It wasn’t all bad

Britain’s oldest poppy seller – a war veteran who survived Auschwitz – is now 100, but insists he has no plans to retire. Ron Jones was captured in Benghazi in 1942. He spent two years in a labour camp that formed part of the Auschwitz complex, and was sent on a death march in 1945. By the time he was freed, he weighed just seven stone. He began selling poppies in Newport, South Wales, after retiring as a dockworker in 1980. “If they need help, I’m there,” he said.

In a scene straight out of Pixar’s hit animated film Up, a British adventurer has been carried 1.5 miles into the sky, suspended from 100 large helium balloons. But whereas the film’s elderly hero attaches his house to the balloons, Tom Morgan, 38, from Bristol, sat in a camping chair for his 15-mile flight, above a stretch of desert outside Johannesburg. “It was a fairly indescribable feeling, wafting across Africa on a cheap camping chair dangling from a load of balloons,” said Morgan, who founded the fundraising organisation The Adventurists in 2004. “Sort of peaceful and terrifying in equal measure.”

A Scottish comic book creator who sold his company to Netflix for a rumoured $50m has vowed to use a large chunk of his fortune to regenerate the town of his birth, Coatbridge in Lanarkshire. Mark Millar, the man behind the Kick-ass and Kingsman series, and his wife Lucy plan to develop brownfield sites for family homes and then pump the profits back into a range of community activities. Already this year, they are funding a Christmas dinner and a variety show for local pensioners, and a trip to the panto in Glasgow for children.