bridges of folly

Some thoughts on

Folly Bridge: A romantic tale
by D. L. Murray
Hodder and Stoughton 1945

I used to think that the folly of Folly Bridge was the unusual house with the statues enshrined in the walls (No. 5 Folly Bridge) but this book taught me about the real folly, a gate tower that was actually sitting on the bridge and was known as Friar Bacon's Study until it was demolished in 1779. In the "romantic tale" the building burns down as a consequence of the fictional events related, set in two subsequent academic years the 1770s. Lord North shows up as Prime Minister (which he was between 1770 and 1782) and the timing is further narrowed down by the fact that another bridge, the Petty Pont across the Cherwell, is being rebuilt (1772-78) as the structure we now know as Magdalen Bridge. So let's say 1777-1779.

The story is an elaborated plot of students and robbers reminiscent of the 19th century robber romances around figures like Schinderhannes in Germany. The message seems to be that Oxford in that time was such a corrupting place that it turned an innocent boy from a village rectory into a hardened criminal within one academic year. So there's definitely more than one interpretation to the folly of the title. There doesn't seem to be much learning going on between the college dinners, academic ceremonies and church services. Towns folk only occur as mobs watching executions or seeking to fight with students, and the roles of Gypsies as criminals and a Jew as moneylender are also stuck in cliché.

I mainly read the book for the intriguing sights of 18th century Oxford, assisted by a historical map I happen to have (see photo below). Most of the places are genuine, but the college featured in the novel is imagined (as are the out of town locations Vailbury Park and Little Mildington). The imaginary Maryol College is on the site of the Cistercian Abbey of Rewley (behind today's Said Business School). At the dissolution of the monasteries, the last abbot of Rewley did suggest turning it into a college, so we're in the fictional world where that initiative succeeded.

Apart from the tower on the bridge (also accessible by boat via the pillars of the bridge), I also enjoyed the descriptions of the "Venetian quarter" with all the waterways around Oxford Castle (top left in the photo below), most of which have been filled in since. We should bring some of those back, if only to give the river space and prevent flooding. Speaking of waterways, the Oxford Canal was under construction in the 1770s, but still far from reaching Oxford. The last stretch into central Oxford was only opened in 1790. Accordingly, it doesn't get a mention in the book.

David Leslie Murray (1888-1962) was editor of the Times Literary Supplement in his day job. He has also written novels tied to other specific cities, including Regency (1936; Brighton) and Enter Three Witches (1942; London).

my copy of the book (it came without the dustjacket, which apparently shows Friar Bacon's study) on top of the historical map I used. Folly Bridge appears at the bottom of the photo. Own photo.

lost cities in literature

I have read several historic novels set in Oxford recently (see list at the bottom), enjoying the discoveries to be made even in a familiar environment (having lived here for more than 30 years now). This set me thinking about my lost cities series (about towns and cities where my direct ancestors lived before 1972) - it would be doubly interesting to read fiction set in these places both from the perspective of knowing (most of) the cities and to gain insights into the kind of places they were when (or before) my ancestors lived there. It's all about getting a sense of place, so I expect that some of the books I find will be good at conveying that and others won't. I also appreciate some real historic people among the fictional characters.

Off the cuff I can think of only one historic novel I've read that is set in a city from my series, and that's the very impressive Riemenschneider by Tilman Röhrig (about the late Gothic / early Renaissance sculptor who lived in Würzburg and the rather gory Peasants War).

In an effort to find more novels, I'll paste in my list of cities here and try to fill it with lots of book titles too (and make them bold once I've read them). Books are all in German so far but I will consider other languages as well.

Cities listed in chronological order, sorted by the year in which the city was lost to my direct ancestors (where a second end year is given, it indicates the continued presence of other relatives):

