coastal squeeze

Sometimes reading a new word or phrase opens a whole new perspective on problems that we may already have known about in a less focused way. The words alone can suggest new connections, analytical methods, ways of describing things, a whole new world. This happened to me recently when I spotted the expression "coastal squeeze" in the headline of a press release. So I had to do a feature about how the coasts get squeezed, and why, and what to do about it.

My feature is out now:

Squeezed between land and sea

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 14, 21 July 2025, Pages R687-R689

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Coastal ecosystems are at risk of being squeezed out between rising sea levels and encroaching infrastructure. (Photo: x70tjw/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

a radiant legacy

I quite enjoyed learning about all the alumnae of Marie Curie's lab by reading:

The elements of Marie Curie
Dava Sobel
Fourth Estate 2024

It was also a good excuse to brush up on her life more generally, as it's been a fair few years since I read the biographies by Eve Curie and by Susan Quinn (long before I started to trouble the world with my reviews). My review is out now:

A radiant legacy

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 7-8, July-August 2025, Page 31

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

a 125-year-old new townhall

The Neues Rathaus (new townhall) of Elberfeld was new in 1900, when it was inaugurated by Kaiser Wilhelm II together with the famous suspension railway on October 24. The city administration moved there from the old townhall which now houses the Von der Heydt Museum.

It was where Heinrich the cellist worked from 1919 onwards. (After the merger with Barmen in 1929 he may or may not have been working at Barmen townhall at some point, as well as the shortlived appointment at the city's pawnshop, so I'm not sure how many decades he spent working in this building - I'd say at least one). At the time it appeared in all its art nouveau glory on the cover of the residents register of the city of Elberfeld:

Although the main seat of the city administration of Wuppertal is now in Barmen, the Elberfeld townhall is still part of it and contains public-facing offices, especially social services. After realising this, I scheduled a visit to just have a look around, which I did in February this year, and I loved the place to bits. They don't do tours or open days, but the porter didn't mind me just snooping around and taking lots of photos. Here's a selection, I have also put a set of 12 photos on my flickr.

I also took a ride or two on the paternoster, which was one of the things my aunt remembered from visiting her grandparents at Wuppertal.

32 strings attached

When I'm visiting flea markets in Germany, I sometimes see zithers, and have always passed them by. One day in September 2023, however, at the Aachener Platz fleamarket at Düsseldorf, I came across a derelict one that was marked a very affordable 5€, and when I had a closer look the vendor reduced the price to 4€. It looked like this:

I was one year into my pirate luthier adventures and thought, maybe I can fix this one, so I bought it and had it sitting around in a corner for a year and a half.

Now, after rediscovering the photo I took at the flea market before buying the instrument and sharing that on flickr, I got round to fixing it up. The biggest challenge was getting my head around the tuning of the harmony strings. The melody strings (above the fretted fingerboard) are tuned like a viola with a duplicate a string: CGDAA. (This is the Munich tuning, as opposed to the Viennese tuning which has a duplicate G string.) The harmony strings (away from the fingerboard) go around the circle of fifths: Eb Bb F C G D A E B F# C# G# Which makes 12 strings. And then the same thing again an octave below (bass strings), another 12. And then, depending on the model, there are variable numbers of contrabass strings descending from Eb chromatically. Mine only has three of these, so that's 27 plus 5 equals 32 strings, phew.

Of these, all of the melody strings and five of the harmony strings were missing, leaving me with just 22 strings in place. Bits of wire that may have been strings in happier times were strung around the back, suggesting that somebody had hung the instrument on a wall for decorative purposes.

When I tried to tune up the 22 strings (very slowly as I tried to get my head round that tuning pattern), I found that the tension warped the frame of the instrument upwards, away from its backside, with an ugly gap opening up under the tuning pegs. So I needed to relax the strings again and glue that gap shut with hide glue to make sure this can't happen.

