Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: Nurse revives 'drunk' raccoon

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

A nurse in the US state of Kentucky has gone viral after she saved a baby raccoon who became 'drunk' on fermented fruit. The cub had passed out after eating peaches, thrown away by a distillery. Also: we hear from Bárbara Hernández, a cold water swimmer from Chile, known as the Ice Mermaid. She's front crawled her way to a Guinness World Record, completing the farthest ice swim ever by a woman. Plus, the man recreating a childhood photo, the 81-year-old woman who planted 4,000 trees; and Carlos Acosta on his latest milestone. Our weekly collection of inspiring, uplifting and happy news from around the world.Presenter: Paul Moss. Music composed by Iona Hampson

This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Moss, and in this edition... 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. The raccoon brought back to life by a nurse after one too many peaches. 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. Life lessons from the woman dubbed the Ice Mermaid. 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. The man who wanted to recreate a picture from his childhood almost 40 years later. We meet 81-year-old Janet, who's grown more than 4,000 trees in her garden. And, what are the animals? that I'm seeing. Before you, one group shows a hound, overpowering a stag, while the other depicts a tiger attacking a bear. The talking statues in France teaching history. We start in the United States, where a nurse in the state of Kentucky has won international fame

after she was filmed resuscitating an unconscious baby raccoon. The carboner. had passed out after eating fermented peaches, thrown away by a distillery. Nikki Cardwell has been finding out more. 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. What happened do 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.

She told the local TV station Lex 18 what happened. 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. 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 not breathing. So immediately, I just started doing CPR on it. Come on. Oh, oh, it's done. It's coming down.

Come on. Come on. Then a sign of life. The raccoon, by this time, nicknamed Otis, took a breath and started to move. After a night at the vets, sleeping off the moonshine, Otis was given a clean bill of health. And Misty was given the honour of sending him back home. Oh, it'll once help bad. Yeah, it does.

He knows it home. I was tickled to death that he was able to join its mom again. Come on, Otis. Yeah. 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. Yeah, that poor little raccoon, I hope it stays out of the dumpster.

Goodbye, Otis. Nikki Cardwell reporting. 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 Oceans 7. 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.

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. The Happy Pod's Stephanie Prentice caught up with Ms. Hernandez and discovered that within her spirit of adventure, there's a life lesson. A group of people wrapped up in thermal jackets are climbing onto a small boat, dusting off the frost to sit down. One of them takes a deep breath and strips

down to a swimsuit. The water lapping against the outside is 4.5 degrees Celsius and Barbara Hernandez, the ice mermaid, is going in. In the ice cold waters of Puerto Natale's Chile, this self-styled mermaid is going after her fourth world record. When I jump into the water, I really enjoyed the ceiling. Just stay there and see the mountains, see the snow and feel this cold, but also thinking about my heart and my memories. 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. 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. I think that is the best word ever. 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. 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. 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.

so it's very difficult but also again the key is your breath so I stay connected with my faith 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 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. 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 3.8 kilometers beating the previous record of 3.5.

But as she builds her ice swimming community online, she taught us that getting other people in the water is her true purpose. It's not about the Guinness World Record or the medals is how it can be our own community trying for our goals and embrace the fear, embrace the doves, and go through that. So start. Never is the best moment.

So the best moment is just now. Just stay and start again and again because for me that is life. That report from St. Stephanie Prentice. 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?

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. I had an idea that it was the island of Isla, an island that I'd only ever been to once in the 1980s. There was just something about the quality of the light and the landscape that made me want to go and seek it out. 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.

So although it's a moment from my own life, it's just out of reach. Now, the Scottish Island of Ila, I gather, has quite a lot of standing stones. How did you manage to find this particular stone? Yeah, Ila is rich in prehistoric remains. I followed a hunch that it was the island of Ila. And while I was there, I met an archaeologist who is a specialist in the prehistoric sites of the island. And as soon as he saw the picture, he was able to tell me what it was, which is Cragabus, a neolithic chambered cairn. In other words, a tomb, which was built around 3,500 BC.

And he showed me on a map where I could find it. So there you are on Isla, and you do manage to find the site, the stone where this is. particular photograph was taken. How did it feel to be back there nearly half a century later? We have to kind of reach to the Welsh language for this. The Welsh have a word, he wreath, which is sometimes described as homesickness,

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. And that picture, to me, is a perfect example of hewryth. That's what I felt when I was there. 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. That's what makes these old stones significant, I think.