• Idstein 1714-1804 - Die Hexe von Nassau: by Nicole Steyer
• Breslau 1830 - 1877 Schuhbrücke: Ein Breslau-Roman by Wolf Kampmann
• Strasbourg 1901 - 1908 - Die Patisserie am Münsterplatz a trilogy by Charlotte Jacobi; Wie der Weihnachtsbaum in die Welt kam by Astrid Fritz (Author), Andrea Offermann (Illustrator); Les nuits de Strasbourg, by Assia Djebar
• Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
• Tangermünde 1888 - 1916 - Grete Minde, a famous novella by Theodor Fontane
• Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current - Der Seidenweber by Thorsten Weiler
• Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
• Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952;
• Bonn 1929 - 1934 - Beethoven by Felix Huch
• Rheydt 1923 - 1935
• Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936 - Die Stadt der Auserwählten Michael Römling
• Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
• Aachen 1936 - 1940
• Königsberg 1935 - 1945 - Die Buchhändlerin von Königsberg by Christian Hardinghaus
• Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
• Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
• Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961 - Und morgen eine neue Welt: Der große Friedrich-Engels-Roman Tilman Röhrig
• Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961 - Der Totentanz zu Freiburg: Historischer Kriminalroman by Astrid Fritz (Author) - 7th of a whole series of crime novels set in medieval Freiburg
• Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
• Würzburg 1961 - 1968 - Riemenschneider, Tilman Röhrig
• Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983 - Einstein im Bade by Daniel Mellem
• Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015

Cities organised geographically, many are in Northrhine Westphalia (NRW), some further south, a few further east:

NRW: Aachen Bonn Elberfeld / Wuppertal Gütersloh Hamborn Krefeld Minden Münster Rheydt

Southwest: Bad Münster Bad Kreuznach Bad Nauheim Bruchsal Freiburg Idar-Oberstein Idstein Lorsch Strasbourg Würzburg

East Breslau Königsberg Tangermünde

Tilman Röhrig's big novel on the other Tilman, Riemenschneider, which vividly brings Renaissance Würzburg to life. The author was born in the next village up the hill from where my great-great-aunt, my grandparents and my father lived their retirement years, but I understand that his father, a vicar, was banished there for disobedience in Nazi times, so this doesn't make him a relative.

Historic novels set in Oxford

• Folly Bridge, by D. L. Murray
• The looking-glass house, by Vanessa Tait
• The dictionary of lost words, by Pip Williams
• The bookbinder of Jericho, by Pip Williams

Not counting fantasy versions of the city as in Philip Pullman's books or in R.F.Kuang's Babel.

Last update 14.8.2026

origins of Summertown

Some thoughts on:

The Butcher, The Tailor, The Picture-Frame Maker...
Stories of Middle Way
Gareth Winrow
The Book Guild 2023

The author investigates the history of the house he lives in and the land it stands on, which is interesting to me because it happens to be in Oxford, and it offers an unusual angle on the history of our city. As a family history researcher, I am also interested in how such projects work for others and how they translate into books. (I've actually used the butcher et al line for a blog entry myself.)

There are some challenges inherent to Winrow's project: His house is only less than a century old. It was built after 1928 on the land of the former Summerhill estate which was auctioned off in 1925. Summertown as a village is only two centuries old and doesn't have a wildly interesting history.

Winrow found the stories he connects to his address not in the actual house nor on the plot it stands on. He looked more widely into the lives of the people who happened to own the land over the last few centuries, along with their ancestry and business connections, making for a vast cast of characters most of whom have only a tenuous connection to the place of interest. The main characters and land-owners are (note that the first four died before the house was built):

• Elizabeth Buswell (1725-1815) who was sentenced to death for poisoning her housemaid and pardoned at the last minute by King George II.
• Henry John North (1756-1831), a lawyer, town clerk and land speculator based in Woodstock;
• John Brain (1798-1855), a butcher who mysteriously disappeared after the death of his young wife;
• James Ryman (c.1795-1880), a picture-frame maker and art dealer who befriended luminaries of the Victorian art world such as Turner and Ruskin (no indication whether he's related to Henry Ryman, founder of the stationery business);
• Florence Bocker (1909-2001), the widow of a colonial officer in Burma, actually lived at the address in question for several decades.

All of these stories are interesting in their own way, but I'm coming away with the impression that the house in question is getting overlooked. We learn virtually nothing about it from the lives of these landowners, and it just serves as an excuse to snoop into these past lives. We don't even get a description of the premises or an insight into the original shape and size, before the recent owners built their extensions.

The exciting things mostly happen in central Oxford (eg the picture frame maker's connection to Turner's famous views of Oxford), sometimes further afield, even as far as India and Burma, but rarely in Summertown. Thus, cycling through Summertown after reading the book

To me as a fellow family history researcher it is interesting that all of these characters come with a well-researched family history, but I feel for the general reader this is just a bit too nerdy and burdened with detail. Which explains the publishing format.