I'm glad to report that this operation was successful, and I have now all 32 strings on and tuned up to their proper pitch and the instrument has stayed in its proper shape. I also applied some teak oil to the wooden surfaces to spruce them up a bit (not sure if that's allowed on instruments and I wouldn't have dared on a violin!), and that seems to have worked as well, so the instrument now looks like this:

There are still some small bits of wood missing around the edges which I'll carve and glue in at some point, but that's essentially a cosmetic issue and the instrument is playable now. The melody strings are brand new (cheap) violin strings, and the harmony strings are whatever I could find lying around that matched the requirements. I think the four higher ones were nyckelharpa strings in an earlier life, and the one at the lowest end is an old cello string. It looks a bit too bulky for this instrument but it does sound lovely for the bottom note.

In theory, the F, A and C# strings are coloured red for easier orientation. Now that I know this, I can just about detect remnants of the colour and confirm that I have the right strings in the right places (apart from one F string that was missing), but it's not conspicuous enough to be real help with playing. It's also confusing for harp players used to recognising the C strings by their red colour.

Oh, and when I attempted to clean up the fingerboard, I discovered a nearly invisible brand name, Sonora:

I found a few zithers and lots of other instruments under that name (including outdoors tubular bells) but it doesn't seem to be an established brand name for a specific zither maker, so it didn't lead me to any information re who made my zither where.

More info on zithers (in German) on this website claiming you only need three hands to play it.

If you think you've never heard a zither, here's the one zither tune that everybody knows.

And here is a picture from Wikipedia of a similar one being played:

Von Naturpuur - Eigenes Werk, CC BY 4.0, Link

crossing the Mediterranean

Humans have been crossing the Mediterranean for millennia, even before the Phoenicians invented the ways and means to build proper ships. I took a recent study of the ancient genomes of numerous people living in the Phoenician colonies around the Western Mediterranean as an excuse to look into the ancient travels on the Mediterranean, including when and how people first reached the islands. Your regular reminder that humans have always migrated and will continue to do so.

My feature is out now:

Mediterranean movements

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 13, 7 July 2025, Pages R639-R641

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Genomes from Punic burials reveal the surprising diversity of the people who lived in communities that were culturally Phoenician. The image shows pendant masks from Carthage made of glass paste in the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE. (Photo from the exhibit Carthage: The Immortal Myth inside the Colosseum and taken by G41rn8/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

a bookish book

Some thoughts on

The bookbinder of Jericho
Pip Williams
Vintage Paperback 2024

I loved Pip Williams's Dictionary of lost words, so kept an eye open for her follow-up novel, which has now crossed my path in a matching edition. (Faced with an ever-growing TBR pile, there is no point ordering books, I just let fate decide.) Although this is not quite a sequel, we are staying in the realm of Oxford University Press, and Esme's dictionary of lost words gets a cameo appearance here. In fact, this novel grew out of a discovery the author made when she researched the first one.

Williams found that in the early 20th century lots of women worked for the Press in the book binding process, but have been forgotten by written history. And this led her to a remarkable frontline between Town and Gown, and between the working folks and posh people. The line runs along Walton Street in Jericho - to the West of it the books published by the Press were typeset, printed, bound, etc., at that point still with lots of manual labour, and just opposite on the other side of the road, at Somerville College, the first generation of young women that had the opportunity to obtain degrees from Oxford University were studying the contents of those very same books. Even their exam papers were produced on the other side of the road.

Our fictional lead character, Peggy, has been working in the bindery since the age of 12 but harbours the ambition to cross the road into Somerville, to "read the books, not bind them". It looked like an impossible ambition in Victorian times, even more so for an orphan looking after her twin sister with autism, but World War I helps to stir the class system just enough to open a plausible path for her to achieve that.

Williams invents the characters standing in for those who were too unimportant to have been recorded by history, but the more notable people that pop up in the story are historic, including for instance the principal of Somerville, and the famous Somervillian Vera Brittain (author of Testament of youth), as well as the upper echelons at OUP.

Her local knowledge is amazing (especially for somebody normally living in Australia, but I assume she must have spent some time in Oxford). Just one thing occurred to me that she may have missed: People go to the cinema in her story, and I think the Electric theatre in Castle Street is mentioned as the place they go. In fact, Jericho got its own cinema during that time, the North Oxford Kinema, which is still standing and now known as the Phoenix Picturehouse. It opened in March 1913, so the characters in the novel would have walked past it and might have noticed a new cinema popping up in their neighbourhood.

