--:-- Paul Moss: This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is The Happy Pod from the BBC World Service.
--:-- Paul Moss: I went over there and I was like, we have to get them out. And I mean, because I guess that was just like the motherly instinct in me. Like I seen that mama and she was trying so hard to get her babies back.
--:-- Nikki Cardwell: We've all been there, unable to resist a delicious treat, but also unable to judge when we've had enough. And it's often mum who picks up the pieces when we're facing the consequences of our own excess.
--:-- Nikki Cardwell: What happened to you? Come on. In this case, it was Misty Coombs, a nurse from Kentucky, who heroically intervened to help a raccoon rescue two of her babies who got stuck in a skip next to a moonshine distillery where they gorged on fermented peaches that had been thrown away.
--:-- Misty Coombs: I went over there and I was like, we have to get them out. and I mean because I guess that was just like the motherly instinct in me like I seen that mama and she was trying so hard to get her babies back but she didn't know what to do.
--:-- Misty Coombs: She scooped out one of the babies with a spade but the second was unconscious and not breathing. Come on baby come on. Everybody that was around was like it's dead I mean it's just not going to make it and it was it was not breathing so immediately I just started doing CPR on it. Come on. Come on. Come on.
--:-- Misty Coombs: Then a sign of life. The raccoon by this time nicknamed Otis took a breath and started to move. After a night at the vet sleeping off the moonshine Otis was given a clean bill of health and Misty was given the honour of sending him back home.
--:-- Nikki Cardwell: Oh it'll want I was tickled to death that he was able to join its mom again. Misty says hopefully Otis has seen the error of his ways and the next time he's drawn to the tempting smell of fermented peaches, thinks twice before overindulging.
--:-- Nikki Cardwell: Yeah, that poor little raccoon, I hope it stays out of the dumpster. Goodbye, Otis.
--:-- Paul Moss: Barbara Hernandez is a cold water swimmer from Chile known as the Ice Mermaid. Earlier this year, she braved hypothermia and hungry leopard seals to become the first South American to complete a marathon challenge known as the Ocean's Seven.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: And now she's front-crawled her way to a Guinness World Record, completing the furthest ice swim ever by a woman. And she did it all without a wetsuit.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: She sounds like rather a glutton for punishment, telling people the pain is the prize. And that dedicated determination has won her hundreds of thousands of fans around the world.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: The Happy Pod's Stephanie Prentice caught up with Miss Hernandez and discovered that within her spirit of adventure, there's a life lesson.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: When I jumped into the water, I really enjoyed the feeling, And just stay there and see the mountains, see the snow and feel this cold, but also thinking about my heart and my memories.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: When your body is dealing with a level of pain, really physical pain, is it those happy memories that get you through it? Yes, I have a lot of memories with my team, with my parents, with my husband.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: The key is go through the pain and sometimes it's also about embrace the fear, embrace the pain and go through this. I love that. If you're going through a hard time, keep going. Keep going, yes.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: The Ice Mermaid never wears a wetsuit or the kind of insulating grease that some cold water swimmers use. and she completed the last segment of this swim while suffering from hypothermia.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: I was worried, of course, because it's so important to be in that place and to be alert and very connected with the team next to you on the boat.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: So in the beginning, of course, with the adrenaline, you stay so fast, so happy and everything. And then it's so difficult because you feel the pain and of course your hands and your legs is every time more heavier.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: So it's very difficult, but also again the key is your breath. So I stay connected with my breath.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: Another time Barbara used her breath to stay calm during previous open water record attempts where she was up close with sea leopards, jellyfish and sharks.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: I think the key again is embrace your fear The sharks, of course, they swim under you. So I thought maybe we can be just friends.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: Sharks aside Barbara credits her human friends with getting her through And to get this world record she spent more than an hour in the water and swam for 3 kilometers beating the previous record of 3
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: But as she builds her ice swimming community online, she told us that getting other people in the water is her true purpose.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: It's not about the Guinness World Record or the medals. is how we can be our own community, trying for our goals and embrace the fear, embrace the doubts and go through that.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: So start. Never is the best moment. So the best moment is just now. Just stay and start again and again.
--:-- Barbara Hernandez: Because for me, that is life.