My house is a bit older and I have looked into its history only very fleetingly, but I wouldn't quite dare trying to make a book out of it ...

There is a clue in the cover as well, which shows the Radcliffe Camera rather than a view of Summertown.

carbon ring hooked up

I don't write about real chemistry very often these days, but it's always great to hear about the creative (supra)molecular architectures and new allotropes of carbon developed in Harry Anderson's lab here in Oxford. The latest news from his lab, published in Science magazine this week, is the first molecular carbon ring stable enough to be investigated in solution by normal spectroscopy methods. Previous carbon rings were produced by atom manipulation on solid surfaces, a method requiring extremely low temperatures (see here and here).

I wrote a news story for Chemistry World about this new work, which is out now:

Ring of pure carbon stabilised by its catenane connections

Chemistry World 15.8.2025

I believe it is freely accessible as long as you haven't used up your monthly quota of free articles from CW.

The three macrocycles helped to stabilise the C48 molecule, allowing the first isolation in solution of this class of molecule. Image source: © Yueze Gao et al 2025

PS It looks like I forgot to blog some of the CW news stories of recent years, I'll list the missing ones here so I have them somewhere on this blog in case I ever get round to updating my publications list.

Proteins behind diatoms’ intricate nanoscale-patterned shells revealed
Chemistry World 5.1.2023

Light-harvesting wheel reinvented by chemists copying bacterium
Chemistry World 7.7. 2020

Hydrogens seen crystal clear in small molecules
Chemistry World 31.5. 2016

For a complete list of all my pieces in Chemistry World, see my profile page.

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

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
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

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

how transport got derailed

A few things I learned from:

Railways of Oxford
A transport hub that links Britain
by Laurence Waters
Pen & Sword 2020

The trouble with railways books is that they are mostly written by and for locomotive nerds and trainspotters, so I didn't read all of this book, skipped all the sections on "motive power", but still learned a few things about the developments that led to the dire situation we're in, without electric trains, and without a rail connection to most of the surrounding towns (Witney, Abingdon, Wallingford, etc.).

Waters starts at the very beginnings, when Oxford became the end of a branch line opened in 1844, with the first station located in Grandpont - not much left to be seen there. Even then the typical Oxford town and gown wrestling matches worked against the railways. The University objected to a transport system that might enable mere students to escape and visit other places to have fun. It eventually agreed on the concession that undergraduates were banned from using the trains and Great western had to police the ban. The University has also played an unfortunate role in preventing the introduction of electric trams in the early 20th century.

The later mess with two stations next door to each other is more widely known, especially as it left us with the Rewley Road swing bridge, for which guided tours are available during Open Doors weekends. The second station was on the plot where the Said Business School stands now.

Regarding the missing links to Oxfordshire's towns, it was new to me that Abingdon once had a branch line and a station closed in 1984. Apparently the station was demolished and replaced by a Waitrose supermarket soon after.

Judging by the bus schedules and daily traffic jams on the A40, the missing link that is producing the biggest share of our road traffic is the Witney branch line which was closed in 1970. What I learned about this one was that there had been a proposal to extend this line ending in Fairford westwards to Cheltenham, making it a valuable crosscountry connection that might have survived the Beeching cuts. The 1923 proposal would only have required 8 miles of extra track. Objections against the extension were raised by Great Western, for fear that the line might take away traffic from their existing services. I think that is the stupidest thing (of many) that happened to the railways around here. Branch lines ending in small places like Fairford (pop. 3,200) are economically challenging by default, but if the same small place is just one of the stations served between two bigger ones, the overlapping itineraries of people going to and from Oxford or to and from Cheltenham give a much more even usage, as anybody who has ever travelled longer distances on Germany's RE regional express trains will have noticed. Basically, Oxford to Cheltenham is an RE line that should be here now, but Great Western and Beeching conspired to kill it. (Funny that Beeching didn't make suggestions re which connections should be added to the network to make it more economically viable.) Every once in a while there is a proposal to rebuild the Witney line, but Waters considers it unlikely to happen.