Like the first novel, this one is also a heartwarming fairytale driven by social justice and feminist themes. Surprisingly, after the novel about words in dictionaries, the author managed to produce an even more bookish book.

PS re-reading the blurb on the back of my paperback edition after posting this entry, I noticed that none of the things that I discussed above and that are obviously crucial to me get mentioned there. The presentation there goes to great lengths to avoid the mention of books, Oxford, Jericho, education etc. Trying to sell it as a novel about what women do when the men are off to fight a war. Of which there are hundreds of others I suspect, so not at all what makes this book special.

Other reviews etc:

Here is an appreciation from Jericho Online

A Guardian piece about the author and the book

a lady in red

Pirate Luthier update

What happened in June? I haven't quite launched the big give-away I was planning, but the Freegle ad looking for violin cases (to be able to give away violins that currently don't have a case) has led to a few interesting follow-ups. One was that I gave two childrens sized violins (numbers 10 with the neck glued back on and 14, a half-sized Lark) to an organisation that gives free initial violin lessons to children at festivals, so these two fiddles may be in use at Glastonbury Festival as this blog entry goes live. Very exciting.

It also led to two new violins coming into the pirate workshop. Number 26 is an old European model that I'm just setting up with a new bridge and then returning to its family. It was described to me as a 7/8 size (like the ladies violin from last year) but it's rather small for that, closer to 3/4 according to my measurements. With a matching bow that is also between 3/4 and 7/8 size. I'm loving the historic case lined with red felt, so I took lots of photos of the violin in its case:

The other just came in yesterday, so I'll write about it later.

List of violins in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). I bought it very cheap on gumtree, mainly because I needed a case for number 1). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) was my second favourite and the one I played in folk sessions for roughly a year until number 22) showed up.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 10) is the 3/4 sized one with a broken neck and traces of multiple repair attempts, which I've now repaired. I kept it for a couple of months to check the neck stays in place, then gave it away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 13) is still broken

violin 14) is a half-size Lark which I gave away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 15) is a 3/4 size Stentor student 2, which I gave away to a local school in October 2024

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one, sadly not made by the Mittenwald luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland, which I restored and returned to its family.

violin 19) is a Stentor student 1 violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

violin 20) is a Stentor student 1 violin I bought via GumTree. It sounds really nice for what it is, thanks in part to a good set-up with Dominant strings. My current plan is to make this one an official Cowley Orchestra instrument.

violin 21) is a nameless student violin I bought via facebook, not quite sure what to think of it. The fingerboard is horizontal, which is all wrong and may mean there is not enough pressure on the bridge to produce a good sound.

violin 22) is the 19th century Guarneri copy, still my favourite (although I'll have to fix that crack at some point).

violin 23) is a nameless student violin I bought from a charity shop. It looks unused but had no strings, so I set it up with a set of spare strings that came with another violin. It turned out to be no trouble at all and sounds ok for an instrument that looks really cheap (with the purfling painted on).

violin 24) is the densely cratered one I found lying on a chair at Oxfam, and which I currently play at sessions.

violin 25) is the fleamarket find from Neuss

violin 26) is the lady in red described above, which has now rejoined its family.

Balance 27.6.2025:
Of the 26 violins listed above, 7 received via freegle, 3 from friends and family, 14 bought (gumtree, facebook, charity shops, flea markets, cost ranging £ 10 to £45), 2 taken in for repair only and returned to their families.
Of the 24 acquired, 8 given away via freegle, 2 given to a local school, 2 sold to musical friends, 1 moved to Germany for holiday practice, 9 currently in house and ready to play, 2 in house and still broken.

List of non-violins in the pirate luthier series:

An old Irish banjo

guitar 1) is the 100 year-old one from Valencia which I set up with frets and strings and handed back to its owner.

guitar 2) is one I spotted in a charity shop "sold as seen" for a very affordable price with nothing more than a broken string, and I bought and repaired it because I knew the owner of the next one needed one while their guitar was out of service.

guitar 3) had a broken neck which I glued back on with hide glue at the same time when I repaired violin 10). It's holding so far.

and finally a shout-out to our family-built hammered dulcimer, which dates from 2016, long before I got any ideas about violins.

the big story of tiny forests

I used to get quite a few stories from Earthwatch Europe back in the noughties, when they sent expeditions to lots of places around the world. Nowadays they focus on issues closer to home such as butterfly counts and water quality, so there aren't so many different ecosystems involved, hence fewer features to write (although I did one on citizen science in 2021).

