Couple have same heart surgery within days - and five more local stories you missed this week
A couple who underwent the same life-saving heart surgery at the same hospital within the space of a few days feature in our best local stories of the week.
Cheshire Live reported how Donald and Joan Curzon - who have been married for 56 years - are now recovering from their operations at their home near Winsford.
Elsewhere, a former Miss Wales finalist has won a £6m house in the Omaze draw and German tourists travelled 700 miles to Scotland for a pie.
You can read the full version of each of our selected articles through the links under each story – or read more top headlines from around the UK's regions on the Yahoo UK local news page.
A married Cheshire couple of 56 years have hailed the "marvellous" care they received after both undergoing the same life-saving heart surgery within the space of a week.
Donald and Joan Curzon both needed surgery for a transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) after separately being referred to University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust's (UHNM) cardiology department.
Donald, 86, and Joan, 77, are now recovering at their home in Meadow Bank, near Winsford, following their treatment at the Royal Stoke hospital earlier in the month.
Read the full story from Cheshire Live
A former finalist in Miss Wales who has never owned her own home has won a spectacular £6m home through the Omaze million pound house draw.
Vicky Curtis-Cresswell, 38, had been living with her family until she won the property.
Vicky is now the owner of a New England-style coastal property in Norfolk inspired by the architecture found in Cape Cod and the Hamptons in the United States.
Her incredible new home is the most valuable property ever to be offered in a UK prize draw.
Read the full story from Wales Online
Two childhood sweethearts have been reunited after 85 years thanks to an old school photo.
Jim Dougal and Betty Davidson used to walk to school together hand in hand in Eyemouth in the Scottish Borders in the 1930s.
They lost touch after Jim's family moved away in about 1939, but his son Alistair's efforts to trace all the members of a class photo from 1936 brought them back together.
Read the full story from the Daily Record
The opportunity for Kernewek, the Cornish language, being taught in all schools in Cornwall took a step forward yesterday (Wednesday, March 26) when Anna Gelderd MP delivered a 'ten minute rule bill' in parliament calling for Cornish to have equal status to the other four Celtic languages of the UK.
The MP, backed by Cornwall's five other MPs, would like to see children being able to learn Kernewek in all primary schools. She pointed out that Cornish is still not formally embedded in secondary or higher education.
Read the full story from Cornwall Live
A tourist travelled all the way from Berlin to West Lothian to try an award-winning speciality pie.
Paul and Christine Boyle have enjoyed a surge in business after their kebab pie went viral for winning the "pie of pies" title at the 2025 British Pie Awards in Leicestershire.
Now, a tourist from Germany embarked on a journey over 700 miles via Prague, Leicester and Newcastle, to Boghall Butchers in Bathgate. Michael Hunter travelled with a friend and is no stranger to kebab meat with over 1,000 shops in Berlin.
Read the full story from Edinburgh Live
Police swooped to help a lost swan outside a Coventry school just before home time on Tuesday afternoon (25 March).
A few people picking up their little ones at Grange Hurst Primary on Anderton Road were in a bit of flap when they spotted the seemingly lost bird.
But a police officer was on hand and the long arm, or should that be neck, of the law managed to save the day, by ushering the swan towards more familiar ground.