Regarding recent passenger services, I learned that Oxford had cross country services to the south coast far beyond the one to Bournemouth we have now. There were also direct trains to Weymouth, Portsmouth, Brighton and Hastings, which were dropped in 2007.

So the strapline A transport hub that links Britain is bound to raise a sarcastic snigger from anybody who may be trying to travel anywhere other than London from here, but knowing what we've lost is important to inform strategic thinking about what may be reclaimed. The Chiltern Line to Marylebone has set a good example for what can be achieved.

a light in the dark

Coming out of the Lamb and Flag this Sunday, I thought St. Giles looked rather pretty, so in lieu of xmas cards which I have given up many years ago, here's my festive offering with best wishes to all:

own photo

dodo and company

Here in Oxford we feel a special cultural connection to the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) - seeing that an important specimen of the extinct species is housed in the University Museum, where it inspired Lewis Carroll to assign it a small role in Alice's adventures in wonderland, which ironically secured its immortality. Witness the pub down the road from me which is run by the Dodo Pub Co. At this year's Alice Day (the Saturday closest to July 4, the day when the story was first told), there was an excellent talk about the museum's specimen, and soon after a paper came out evaluating the entirety of the scientific literature on the dodo and on its relative the equally extinct Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria).

All of which clearly indicated that I needed to write a dodo-themed feature. The more general question I have tried to address is what the study of extinct species can teach us for the conservation of those that are endangered but still alive. The feature is out now:

The way of the dodo

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 18, 23 September 2024, Pages R837-R839

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

A life-sized dodo sculpture by palaeoartist Karen Fawcett, created on the basis of the most recent scientific investigations into its anatomy. (Photo and sculpture © Karen Fawcett.)

it's WNBR season again!

The UK's World Naked Bike Ride season kicks off in two weeks time with the Portsmouth Ride, so I'll compile some relevant info here. I typically get the tip-offs from this page but don't find its alphabetical order very helpful, so I am sorting everything in chronological order, as long as it can be reached from Oxford in a day trip using public transport (also including some rides abroad in places where I might be passing through by coincidence). No guarantee, obviously, do check other sources and local info.

As time passes and rides happen, I'll update the list with links to photos, press reports, and whatever I find about them.

25.5. Portsmouth
2.6. Oxford - the website the ride has been cancelled without explanation, unfortunately.
8.6. London - my photos, more in this Flickr group, see also this album by Dariusz.
9.6. Brighton
15.6. Cambridge; Brussels - photos here and here.
29.6. York
7.7. Bristol
13.7. Amsterdam
14.7. Cardiff
20.7. Portsmouth 2
27.7. Folkestone
3.8. Romford (East London)
24.8. Folkestone 2
25.8. Cardiff 2
September TBC Bristol 2

Own photo taken at last year's London WNBR.

My list of rides I participated in:

2015 Bristol
2016 Bristol, London
2017 Bristol, Brighton
2018 London
2019 London
2023 Oxford, London (hey that's me)
2024 London (I'm here and here and here - look for the green flag)

Links lead to the specific Flickr albums. All albums are combined in this Flickr collection.

lost railways

some thoughts on

Last trains: Dr Beeching and the death of rural England
Charles Loft
Biteback Publishing 2023
(original hardback 2013)

For the last 30 years and a bit I’ve been living in Oxford and very happily too. The one thing that bugs me is the state the railways are in. Although Oxford is located centrally and in the middle between the two biggest cities, there are no electric trains here and overall fewer trains leaving the station than, for instance, the small regional station of Düsseldorf-Bilk (which is my base when I travel in Germany, see photo and caption here). As recent events have underlined, the country has spectacularly failed to invest in modern high-speed rail, meaning that people routinely take planes from London to Manchester, Edinburgh or Glasgow.

When I want to go to London, I take the coach, as the train is unaffordable and diesel-powered anyways, so not much greener. When I want to see some other cities for a change, I take the Eurostar from there – cheaper, faster, and more comfortable than travelling within the UK.

There are no railways connecting us to neighbouring Oxfordshire towns except Didcot and Banbury which happen to be on the main line (the recent reopening of the Chiltern line has added Bicester). Going to Witney, for instance, you spend an hour each way on a bus stuck in a permanent traffic queue. Buses go every ten minutes or so, so there would have been enough demand for a train that would only take ten minutes. No trains to Abingdon, Wallingford, etc either. The absence of regional lines corresponding to the German Regionalexpress directly affects our quality of life here as people from the wider region drive into Oxford by default and thus clog our streets and pollute our air.