Recently I heard a talk from Claire Narraway at the Oxford Cafe Scientifique about their tiny forests programme, and was intrigued by the way the idea has travelled around the world, pioneered in Japan by Akira Miyawaki, and being scaled up in India, to arrive on some 300 tennis-court-sized plots in the UK. So I wrote a feature about it and also went to the local tiny forest in Meadow Lane to take a few photos.

My feature is out now:

How tiny forests became a big thing

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 12, 23 June 2025, Pages R587-R589

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Oxford's very own tiny forest in Meadow Lane. Own photo.

deep down

As an armchair explorer of life under extreme conditions, I always enjoy reading the accounts of people who dare to go to these dangerous places themselves. One of them is Susan Casey, whose book on deep sea dives is informed by her own participation in some of the exploration as well as by immersing herself in the weird and wonderful world of those people who are prepared to go to the bottom of the oceans. While I had covered the 20th century explorations in my books, it was enlightening to read about the recent multi-record breaking exploits of Victor Vescovo who visited the deepest points of all five oceans in solo dives (the Five Deeps project completed in 2019).

The book is called

The underworld: Journeys to the depths of the oceans
Susan Casey
Penguin 2024

and my review is out now:

Oceanic exploration

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 6, June 2025, Page 30

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

dvořák's American adventures

Some thoughts on

Dvorak in Love: A light-hearted dream
Original title of the Czech edition: Scherzo capriccioso
1984
Josef Škvorecký

I have always been a fan of Antonín Dvořák's works from the American period (1893-1895), including his cello concerto in B minor, the New World symphony, the American quartet, the Sonatina, and the humoresque. I did not however, have a very clear view of how this body of work came into being, i.e. how the composer's "discovery" of this new world came about.

Josef Škvorecký's (1924-2012) light-hearted and indeed boisterous novelisation of this part of the composer's life gives a very vivid impression of how it may have happened. Although the second part of the title seems to suggest it's probably imagined. I guess to find out which parts of this were true I will have to re-read the relevant 30 pages of Neil Wenborn's biography: Dvořák: His life and music, which didn't leave much of a lasting impression when I read them more than 10 years ago.

Škvorecký's version is a very elaborate choreography swirling around just about everybody who had anything to do with the composer's decision to move to New York, and then with the decision not to stay after the expiration of his first contract. The best parts go to the women around him, including his employer, the very remarkable Jeannette Thurber (1850-1946), his wife Anna, her older sister Josephine, and his daughter Otylia. Men come in as love interests for these formidable women, and also for comic relief, which often involves some very heavy drinking.

Many of the chapters are like crowded rooms where it is at times difficult to keep track of the many characters and their multiple interactions, with the narration typically jumping between times as they reminisce about earlier encounters with each other or with the great composer. With hindsight I should have drawn a flow chart for this. The author must have had one and I imagine it may have had a beautiful symmetry too complex for me to grasp while juggling all these connections in my mind while reading.

Leaving aside the gossipy bits involving a lot of heavy drinking and extramarital adventures, there is enough food for musical thought to justify reading the book as a source to learn about Dvořák's work of the American period. Musical and other soundscape influences of the New World that we now find immortalised in his works are pointed out and put into their biographical context (or quite possibly into an imagined context). Conversely, there is also some thoughts on how Dvorak's work in New York influenced the nascent American music scene, and how both sides of the deal might have co-evolved further, if Dvořák had decided to stay in New York. Which he might have done if his daughter, allegedly torn between two admirers, had opted for the one based in the US. So this musical question kind of justifies the reporting of young Otilya's New World adventures.

