It wasn’t all bad news last week. In case you missed them, Coach and The Week have teamed up to celebrate the men who’ve recently done something inspiring, noteworthy, daring, unbelievable, heroic or just straight-up cool…
The man who returned a lost £50,000 diamond ring
Andrew Samuels, 31, proved himself to be more honest than the average man this week by returning a £50,000 diamond ring he picked up outside Nando’s.The Londoner spotted in the ring glittering in the gutter outside the Earl’s Court branch of the chicken restaurant, then took to social media to find the jewel's owner.
“I felt a bit like Gollum at the time, revelling in my marvellous find,” he said on Facebook. “But rather than flogging this bejewelled finery at Cash Converters and blowing my winnings on scratch cards, I thought I had better do the honourable thing and try to track down the undoubtedly distraught owner.” Shortly after posting his find, Samuels was contacted by a woman, who gratefully collected her engagement ring at a local jeweller's.
The clown who was given a bravery award
A clown named Doo Doo has been recognised for bravery by the City of Toronto, after stopping in costume to help two women who were being attacked in the street. Doo Doo, real name Shane Farberman, witnessed the attack and stopped to allow the two women to climb into his car, which was already “full of clowns”. After the women scrambled into his car, the man attacked the vehicle, ripping off a wing mirror.
“You give an additional definition to the word clown. You weren’t clowning around. You were acting decisively and bravely,” councillor Norm Kelly told Doo Doo while giving him the award.
The man who earned first-class flights for life with one purchase
Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian earned himself an estimated 170,400,000 reward points when he put his most recent art purchase on his American Express card. Liu was the winning bidder for Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917 painting Reclining Nude (Nu Couché) at Christie’s auction house earlier this month. The reward points haul is enough to guarantee Liu free first-class flights for himself and his whole family for the rest of his life, Canada’s National Post estimates.
The man who became Britain's first professor of comics
It is difficult to think of a job better than that of French writer and critic Benoît Peeters who has just been appointed Visiting Professor in Graphic Fiction and Comic Art by Lancaster University. It is the first time someone has been appointed to oversee a department focused on comics in the UK.
On accepting the post, the 59-year-old Parisian said: “This professorship is a great honour for me… I want to explore the connections between the history of graphic fiction and contemporary creation”.
The Big Issue seller marrying a woman he helped at Christmas
Romance blossomed outside a Bristol café when a Big Issue salesman donated 50p to a woman who was struggling to pay her Christmas electric bill. Big Issue seller Jack Richardson and Toni Robinson found love when Richardson, who was made homeless in 2012, lent Robinson a helping hand.
“She had bought everything ready for Christmas and thought she had saved enough money for the [electricity] meter, but when she put it in it wasn't enough. She was a couple of pennies away from spending Christmas in the dark. Even though I was begging, I gave her the 50p to put her lights back on.” The pair fell in love and now plan to get married early next year.