--:-- Paul Moss: I think many of us will have had the experience of looking at an old photograph of ourselves and perhaps wondering, who was I back then? Am I really the same person as that toddler or child?
--:-- Peter Ross: That's what the Scottish writer Peter Ross felt when he saw a photo taken of him at the age of 11 on a Scottish island.
--:-- Peter Ross: It prompted him to set off on a quest to find the spot where he was standing and to replicate the same scene almost 40 years later.
--:-- Peter Ross: When I turned 50 years old, my mother gave me an album full of pictures from my childhood. So it was a real nostalgic rush, quite emotional, really.
--:-- Peter Ross: And there was this one photo that seemed to have a different look and feel to the others. And it was me as a boy sitting on what I took to be an ancient standing stone.
--:-- Peter Ross: I had no memory of the picture being taken, and I didn't know for sure where it was or even when it was. So it had this strange quality of a lost memory.
--:-- Peter Ross: I had an idea that it was the island of Islay, an island that I'd only ever been to once in the 1980s.
--:-- Peter Ross: There was just something about the quality of the light and the landscape that made me want to go and seek it out.
--:-- Peter Ross: and also the picture has this kind of hazy sort of fuzzy quality, a sort of warmth but also a kind of melancholy quality to it.
--:-- Peter Ross: So although it's a moment from my own life, it's just out of reach.
--:-- Paul Moss: Now the Scottish island of Islay, I gather, has quite a lot of standing stones. How did you manage to find this particular stone?
--:-- Peter Ross: Yeah, Islay is rich in prehistoric remains. I followed a hunch that it was the island of Islay
--:-- Peter Ross: And while I was there, I met an archaeologist who is a specialist in the prehistoric sites of the island.
--:-- Peter Ross: And as soon as he saw the picture, he was able to tell me what it was, which is Cragabus, a Neolithic chambered cairn.
--:-- Peter Ross: In other words, a tomb, which was built around 3500 BC. And he showed me on a map where I could find it.
--:-- Peter Ross: So there you are on Islay and you do manage to find the site, the stone where this particular photograph was taken.
--:-- Peter Ross: How did it feel to be back there nearly half a century later?
--:-- Peter Ross: We have to kind of reach to the Welsh language for this. The Welsh have a word, hirith, which is sometimes described as homesickness.
--:-- Peter Ross: But I think it's more like a yearning for a place or a person that can never be reached. It's a kind of ache in the soul, but not unpleasant.
--:-- Peter Ross: And that picture to me is a perfect example of Heeraith. That's what I felt when I was there.
--:-- Peter Ross: I felt connected to my past, but also cut off from it. You know, the stone is the same, but I'm not the same person as I was then.
--:-- Paul Moss: Recreating these pictures give us a strong sense of how fleeting our lives are, and they perhaps encourage us to make the most of them.
--:-- Paul Moss: Peter Ross, author of Upon a White Horse, journeys in ancient Britain and Ireland, speaking to us about the joys of recreating a childhood photo.
--:-- Vanessa Heaney: Now, plenty of people worry about climate change. perhaps fewer tried directly to do something about it. 81-year-old Janet Williner's concern led her to grow more than 4,000 trees.
--:-- Janet Williner: She foraged for the seeds locally and grew each sapling in her own garden.
--:-- Vanessa Heaney: Trees, of course, take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These ones have been added to forests in the North English county of Yorkshire where she lives.
--:-- Janet Williner: I decided that I probably had 10 years of active life left. And if I could grow a few more than I'd done, say 500 a year, for 10 years I could grow 5,000 trees.
--:-- Janet Williner: And that would be a reasonable legacy.
--:-- Janet Williner: Janet secured sponsorship for her tree project and estimates she's already grown around 4,200 trees, gifting them back to nature through a variety of organisations.
--:-- Janet Williner: she really hopes to inspire others. Because what I can do as an individual person is just a drop in the ocean but an ocean is made out of lots of drops.
--:-- Vanessa Heaney: So if other people could do something similar. And Janet has no plans to take off her gardening gloves anytime soon.
--:-- Paul Moss: When she reaches her target of 5,000 trees there's quite a big possibility she'll keep growing.
--:-- Paul Moss: Vanessa Heaney reporting.