Apart from the works mentioned above, the American (inspired) output also includes a string quintet (with a second viola) and a suite (written for piano then arranged for orchestra), both of which I only discovered recently, and the opera Rusalka, which strangely didn't capture me when I listened to it once or twice. Will try again.

the Trimbach connection

Ten years ago, I looked into the story of the miners migrating from Fischbach (Nahe) to Markirch (Sainte Marie Aux Mines) and mentioned several interesting leads connected to the Trimbach family which stayed in Markirch for several generations. (NB I'm using the German name for Sainte Marie aux Mines because it's a lot shorter. As I explained in the migrating miners entry, the town was split between territories, languages and confessions for several centuries.) There is a likely Huguenot connection, as well as a link to a wine-growing business still active today. All safely buried in a great big materials file I compiled at the time.

I was reminded of the Trimbachs now because I became interested in family names that are also place names and go back far enough to support the hypothesis that the first in the name line took the name of the place where he came from, for instance after being displaced and on arrival at a new place becoming known as the person from the previous place.

So Trimbach is such a case, and intriguingly one place with this name is half way on the well trodden path of the migrating miners between Fischbach and Markirch. Another is in Switzerland. But which could it be? Let's introduce some Trimbach people first:

We're starting from the supremely unsearchable Paul Simon, born 1740 in Markirch, who migrated to Böchingen, Palatinate, where his descendants became entangled with the Klundt Clan.

His mother was Maria Susanna Trimbach * 1713 + 1752 Markirch. Her male line ancestry goes:

Paul Trimbach * 1682/83 (calc.) Echery (now part of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines) ~ 1682 Markirch oo Maria Salome Klein five children + 1760 Markirch aged 77

Johann Georg Trimbach ~ 1635 Markirch oo (II.) 1667 Elisabeth Saass + 1693 Echery (the same person, identified by baptism and death dates and names of parents and first wife, is known as Paul Trimbach in the Gaudel genealogy)

Jakob Trimbach oo 1623 Ermelind Monschat (Irmel Besuchet) from Lapoutroie + 1669 Markirch

Jean Jacques Trimbach * around 1570 oo Susanne Marchand at least three children including a Jean Trimbach who on 15.9.1625 married Marguerite Reisser in Riquewihr. I'm assuming he is the same Jean Trimbach who in 1626 established himself as a wine grower in that very town, according to the Trimbach website. The business moved a couple of times while staying in the Trimbach family and is now located in Ribeauvillé. (Incidentally both Ribeauvillé and Riquewihr are today tourist destinations for all things Alsatian.) If I've got my maths right, the founder must be my 9xgreat grand uncle.

Laurent Trimbach * around 1540 Markirch oo 1570/71 Marie Anne Sturm in Riquewihr

the name line ends here, but six generations of Trimbachs in one spot isn't too shabby.

Now one village with the name of Trimbach is in the northeast corner of Alsace region, around 100 km north-northeast of Markirch. It has always had just a few hundred residents (435 in 1793). I was keen to connect the name to this one, as it is on the route from Fischbach, but others seem to have other information:

The history page of the Trimbach winery, however, says the family came to Markirch from Switzerland in the 16th century to work in the silver mines. There is a Trimbach town in the Canton Solothurn in the north of Switzerland, not all too far from Alsace (also just over 100 km from Markirch), so that would make sense too.

Trimbach is one of three names in my family tree that appear on wine labels to this day. The others are Klundt and Minges. All three are in the ancestry of Barbara Klundt (1847-1886).

The miners' tower at Echery.
Image source: Wikipedia / Von Rauenstein - Selbst fotografiert, CC BY-SA 3.0

In the hope that this will grow into a series, here's my nucleus list of blog entries exploring name/place connections:

1. Wolff (named after the Wolffskotten farm in Styrum);
2. Zeuzheim; further details re. the Zeuzheim family
3. Trimbach

save the fungi

Today's issue of Current Biology contains a special theme section on fungi, with lots of fascinating fungal facts. My contribution is focused on the conservation of fungal species which has long been a neglected field. Only this year a major catching up effort catapulted the number of fungi in the IUCN Red List to more than 1,000.

Like plants and animals, many fungi are at risk of extinction due to the effects of habitat loss, land use change, the climate catastrophe and/or invasive species. Only that the threats are much less well known in fungi, so a lot of work remains to be done.

My feature is out now:

Fungi in peril

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 11, 9 June 2025, Pages R438-R440

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Cover of Current Biology vol 35 issue 11. Cover image: the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, releases its spores in the early morning light. Photograph © Jason O' Brien.