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Coronavirus positive: Good news round-up – Children take to pontoons and theatre-goers to car parks

Children can be seen jumping of the pontoon in the sea in Brighton and Hove - LNP 
Children can be seen jumping of the pontoon in the sea in Brighton and Hove - LNP

Children were climbing to the pontoons and launching themselves into the sea in Brighton and Hove on Tuesday – more of that in the coming days as temperatures rocket.

Meanwhile, Horrible Histories is looking back to “really ancient history” and taking the theatre to the people during the epidemic. Audiences will be able to watch performances from their cars and sound will be transmitted through each car’s radio.

Author Terry Deary said that when the plague hit Shakespeare’s London in 1593 “theatres were closed because of social distancing, which is an amazing thing, to think that people were aware that crowding people into a theatre was not a healthy thing to do."

"Theatres responded brilliantly. Shakespeare went off and started writing poetry but he probably also went on tour,” he added.

"They just loaded everything onto a cart because the plague wasn't seen as a problem, outside of London. So they could pull up to a country inn and play in the courtyard there and keep going." You can join the Car Park Party here.

Deck the halls with boughs of unused kegs? Hundreds of thousands of Guinness kegs are being repurposed to fertilise Christmas trees under a forestry project. The famous brewery bought back millions of litres of stout, beer and ale from closed pubs and is disposing of the drink in this environmentally friendly way.

Aidan Crowe, the director of operations at the brewery, said: "The vast majority of the beer goes to willow and Christmas tree plantations, it's used as nutrients in those farms. We've also diverted some product through to anaerobic digesters, where it produces a bio-gas.

"Actually, we're quite optimistic that, in the long term, that bio-gas can be a suitable fuel source for us to use here in the brewery. And then we've also diverted some of the product for composting.”

Are you ready to start judging books by their back covers? Some branches of Waterstones have started to display their books blurb-first so shoppers can read without picking them up. London Picadilly apologised to "all book designers" while the Swansea branch said "upside down is the new right way up."

And in Washington, when a dog went missing in the middle of the pandemic, a neighbourhood rallied together to find him. On May 3, Finn disappeared when on a walk in the woods. His owner, Debi Blaney, frantically started searching for him, but had no luck. She texted a friend, who works as a teacher, who in turn contacted his students to tell them to look out for Finn.

Soon 20 people were searching for the dog in the woods – while keeping their distance. One child bought dog biscuits along and another neighbour printed 100 copies of the missing dog flier to hand out and post up. A week later, a further 20 people who were mostly strangers had joined the hunt, and by mid-May Finn had been found.

Around the world

  • In Belgium a businessman has given face masks a human face. Charles de Bellefroid has used a photo booth and a mobile app to produce masks that have the lower half of the wearer’s features on them in an effort to make life more friendly and fun.

  • The council of a small German town, Stadt Bühl, built its very own video conferencing platform to keep its 30,000-strong community connected during lockdown. The decision was made to build a service using  Jitsi  that was free for large groups and easy to access. At its peak, more than 1,000 residents simultaneously used the platform. The local children’s and family centre ran its school holiday activity programme virtually, with children able to participate in a video-led craft session.

  • One baseball fan in Japan, 14-year-old Futaba Tsuchiy, was taken inside the otherwise empty Tokyo Dome on Tuesday to watch the  Yomiuri Giants' win, by a monitor mounted on a robot she controlled from home.

TODAY’S MOODBOARD

Three pleasant things to put into your head 

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Cotswold Lavender Farm opens to the public

A child walks through Cotswold Lavender Farm - Mikal Ludlow Photography 
A child walks through Cotswold Lavender Farm - Mikal Ludlow Photography

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  • Do you have some good news to share? What's made you happier in the past 24 hours? Have you seen a pleasing picture? Please send it all our way, either by commenting below or emailing coronapositive@telegraph.co.uk