It wasn’t all bad

A teenage magnet fisher found 2,500 Australian dollars in cash in an old safe – and then tracked down its owner so that he could hand the money back. George Tindale, 15, was “fishing” the River Witham in Grantham with his father when they pulled the safe out of the slime. As well as the cash, it contained papers and bank cards that led them to Rob Everett. The safe had been stolen from his office 22 years earlier. “Some people are just wonderful,” he said. “They could have kept the money.”

A border terrier has survived being trapped in a hole for nearly two weeks. Six-year-old Freda burrowed into a badgers’ sett while on a walk at Lickey Hills Country Park, near Birmingham. Her owner, Victoria Hogan, set up camp outside the hole, in the hope that Freda would pop up. She even fried some bacon and tried to waft the smell downwards using a leaf blower. After eight nights out, Hogan gave up and went home to grieve her dog. But four days later, Freda was found by three students on a nearby road, who took her straight to a vet. “She was very weak and bedraggled but she was alive,” Hogan said.

A tiny book written by Charlotte Brontë in 1829, when she was 13, and containing ten of her poems, is set to go home to West Yorkshire. The Book of

Ryhmes [sic] – which measures just 10cm by 6cm – was last seen at auction in 1916, when it sold for $520. This time, it fetched $1.25m. The titles of its poems have long been known to scholars, but little was known of the poems themselves. The book was bought by a charity, which is donating it to the Brontë Parsonage Museum. “I can’t quite believe it,” said Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s curator.