The ‘bike ladies’ of Bombali, a wandering tortoise and more uplifting stories

Good morning.

“At first when I started, people were mocking me,” says Mariama Timbo. “Now they see how my life has changed since I started riding the bike.”

Timbo is a recognisable figure on her pink motorbike in her home province of Sierra Leone, writes Caitlin Kelly, as the sole female biker ferrying people and goods to town.

Motorcycles are a vital lifeline in Sierra Leone after war led to the destruction of transport infrastructure. The locally known okadas are often the only accessible and affordable way to reach markets, hospitals and cities. Almost 60% of the rural population lives in poverty, so commercial riding offers income to hundreds of thousands – but the vast majority are men.

Timbo is striving to change this, by leading the newly formed Bombali Bike Ladies to help inspire a new generation of women to hit the road.

More life-affirming tales can be found below in our recap of all the uplifting stories from this week’s First Edition newsletter …

The Guardian newsletters team

A giant puppet of a Syrian girl has inspired a pilgrimage of hundreds of lifesize animal puppets – from central Africa to the Arctic Circle. As Isabel Choat reports, the public art initiative called The Herds will travel to 20 cities over four months to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

The Herds, produced by award-winning Walk productions that was co-founded by Palestinian playwright and director Amir Nizar Zuabi, has already travelled through Kinshasa, Lagos and Dakar. “The idea is to put in front of people that there is an emergency – not with scientific facts, but with emotions,” said The Herds’ Senegal producer, Sarah Desbois.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50 this week. Guy Lodge looks back on watching the film at different stages of his life, and how it holds up now. “Half a century on, the film is palpably a product of its era – visible in its own stylings and those of the contemporary works it responds to – but the Python sensibility remains so strangely, dizzily sui generis that it can’t really date all that much,” he reckons.

To him, it remains “a film made to be recited by heart, hilarious even as second-hand evocation, and still possessed of pleasures and surprises that generations of cultists haven’t yet spoiled”.

Leonardo, a tortoise who disappeared from his Cumbria home almost nine months ago, was feared lost by his owners.

But the “intrepid testudine”, as Jamie Grierson calls him, was found just a mile away (meaning he travelled about six metres a day further from home) this week. Brave Leonardo was spotted by a surely baffled dog walker, and dropped off at Little Beasties pet shop in Ulveston, who reunited him with owner Rachel Etches.

“It was totally my fault; we were out in the garden, we’d just had our second child, I got a bit distracted and he just wandered off out of our sight,” Etches confesses.

“He’s led a very comfortable life for 13 years under a heat lamp in my house, so we didn’t think he was going to survive the winter being out for the first time.”

After 20 years, the world’s favourite monster - he of knobbly knees, turned-out toes and wart on his nose - is back. Legendary children’s book duo Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler have announced that they are working on a new Gruffalo book, set to launch in September of this year.

The original Gruffalo stories, The Gruffalo and the Gruffalo’s Child, were published in 1999 and 2004 and have remained among some of the most popular children’s titles in the world, collectively selling over 5 million copies. It has become a staple of a generation of children’s bedtime routines, spawning films, theatre shows and a huge range of Gruffalo merchandise.

In previous interviews, Donaldson said that she had originally intended the main character in the Gruffalo books to be a tiger but couldn’t think of a good enough rhyme. In the end she decided to create a monster and needed a word of three syllables ending with “oh” and starting with “grrr” and so the gruffalo was born.

In the five years since the managers of the Sharpham estate in south Devon began an ambitious rewilding project on the 223 hectare estate, miraculous things have started to happen. Butterflies, woodland animals and insects have returned, and a flock of 500 goldfinches have appeared, drawn to the new food sources from the grasses and thistles that have grown over what used to be ploughed fields.

For years the estate, originally created by a wealthy naval sea captain from the spoils of plundered Spanish treasure, has been hosting Buddhist-inspired mindfulness retreats.

When the rewilding project began, the new director of the estate Julian Carnell wanted to build something that would combine the estate’s mental health work with its conservation aims. Since then, they have designed the programme around ensuring that people can get access to the land and its natural environment, holistically.

The hope is that in the coming years, as the project continues, more people, as well as the land itself, will continue to feel the benefits.