Read the full story from Coventry Live
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World-famous German "nail artist" Günther Uecker dies at 95
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Yahoo
an hour ago
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German artist who 'painted with nails', Guenther Uecker, dead at 95
German sculptor and installation artist Guenther Uecker, best known for his mesmerising artworks using thousands of nails, has died at age 95. His works, created from the 1950s saw him hammer nails into furniture, TV sets, canvases and a tree trunk, creating undulating patterns, the illusion of movement and intricate shadow plays. While he became famous for using a hammer instead of a brush to "paint with nails", Uecker, considered one of Germany's most influential artists, later also used other materials, from sand to stones and ash. Uecker was born on March 13, 1930, in Wendorf in what is now the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. He grew up on Wustrow, a peninsula north of the Baltic Sea port of Wismar, experiencing the horrors of World War II. A few days before the German surrender, the ship "Cap Arcona" sank near his hometown, with 4,500 concentration camp prisoners on board. Uecker helped bury the dead who washed up on shore, a traumatic experience he addressed decades later in his work "New Wustrow Cloths". Fearing the advance of the Russian Red Army, a young Uecker nailed shut the door of his family home from the inside to protect his mother and sisters. Uecker remembered that "panicked, instinctive act" in a 2015 TV documentary with public broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk. "That had a profound impact on me and was perhaps a key experience for my later artistic work." - 'Intrusiveness and aggression' - Even as a child, Uecker was constantly drawing. This displeased his father, a farmer, who thought his son was "a failure and not quite normal", Uecker recalled in a 2010 interview with the Rheinische Post daily. As a young man in East Germany, Uecker in 1949 began an apprenticeship as a painter and advertising designer, then studied fine art. But Uecker, who wanted to study under his artistic idol Otto Pankok, fled East Germany in 1953 and transferred to the University of Dusseldorf. Uecker, who created his first nail paintings in the late 1950s, later said that the nail attracted him for its "intrusiveness, coupled with a strong potential for aggression", something he said he also carried within himself. In 1961, he joined the art group Zero of Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, who sought to counter the devastation of World War II with a spirit of optimism and lightness. Zero aimed to return art to its absolute basics, they wrote in their manifesto: "Zero is the beginning." Uecker's work often addressed contemporary issues. His ash paintings, for example, were a response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. After xenophobic riots targeted migrants in a suburb of Rostock in 1992, he created a series called "The Tortured Man" which was exhibited in 57 countries. Uecker's works are exhibited in museums and galleries, but he also designed cathedral church windows and the prayer room of Berlin's Reichstag building housing the lower house of parliament. Asked once whether he was bothered by being known simply as the nail artist, he said he wasn't. "Something like that is necessary for identification ... People need a symbol, an emblem." wik/fz/sea/giv
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World-famous German "nail artist" Günther Uecker dies at 95
BERLIN (AP) — German artist Günther Uecker, one of the country's most important post-war artists who was world-famous for his large-format nail reliefs, has died. He was 95. German news agency dpa reported that his family confirmed he died at the university hospital in his hometown of Düsseldorf in western Germany Tuesday night. They did not give a cause of death. For decades, Uecker, who was often dubbed 'the nail artist,' created art by hammering carpenter's nails into chairs, pianos, sewing machines and canvases. His works can be found in museums and collections across the globe. In his art work, seemingly endless numbers of nails, which would by themselves perhaps be perceived as potentially aggressive and hurtful, turned into harmonic, almost organic creations. His reliefs with the tightly hewn nails are reminiscent of waving grasses or fields of algae in a marine landscape. Uecker himself described his nail art as diary-like landscapes of the soul, which he called an 'expression of the poetic power of man,' dpa reported. Hendrik Wüst, the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia which includes state capital Düsseldorf, called Uecker 'one of the most important and influential artists in German post-war history' and said that with his life's work, he influenced generations of young artists and 'contributed to an open and dynamic society." Born on March 13, 1930, in the village of Wendorf on the Baltic Sea, Uecker moved to Düsseldorf in the mid-1950s, where he studied and later also taught at the city's prestigious art academy. In one of his most spectacular appearances or art happenings, he rode on the back of a camel through the hallways of the venerable academy in 1978. Together with fellow artist Gerhard Richter, he 'occupied' the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden museum in 1968, with both kissing in front of the cameras. The son of a farmer, he traveled the world with a humanitarian message of peace and exhibited in countless countries, including dictatorships and totalitarian states. He painted ash pictures after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986, and exhibited human rights messages painted on fabric in Beijing. He also painted 'Verletzungswörter,' or words of violence, killing and torment in many languages and foreign scripts on large canvases. In 2023, Uecker erected a stone memorial in Weimar in memory of the victims of the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. 'The theme of my artistic work is the vulnerability of man by man,' he said.
