The officers cooked them a meal and then stuck around for a chat. “Sometimes [loneliness] is like a summer storm,” said one officer. “It comes suddenly and overtakes one.”