Five Yorkshire Stories That Will Make You Smile This Week

Yorkshire: Five Stories

On 27 September, Kevin Sinfield will leave Hull for the first of seven ultra-marathons. He plans to run from Hull to Manchester over seven days, finishing at the Super League Grand Final on 3 October. Along the way he will visit all 12 English Super League grounds. He is wearing a white hooded jacket over an orange and blue T-shirt printed with charity logos and a blue number seven. A bald man in a matching T-shirt will run behind him. Sinfield wants to sell 7,777 pairs of sports socks for MND charities. The number seven honours Rob Burrow, his former Leeds Rhinos teammate, who lived with motor neurone disease for four and a half years and died in June 2024. Sinfield has raised more than £11 million for MND causes. "If we all do a tiny bit, it goes a long, long way," he said. The socks come in pairs, go into bags and then into the post. He wants to sell seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven of them.

On Wednesday, Grace Orton stood in a shop in front of a display of Pokémon cards. She wore a denim jacket with a Pokémon badge pinned to it and smiled at the camera. Pokémon had released its 30th anniversary range. Gus Hall, who owns Evolution Games in Halifax, said he was "massively excited." One collector called it Pokémon's biggest day "in the last decade, if not more." For most people, Wednesday was the middle of the week. For Grace, it was a chance to look at cards, stand in a queue and maybe buy some. The cards are paper, printed with colourful creatures. Thirty years of video games, shop shelves, trades and battles have passed. Some cards sat in plastic sleeves, some in binders, some in boxes, some behind glass. Grace stood in front of them, wore the badge, smiled at the camera, and the camera clicked. The cards stayed on the shelf.

In a lab at the University of York, a gloved hand held a small piece of mammoth ivory carved with geometric lines. Its surface was weathered and speckled. Researchers examined 18 "Venus" models found in Mizyn, northern Ukraine, and thought to be 18,000 years old. The teams came from the University of York, the University of Stavanger in Norway and the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. Under microscopes, they found that Ice Age craftspeople had observed and copied the ivory's natural lines. The finding challenged the traditional view of how Stone Age art evolved across Europe. The lines are small, but they have lasted 18,000 years. Eighteen thousand years later, someone held the ivory under a bright light with a white glove. The lines were still there.

In Rawmarsh, Rotherham, Alex Ward and his brother Tom make hot sauce in their parents' kitchen. They spent six months travelling and researching Southeast Asian cuisine. They grew up putting hot sauce on everything. Now they wear hairnets, gloves and black T-shirts and hold up a large bucket of red chillies. Alex is 28. He won the title of Young Trader of the Year at the National Market Traders Federation. A year earlier, he won a regional award. He said the category had tough opposition and that he wanted to win. He won. The bucket is plastic. The chillies are red. The kitchen belongs to his parents. The sauce goes into bottles, then onto market stalls. Customers take it home and put it on food. The kitchen gets messy. The brothers clean it and make more.

In Bradford city centre, the former Jacob's Well council building site is still a car park. Design images have been revealed for Brit North, the first Brit School-inspired performing arts college in the north of England. The images show a large grey and black stone building, two bus stops, and an area of grass and trees. The plans were announced in 2023. In February, the council sold the land to the Department for Education. According to a planning application, Bradford's designation as UK City of Culture 2025 helped bring the school to the city. People hope the project will improve arts facilities across the North of England. For now, the renderings are drawings. The school is not built. The car park is still there.

Sinfield starts in Hull on 27 September.