It wasn’t all bad

A man from Latvia has cycled every street in central London over the past five years. Soon after moving to the capital, Davis Vilums started varying his morning commute and found that going down different streets made him feel “part of the city” – and so the computer programmer set himself the challenge of cycling down every one of them. He tracked his progress using GPS and GoPro footage, and also coloured in the streets as he completed them on an A-Z map.

A musician who left his prized £250,000 violin on a train has been reunited with the instrument, at a late-night rendezvous in a car park. Stephen Morris was devastated when he realised he had forgotten the 310-year-old David Tecchler violin on a train home from London on 22 October. First, he hoped it would turn up in Lost Property; then he contacted the police, who found CCTV footage of a man getting off the train with a violin case. They put out an appeal for help in identifying him, and soon they were contacted by “Gene”: it seems he had picked up the violin, but had realised his mistake and was keen to give it back, and to apologise to Morris in person. After lengthy negotiation led by ex-Scotland Yard police officer Mike Pannett, “Gene” agreed to the car park handover. “You could tell by the expression on this young man’s face when he walked up – he had the biggest smile on his face – that he knew he’d done the right thing and the pressure had come off and he could carry on with his life,” said Pannett. “That expression said it all.”