It wasn’t all bad

A record-breaking number of tourists came to the UK last year. Confounding expectations, there were 37.3 million visitors – up 3% on 2015 – who took advantage of the weak pound to spend a whopping £22.2bn. Britain proved a particularly popular destination with Americans: they accounted for 4.3 million of the visitors. Early indicators suggest tourists will keep flooding in this year: bookings for February to April are up 16% compared with the same period in 2016.

An architectural historian claims to be the owner of Britain’s oldest plastic shopping bag. Sue O’dowd, 65, was given the bag while shopping at Tesco in 1981. Part of a batch produced to mark the supermarket’s 50th anniversary, it has survived five house moves, travelling from Birmingham to Much Wenlock in Shropshire. A keen knitter, O’dowd now uses it to store her spare wool. “It’s really been a bag for life,” said her daughter Frankie, who was born shortly before the bag was acquired. However, O’dowd has competition: one Martin Mccaskie claimed last year to also have a Tesco bag dating from 1981 – and to have used his some 2,000 times.

A two-year-old girl could be the first person in the world to have been cured of cancer by gene editing. The patient, Layla Richards, was diagnosed with acute lympho-blastic leukaemia when she was three months old. Using groundbreaking methods that had only been tested in a lab, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital took a donor’s healthy immune cells and added new genes to arm Layla against the cancer. Now, 18 months later, she has been clear of the disease for so long that doctors think the treatment could amount to a cure.