--:-- Paul Moss: And if there's anyone in your community that's doing something small or big to combat climate change, we'd like to hear about it.
--:-- Paul Moss: The email address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Paul Moss: Coming up in this podcast...
--:-- Asma Khalid: She struggles with her emotions and stuff like that. So it was put to me about helping her with resilience and just getting her confidence built up and stuff like that and it seems to have worked she a lot better than she used to be the playground helping children explore and where no parents are allowed America is changing and so is the world.
--:-- Asma Khalid: But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
--:-- Asma Khalid: I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story.
--:-- Tristan Redman: Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.
--:-- Paul Moss: Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Harry Bly: The Palace of Versailles, just outside the French capital, Paris, has teamed up with two AI companies in a project that allows many of its statues to talk to visitors.
--:-- Harry Bly: They're hoping this will be a new way for guests of all ages to learn about the art and history of its Baroque gardens.
--:-- Marion Carre: What we bring into the experience was the ability to use information from their site to feed the AI with it. But we need the AI not to invent information.
--:-- Marion Carre: Currently, the chatbots can be used in three languages, English, French and Spanish, and there are plans to expand this.
--:-- Pierre-Hippolyte Penney: We have 6,000 questions asked every day to the statues. And the visitors seem to be very happy with the experience, with the new way to interact with the sculpture and to discover more information about history, the creation of the sculptures and the Grieco-Roman mythology.
--:-- Pierre-Hippolyte Penney: Pierre Hippolyte says embracing innovation is firmly in keeping with the history of the palace and its former residents.
--:-- Harry Bly: Carlos Acosta is widely considered one of the greatest classical dancers of the modern age, with his career taking him from the back streets of the Cuban capital Havana to some of the most prestigious stages in the world.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: After retiring from performing a decade ago, he set up a dance company in Havana called Acosta Danza, which has taken classical stories and styles and added a distinctly Cuban flavour.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: It's called A Decade in Motion and Isabella Jewell went to meet Carlos as the group were rehearsing.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: In this programme, you could see what Acosta Danza is all about. You will see pieces in point work and contemporary and Cuban folk.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: you will see a platform for foreign choreographers to express their own part of Cuba from their own perspective.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: It consists in four pieces. I think it's Sony. It summarizes what Cuban is all about. It's the Caribbean. It's a melting pot of culture.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: It is in line with what I intended for the very beginning for this company, which was a company that will share the Cuban talent to the world.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: So it is a bridge from Cuba to the world and vice versa.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: This is to celebrate a decade since you founded your dance company, Acosta Danza. Could you tell me a little bit more about it and your ethos for the dance company?
--:-- Carlos Acosta: In Cuba you have three dominant companies which is the National Ballet of Cuba the Danza Contemporanea de Cuba and the Folkloric of Cuba and so I thought I was going to form a company that sits in the middle of it and we develop a dancer that could do everything could do from classical to contemporary and Cuban folk
--:-- Carlos Acosta: And then the following year in 2016 we formed the Academy And I must say that 10 years on now, all of the dancers came from the Academy.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: Most of them come from Santiago, Guantanamo, from the eastern part of Cuba. They have very, very poor backgrounds, similarly to mine.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: We gave them everything for free, from the shoes that they wore, the costumes, we trained them.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: We are half Spanish, African, French, Chinese, and so that's why this kind of melting pot of dances that the Acosta Danza dances have in their bodies is a symbol also of who they are as a culture.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: When we went to the Kennedy Center this last April, the critics really value the authenticity of the repertory.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: Because you have dancers that start doing point work like classical, but then they take the shoes off and do a most extraordinary contemporary piece.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: And then lastly, with tennis shoes, they dance conga and salsa and very stylized kind of Cuban rhythm in one performance.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: and so that is quite unique.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: Do you yourself miss performing on the stage in front of an audience?
--:-- Carlos Acosta: I love the fact that when you are at this time in my career, it's about everybody else. It's about directing, it's about bringing dancers, development and bringing audience joy through a company.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: But, you know, when you dance, it's all about you. It's about you, your thoughts, you in the space. just being in tune with your body and then really connecting to an audience.
--:-- Carlos Acosta: I can't give you the news now, but I'm planning to be real soon on stage again and you will hear about it.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: Some music from A Decade in Motion.