It has dawned on me over the years that these regional rail connections existed once, but were cut in the 1960s, mostly in the wake of the infamous Beeching report, an attempt to cut costs by closing unprofitable lines, stations and services. In Last trains (a general reader book based on the author’s earlier academic monograph on the topic), Charles Loft examines the politics around these cuts – which has relevance beyond the railways as the politics is similar around today’s dismantling of the NHS.

Reading it both as the history of the railways we’re missing now and of the other public services we still have but may lose soon, this is quite painful but important. The author tries hard to present a balanced view between the social usefulness of railways and the political imperative to save taxpayers’ money, and it is kind of comforting that it could have become much worse, and one of the scenarios examined under tory governments featured no railways whatsoever.

I learned that we owe the survival of the wreckage we still have not so much to foresight but to the electoral fallout that further cuts would have had. Essentially, Tories feared losing their support in the shires cut off from civilisation, whereas Labour feared the unions falling away. Everybody feared that Scotland and Wales might resent being cut off from the railways entirely by Westminster.

It is also remarkable that different branches of the government involved in allegedly modernising the country didn’t talk to each other. Thus, a shiny new city, Milton Keynes, was built from scratch in a place that simultaneously lost its rail connection westwards to Oxford and eastwards to Cambridge.

What I still find puzzling is that planners and politicians in the 1960s didn’t think through the effect that a total switch to car ownership would have. Although climate change wasn’t in the news yet, the sheer surface area needed if 60 million people move 40million metal boxes to wherever they want to go, requiring a multiple of their sizes in car parks and road surface, would have destroyed not just the countryside but also the cities. Well it largely has, but if the misguided “modernisers” of the 60s had pulled through with these plans (famously including an inner ring road across Christ Church Meadow, vetoed by the University), it could have become even worse.

Blackwells (bought it from The Last Bookshop in Jericho, actually, but can't find it on their website)

Loving the cover. Seeing that I have four separate railway families in my immediate ancestry, I may well be epigenetically programmed to become a railway nostalgic.

PS I wasn't aware of this, but just the day I posted this a feasibility study for the rail connection to Witney was published. Funny how the press release doesn't mention this connection once existed. They keep stressing it's a new line. The BBC report, however, does discuss the historic line and its closure in the Beeching cuts.

more carbon rings

I reported the discovery of a new allotrope of carbon, the C18 cyclocarbon, back in 2019. It took a while, but the groups involved in that paper have now presented another new ring molecule made only of carbon, C16. This time the extra challenge is in the fact that it is anti-aromatic (hosting 4n rather than 4n+2 atoms in the ring). A group in China has also produced several such rings in different sizes with a similar method. Their papers aren't officially published yet but available as preprints.

My news story in Chemistry World is out now (open access if you haven't used up your monthly quota of free stories):

Carbon's anti-aromatic allotrope is ringing the changes

The paper is out in Nature online (but not in this week's issue) and is on open access. UPDATE The paper is now in the issue of 29.11.2023, page 977, together with one of the papers from the Wei Xu's group, on page 972

And here is the recipe:

Source: © Yueze Gao et al 2023

The precursor 4 is deposited on a NaCl surface and the carbon monoxide and halogen masking groups are then eliminated to give the cyclocarbon C16

30 years

as of today, I have lived in Oxford for 30 years, which also means more than half my life. Slightly scary thought, but I always thought if I have to get stuck somewhere, Oxford is a good place to get stuck. May 21 1993 was the day when our furniture (and Heinrich the cello) was delivered to our rented house in Derwent Avenue, so I count that as the arrival date, even though the rest of the family arrived the day before and I had spent a few more days at the youth hostel* in Jack Straws Lane before that. Here's one of the first two Oxford photos in our album, dated June 1993:

A bit of family perspective: Neither of my parents and none of my grandparents have lived in the same place as long as half their lifetime. Of my great-grandparents, Heinrich the cellist and his wife Maria did (after settling at Elberfeld/Wuppertal), Adam the baker and Anna Barbara did (at Lorsch), Heinrich the station master of Minden Stadt and Luise did, but adventurous Julius and wife Helene very emphatically didn't. For Julius, his years growing up in Krefeld were easily the longest stay, whereas for Helene her final 27 years in Bad Nauheim were. She lived to age 87, so that's not even a third.

