It wasn’t all bad

The corona-crisis appears to have encouraged millions of people to cut down on their smoking, or give up entirely. According to a YouGov survey, 2% of UK smokers have quit, because they’re worried their habit makes them more vulnerable to Covid-19; a further 8% say they are trying to give up, and 36% say they have cut down. Extrapolating the findings suggests more than 850,000 people have given up smoking, or are trying to, and 2.4 million are smoking less.

Scores of rebel botanists are using chalk to identify the weeds that grow up walls and in the cracks on city pavements, in an attempt to change people’s perceptions of these diverse but neglected plants. The idea of naming wild plants began in France, and has spread around Europe. Now Sophie Leguil, who set up the UK branch of the campaign More Than Weeds, has been given permission to chalk up the streets of Hackney in east London. She says that she hopes the project “could make people look at [plants] in a different way”.

Tens of thousands of bored sports fans tuned in to watch three pole vaulters compete in an event dubbed the Ultimate Garden Clash. Cheered on by his daughter on a nearby swing, Olympic gold medallist Renaud Lavillenie competed in his garden in France, against the worldrecord-holder Armand “Mondo” Duplantis, in Louisiana, and world champ Sam Kendricks in Mississippi. The live-streamed challenge, to clear a five-metre bar as many times as possible in 30 minutes, was jointly won by Duplantis and Lavillenie, with 36 clearances each.