Their eternal quality makes us feel our own transience more keenly. 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. 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. 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. She forage for the seeds locally and grew each sapling in her own garden. 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. Vanessa Heaney has more. Meet Janet Williner, otherwise known as the tree-growing granny. It started out because I was deeply saddened by the destruction that the human race have caused on this beautiful planet of ours.

So she joined the zero-carbon movement and learned about different ways to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change. The only one she felt she could achieve was planting trees which absorbed the gas known as carbon sequestering. Janet had always loved growing things, so she started foraging for local seeds. She planted them in some empty pots she had at home and waited. She didn't tell anyone what she was doing just in case they didn't germinate. The first week of lockdown, I'd been staring at these pots of soil all through the winter. And that day, when lockdown was started, I saw the first green shoots come up. And I was absolutely over the moon.

She tried to grow around 20 species of trees native to the UK, such as oak, hazel, rowan, birch and spindle. What started as a small experiment rapidly grew into something rather big. By the end of the first season, she'd grown 400 trees, all of which she'd financed by herself. and then came her ambitious target. 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. And that would be a reasonable legacy.

Janet secured sponsorship for her tree project and estimate she's already grown around 4,200 trees, gifting them back to nature through a variety of organisations. 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. So if other people could do something similar. And Janet has no plans to take off her gardening gloves any time soon.

When she reaches her target of 5,000 trees, there's quite a big possibility she'll keep growing. Vanessa Heaney reporting. 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. The email address is Global Podcast at BBC.co.com. Coming up in this podcast... She struggles with her emotions and stuff like that.

So it was put to me about helping her with resilience and just getting a confidence built up and stuff like that. And it seems to have worked. She's a lot better than she used to be. The playground helping children. explore and where no parents are allowed. 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. 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.

A reporter Harry Bly went to see them. The horses represent the power and energy of the sun. They are spirited and almost untamable, showing the raw force of nature. This was me at the Palace of Versailles, speaking to Apollo's Fountain. What is the big golden fish in the water? Ah, that's no fish. Those are sea monsters surrounding my chariot. They blow their trumpets to announce my...

The music you can hear tells you that we're in the Baroque gardens of the palace. Here there are 20 iconic fountains and statues, which visitors can now speak to and hear their stories. It's all come about thanks to a partnership with the artificial intelligence firms, OpenAI, and Ask Mona. And it's relatively simple. At each site, there's a QR code. When you scan it with your mobile phone,

it takes you to a website where users can launch a conversation. Now, to give some visual context here, Apollo's fountain is right in the middle of the palace gardens, just down the hill from the palace itself. The fountain features the Greek god Apollo, the god of sun, rising from the water in a four-horse chariot, all in gold. Chateau Versailles partnered with Open AI, for the popular app Chats GPT to create the real-time conversational technology that lets visitors converse in a natural and immersive way, and Ask Mona, a French AI company which specialises in

designing artificial intelligence products in cultural and educational settings. Ask Mona is known for bringing to life famous artworks like the Mona Lisa to provide engaging conversations with visitors. Marian Carrey is the founder of Ask Mona. She told me how important it was that each chatbot was trained with accurate information. What we bring into the experience was the ability to use information from their site to fit the AI with it.

But we need the AI not to invent information. Currently, the chatbot can be used in three languages, English, French and Spanish, and there are plans to expand this. Developers have also ensured that each statue's bot has its own curated voice to best suit the character being depicted. What aspect of these animal combats intrigues you? What are the animals that I'm seeing?

Before you, one group shows a hound overpowering a stag, while the other depicts a tiger attacking a bear. Both scenes capture a moment of... And as Marion explains, the bot can adjust to people of different ages. So, for example, if you're going from the statue and say, hey, I'm with a six-year-old kid, then I wanted to talk about blah, blah, blah. The AI is going to answer with appropriate language for a six-year-old killed.

So it's really a way for us to be able to personalize the experience. Pierre Ipolite-Pené is the chief curator at Chateau Versailles and led this project. We have 6,000 questions asked. every day to the statues and the visitors seems to be very, very happy with experience with a new way

to interact with the sculpture and to discover more information about history, the creation of the sculptures and the Quaker Roman mythos Pierre Ipulite says

embracing innovation is firmly in keeping with the history of the palace and its former residents. We can say that Versailles has always been at the forefront of innovation. We can remember that during the 17 and 18th centuries, many inventions were presented to the king here in Versailles. So we are in a tradition of innovation in Versailles. Pierre Uppelin, chief heritage curator at the Palace of Versailles,

ending that report by 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. After retiring from performing a decade ago, he set up a dance company in Havana called Acosta Dancer, which has taken classical stories and styles and added a distinctly Cuban flavor.