Obviously, I could still tip the balance by moving somewhere else, but as even the Brexiteers haven't quite managed to kick me out, I guess I'll just hang on.

*Note re the youth hostel - a couple of years later, the building became a nursery and the new hostel behind the railway station was built which has now disappeared. So at least one major buildings has been built and knocked down in the time I've lived here. Now that is a scary thought.

words lost and found

Some thoughts on

The dictionary of lost words
Pip Williams
Vintage Paperback 2022

Shortly after reading and reviewing The looking-glass house, I spotted this paperback at The Works and was attracted to the idiosyncratic title and the map of Victorian Oxford included at the front. Always fun to wander the streets of Victorian Oxford in fiction, as it is instantly recognisable but also interestingly different.

The focus of the book is a place I actually cycled and walked past many times. Of course I have read the blue plaque on the Banbury Road which enlightens us that the first Oxford English Dictionary was born in a garden shed on this site. It was the shed grandiosely named the “Scriptorium” in the garden of the first editor, James Murray, where staff collected words and crafted definitions for decades.

The story is well documented and reported, of course, but what Pip Williams does is to analyse how the words and definitions were biased by the fact that all editors on site were men of a very similar social background. To this end, she introduces a fictional girl, Esme, growing up in the circle and becoming a lexicographer herself, and uses her to interrogate why words such as bondmaid and cunt aren’t included in the dictionary. Funnily enough the latter just got underlined in red as isn’t in the dictionary of my word processing software either – looks like the Victorian times never ended.

The novel spans the story of Esme’s entire life, which is heartwarming throughout. In spite of the various troubles in the world (including the Great War and the suffragists movement) and in her life, the warm glow never fades. There is no real evil in her world, which one could perhaps criticise as naïve, but I think it reflects in a way the ivory tower perspective that you get when you’re fully immersed in a major academic project such as the dictionary. Implausibly vast and extremely slow moving, this kind of work will only have been tolerated by people who cared about it to an obsessive degree, so the normal rules of competitive capitalism wouldn’t apply.

There is also something Carrollean in the way Esme explores the weird and wonderful worlds of Oxford and lexicography. Born in the early 1880s, fictional Esme is a generation younger than real life Alice Liddell, so it makes sense to read this after The looking-glass house.

So, it may be a fairy tale for adults, but I would highly recommend it as an escape from today’s harsh reality and news cycle. Also as an introduction to Oxford – the place hasn’t changed all that much, even the map is still useful today.

Blackwells

PS 25.4.2023 The author's second novel, out in the UK on July 6, will also focus on books being produced in Oxford: The bookbinder of Jericho See her interview in the Guardian.

reinventing Alice

Some thoughts on

The looking-glass house
by Vanessa Tait
Corvus paperback 2016

Alice Day in Oxford is normally celebrated with an events programme that not only includes entertainment for kids but also some thoughtful lectures for adults which I usually attend. Although the topics may sometimes look eclectic on paper, I’ve always learned something interesting.

This year, one of the presentations was by Vanessa Tait, who has the USP of being Alice Liddell’s only great-granddaughter – being the only daughter of her only grandchild. So the whole Carrollian heritage came down heavy on her, and she made light of it by writing it up as a novel informed by the unique insights gained from family tradition and the memorabilia inherited by her mother but eventually sold at auction.

This was all so intriguing that I bought her book on the spot – I was also a bit embarrassed that I missed the memo when it was published. It did not disappoint. Mixing the well-documented information about the historic characters (Alice, her parents, her governess, Lewis Carroll, Queen Victoria and her sons) with a few invented ones to provide colour and plot, she does paint a convincing tableau of how the events that led to the telling of the Alice stories on that famous boat trip may have unfolded.

While I personally wouldn’t go as far as inventing dialogues to put into my dead ancestors’ mouths, I fully understand that this is a reasonable thing to do here, as the factual backbone has been established by a legion of researchers and every single stone has been turned over by committed fans. To add anything new to that, I suppose you have to rely on well-informed invention. The author does add a helpful afterword to help readers with the separation of facts and fiction.