--:-- Paul Moss: And finally, in this edition of The Happy Pod, we visit a playground with a twist.
--:-- William Kremer: The land in Wrexham in North Wales is a community-funded play area for children where parents are not allowed.
--:-- William Kremer: The idea is that this approach of free play can improve young people's mental health.
--:-- William Kremer: They did make an exception, though, for the BBC's William Kremer, who got a sneak adult chance to see the land and find out more.
--:-- Amelia: Imagine a place where children come together to make toys, build houses and play games.
--:-- Amelia: Grown-ups aren't allowed in unless they have special permission and children are free to do whatever they want.
--:-- Amelia: Well, this place exists and it's called simply the land.
--:-- Amelia: You could build stuff here and there's a lot of wood and at the park you don't get to do that.
--:-- Claire Pugh: This was a neglected piece of wasteland and the fence went up and really claimed this space for children.
--:-- William Kremer: At first glance, the land is little more than a junkyard.
--:-- William Kremer: There are stacks of used wooden pallets and big reels for holding wires.
--:-- William Kremer: but if you look a little bit closer you'll see crooked homemade structures, hidey holes and turrets.
--:-- William Kremer: Children run barefoot. They swing on ropes and throw themselves down a makeshift water slide.
--:-- Amelia: We're making secret bases up there. Are you? Yeah, no, I'm underneath there.
--:-- Amelia: Do you want to show me your base or is it too secret?
--:-- Amelia: Well, come on, I'll show you.
--:-- Amelia: I follow five-year-old Amelia. Come on. Yeah, I'm coming. Yeah, I'm coming.
--:-- Amelia: Oh my goodness. There's a whole web of these plastic tubes that the kids scurry up like hamsters.
--:-- Amelia: Amelia's just gone up a blue tunnel and I'm not sure I'm going to fit in it.
--:-- Amelia: I'm trying. It's really small.
--:-- William Kremer: The children like to play lots of running games and catch games and as an adult you try and navigate through them and it's really difficult and you'll scrape your back or bang your head but kids are the experts and they just fly through them and it just highlights that this is their space.
--:-- Amelia: This is my base. Is this your base? I'm not sure I'm going to get out.
--:-- Amelia: This is my base.
--:-- William Kremer: The tunnels are fashioned from industrial tubing, from building sites.
--:-- William Kremer: Structures like this are made by the children themselves or put together by attendants called play workers, based on the children's ideas.
--:-- William Kremer: This type of playground is not new.
--:-- William Kremer: The first junk playground, or adventure playground, opened in the 1940s in Copenhagen, Denmark.
--:-- William Kremer: Then, after the British landscape architect Lady Alan of Hertwood observed the way that children played on bombsites in England, she suggested allowing them to play there freely and build their own structures.
--:-- William Kremer: Adventure playgrounds reached their heyday in the 1970s, but they're now a rarity.
--:-- William Kremer: Most playgrounds have fixed equipment that doesn't change.
--:-- Jamie: I'm showing you a little house I made. This is nine-year-old Jamie.
--:-- Jamie: What, you bang the nails and stuff? Yeah. No way.
--:-- Jamie: Jamie has been coming to the land for about a year.
--:-- Jamie: Her mother told me that coming here has had a big impact on her mental wellbeing.
--:-- Jamie: She struggles with her emotions and stuff like that. So it was put to me about helping her with resilience and just getting her confidence built up and stuff like that.
--:-- Jamie: And it seems to have worked. She's a lot better than she used to be.
--:-- Jamie: She's come out of herself a lot more.
--:-- Dakota: 13-year-old Dakota has been coming here since she was seven.
--:-- Dakota: When I first started joining, I was shy and I didn't talk to anyone at all.
--:-- Dakota: But when I started coming more, I started talking and being more confident.
--:-- William Kremer: 13-year-old Dakota.
--:-- Paul Moss: And to hear more about the power of play, just search for People Fixing the World wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
--:-- Paul Moss: and that's all from the happy pod for now we'd love to hear from you about people who are doing something in your community to help climate change as ever the address is global podcast at bbc.co.uk
--:-- Paul Moss: This edition was mixed by mark pickett and the producers were holly gibbs and harry bligh the editor is karen martin i'm paul moss until next time goodbye