And to celebrate the 10-year milestone, The dance company is bringing a showcase of its work to the London Theatre, Sadler's Wells. It's called A Decade in Motion, and Isabella Jewel went to meet Carlos as the group were rehearsing. In this program, you could see what Acosta Danza is all about. You will see pieces in point work and contemporary and Cuban folk. You will see a platform for foreign choreography,

geographers to express their own part of Cuba from their own perspective. It consists in four pieces. I think it's sunny. It summarizes what Cuban is all about. It's the Caribbean. It's a melting boat of culture. 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. So it is a bridge from Cuba to the world and vice versa. 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? In Cuba, you have three dominant company, which is the National Valley of Cuba, the Danza Contemporaneous of 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 dancers that could do everything, could do from classical to contemporary and Cuban folk. And then the following year in 2016, we found the academy.

And I must say that 10 years on, now all of the dances came from the academy. Most of them come from Santiago, Guantanamo, from the eastern part of Cuba, the very, very poor background, similarly to mine. We gave them everything for free from the shoes that they wear, the costumes, we trained them. 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 who they are as a culture. when we went to the Kennedy Center this last April the critic really value the authenticity of the repertory because you have dances that start doing point work like classical

but then they take the shoes off and do a most extraordinary contemporary piece and then lastly with tennis shoes they dance conga and salsa and very stylized kind of Cuban rhythm in one performance and so that is quite unique Do you yourself miss performing on the stage in front of an audience? I love the fact that when you are at this time of my career it's about everybody else, it's about directing, it's about bringing dancers, development

and bringing audience joy through a company but when you dance, it's all about you. It's about you, your thoughts, you in the space. you know, just being in tune with your body and then really connecting to an audience. I can't give you the news now, but yeah, I'm planning to be real soon on stage again and you will hear about it.

Some music from A Decade in Motion, ending that report from Isabella Jewel. And finally, in this edition of The Happy Pod, we visit a playground with a twist. The land in Wrexham in North Wales is a community-funded play area for children where parents are not allowed. The idea is that this approach of free play can improve young people's mental health. 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. Imagine a place where children come together to make toys, build houses and play games.

Grown-ups aren't allowed in unless they have special permission. And children are free to do whatever they want. Well, this place exists, and it's called simply the land. You could build stuff here and there's a lot of wood and at the park you don't get to do that. The land is a space. that supports children's play,

that society may struggle to support. Claire Pugh started the land in 2012 after working on other play schemes in this neighbourhood. This was a neglected piece of wasteland, and the fence went up and really claimed this space for children. At first glance, the land is little more than a junkyard. There are stacks of used wooden pallets and big reels for holding wires.

But if you look a little bit closer, you'll see crooked homemade structures. holes and turrets. Children run barefoot. They swing on ropes and throw themselves down a makeshift water slide. We're making secret bases up there. Are you? Yeah, and I'm underneath there. Do you want to show me your base or is it too secret? Well, come on. I'll show you. Okay. I follow five-year-old Amelia. Yeah, I'm coming. Yeah, I'm coming. Oh my goodness. There's a whole web of these plastic tubes that the kids scurry up like hamsters

Amelia's just gone up a blue tunnel and I'm not sure I'm going to fit in it I'm trying it's really small The children like to play like 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 you'll bang your head but kids are the experts and they just fly through them and it just highlights that this is their space This is my base? Is this your base? I'm not sure I'm going to get out. This is my base. The tunnels are fashioned from industrial tubing, from building sites.

Structures like this are made by the children themselves, or put together by attendants called playworkers, based on the children's ideas. This type of playground is not new. The first junk playground, or adventure playground, opened in the 1940s in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then, after the British landscape architect, Lady Alan of Hurtwood, observed the way that children played on bombsites in England.

She suggested allowing them to play there freely and build their own structures. Adventure playgrounds reached their heyday in the 1970s, but they're now a rarity. Most playgrounds have fixed equipment that doesn't change. I'm showing you a little house I made. This is nine-year-old Jamie. What, you bang the nails and stuff?

Yeah. No way. Jamie has been coming to the land for about a year. Her mother told me that coming here has had a big impact on her mental well-being. 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's a lot better than she used to be. She's come out of herself a lot more. 13-year-old Dakota has been coming here since she was seven. When I first started joining, I was like shy and I didn't talk to anyone at all. But when I started coming more, I started talking and being more confident. 13-year-old Dakota, ending that report by William Kremmer. And to hear more about the power of play, just search for people fixing the world wherever you get your BBC podcasts. 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. This edition was mixed by Mark Pickett and the producers were Holly Gibbs and Harry Bly. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Paul Moss. Until next time, goodbye.