I was particularly intrigued by the reminder that Lewis Carroll’s main interest in these contacts was that of a pioneering photographer. He told the children stories in order to get them in a better mood for posing for his photos. And of course it’s fun to catch the atmosphere of Victorian Oxford with places like Christ Church and the department store Elliston and Cavell taken over by Debenhams a century later. In some ways one could say it hasn’t changed a bit, and culturally speaking, Alice still is very much alive around here.

See also my twitter thread listing books I read in 2022.

PS Just one tiny little moan: I am fairly sure the Victorians didn't know the horribly agrammatical phrasing "just because ... doesn't mean", which occurs at least twice in the book, including once as allegedly spoken by one of the characters. I believe I haven't heard this before the year 2000. Am I wrong?

NB I am tagging this "memoir" although it isn't one, because it demonstrates one of the options we have in processing family history, so it helps me thinking even if novelisation is not a path I'm likely to take.

traffic calming measures

Oxford has a few lovely new low-traffic neighbourhoods, essentially closing down rat runs between main roads with modal filters (see my photos of last year's LTNs on flickr). The furious responses amplified by local media and vandalism from some parts demonstrate that people still don't understand the basic science of traffic management in cities, such as the proven fact that building more roads and more parking spaces will produce more traffic. This is called induced demand, essentially, make it easier to drive and more people will drive more. Conversely, you can make it harder to drive, people will think twice if their trip is necessary or could perhaps be done by walking or cycling.

I learned this more than 30 years ago, back in Germany, in a talk held by Hermann Knoflacher, who was then still active in traffic planning in Vienna, and also widely known as an expert on getting cars out of cities. Another thing I remember from his talk is the concept of desire lines, telling planners where people want to go.

Wikipedia reminded me of another thing he probably showed on his slides, namely his "walkmobile" - a home-built frame the size of a car, with which he sometimes walked around to demonstrate the insane space requirements of drivers. This set me thinking, and I came up with a somewhat more practical version of the idea, using a pedal car to take up space (such as the roadside space outside my house where I really don't want to see horrid huge SUVs), and maybe cycle around to slow down traffic and raise awareness for good causes (such as ban SUVs from cities).

A quick search found a lovely specimen from a company in the US, called International Surrey Company:

Source

Wikipedia calls this vehicle type a quadracycle.

Still have to find something closer to home - stop press here is a list. And figure out how to get a parking permit for something that isn't a car.

An alternative idea which I pondered earlier was converting an old truck into a mini-park, like Adam Tranter did. Just shying away from all the hassle associated with owning the vehicle.

UPDATE 20.6.2025 Just came across this very lovely convertible converted to a herb garden, complete with official parking permit.

the view from above

An aerial photo showing my house and dating from 1947 has become available from Historic England, and as the site doesn't let me steal it, I'll just have to embed it here:

That's Marston Road running alongside the right edge of the frame, and Parsons Pleasure near the middle of the left edge.

I've previously summarised what we know about the history of the house here (not much progress since then).

the elusive hornplayer

some thoughts on

The travelling hornplayer
Barbara Trapido

I picked up a battered paperback edition of this novel from a book exchange mainly on the merit of its musical title (a reference to the poetic source of Schubert’s song cycle “Die schöne Müllerin” as I found out later) and the fact that there was a cello shown on the cover. The cello arrives fashionably late in the book, making its entry on page 90, but with a strong back story, involving a five-generation transfer in the family line, and a period spent buried in the woods. The young cellist who inherits the instrument is arguably the main character in the book, although the author has carefully constructed a kind of hypercube in which a dozen characters are connected in multiple ways, sometimes involving very improbable coincidences. The only living hornplayer mentioned, however, remains an elusive and very marginal character.

Apart from the welcome presence of celloing (although some very subtle details tell me the author perhaps doesn’t know much about cellos), other bonus points include occasional visits to Oxford, where Trapido lives, and, for me coming to it with 23 years delay, a glimpse of the almost forgotten world of the 1990s. People using their mobile on the train because they can, only to say “I’m on the train”, people smoking in restaurants, professionals mentioning the internet as a special tool at their workplace, and students studying without worrying about tuition fees. Characters can have Middleton as a family name without any royal implications. A distant world – although Oxford sounds very much the same as always.

All in all, a well balanced tragicomedy, great fun to read, and, notwithstanding the hornplayer of the title, I’ll file it under cello books. Oh, and I am listening to a CD of “Die schöne Müllerin” sung by Fritz Wunderlich right now (inherited from my mother). That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t read the book.

cover of the edition I have. The cello is (just about) recognisable by its spike.

journey inside my guts

In January 2019, as I was 55 then, I was invited to a bowel scope screening. According to the brochure I was sent at the time, "The NHS offers bowel scope screening to all men and women aged 55." It sounded like a good idea, because "for every 300 people screened it stops 2 from getting bowel cancer and saves 1 life from bowel cancer."

While experiences may vary, I didn't find it terribly unpleasant and as a scientifically curious person I rather enjoyed the opportunity to follow the camera view on a large screen and travel through my own guts.

I just found out that the programme has since been scrapped, and its history, shall we say, adjusted to the situation. The relevant NHS website now says:

"Previously, some people aged 55 were invited for a one-off test where a healthcare professional uses a tube with a camera to look inside the bowel. This is called bowel scope screening. Bowel scope screening is no longer offered."

NB: some people were invited. When it was my turn, the official info said, as quoted above "all men and women aged 55."

For a competent analysis of the withdrawal of the screening programme, see this blog entry from a cancer charity.

Although I was lucky in getting the screening before it disappeared, I find it upsetting that there is very little interest around here in preventing disease before it happens. The NHS is brilliant because it's free at point of use as it should be and good at treating people when they get ill, but preventative measures aren't its strongest point and they are the first to suffer when things get difficult.

To me preventing disease is the most important job of the health system. I remember my grandparents being in and out of hospitals for bowel operations repeatedly, and I'm quite sure I prefer a camera up my bum to their experience.

Checking up the numbers:

There are 900,000 people in the UK aged 55 right now. We're talking about 3,000 lives that could be saved every year and 6,000 bowel cancer cases that could be prevented according to the NHS info I cited above. This may be small fry in comparison to the numbers currently killed by the mishandling of the Covid pandemic, but I am sure those 3,000 55-year-olds would have liked to live a bit longer ...

Cover of the brochure I received in 2019. Shows it's good to keep the paperwork, because online info gets adjusted to political convenience.

sous le kiosque a musique

Ce qu'on peut rigoler
Par les beaux soirs d'été
Sous le kiosque à musique
On entend l'orphéon
Les tambours les clairons
La fanfare et la clique

I'm regularly using Oxford's only bandstand this plague year summer, both for chamber music and for folk sessions, so I am often reminded of one of my favourite French songs, an ancient one from the 1930s, which gently mocks the culture of widespread amateur / semi-professional music making for which these structures were built. I'm loving all the attention-grabbing flourishes and fanfares in the melody which are obviously a parody of the type of light music you might have heard at a bandstand on a summer evening in the early 20th century. Now that this culture has gone the way of the dinosaurs (along with the ophicleide mentioned in the text) and bandstands are mostly silent, I wonder what the authors of the song might have to say about it.

I've known the song since forever in the version performed by Georges Brassens (1921-1981) in a radio programme dedicated to the popular music of his youth: Georges Brassens chante les chansons de sa jeunesse (also available as CD).

Looking it up right now, there seems to be a general block in place forbidding users in the UK to access this recording. If you're outside the UK, you may be lucky to be able to listen to it on Soundcloud here.

I never knew the original version, only now I unearthed this one from jazz band leader Ray Ventura (1908-1979) which I'm assuming must be the version Brassens heard in his youth.

The only modern cover I've found is this one, which looks like a music teacher made it for kids, but it does have rolling lyrics, so if you want to learn the song it's a good resource (there are also chords provided here). According to this video, the composer is Marc Lanjean, and the lyrics are by Maurice Vandair.

Lyrics are also here (wrongly attributed to Brassens).

I've poked the very amazing Pomplamoose via twitter, I think they should definitely cover this.

Not our local bandstand, but one I saw at Romsey on a day trip earlier this year.

There is also a lovely flickr group called Bandstands Worldwide where you'll find some amazing structures (loving this one in Hove) as well as the occasional contribution from me.