Contact
A short letter is the most reliable way to get in touch, and I do read everything.
Most of my free time goes into amateur astronomy, cooking for friends and a growing pile of half-finished projects. Pages here change slowly, usually early on Friday mornings, and that suits amateur astronomy just fine. Feel free to borrow the plans about amateur astronomy from this site, no need to ask. I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Basel or further away, even if it takes a whole winter.
Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made carefully, mostly at the kitchen table. When I am not busy with amateur astronomy, I am usually at the market. A lot of this would not exist without my sister, who patiently answered my questions one wet weekend in October. The design of this page is plain on purpose so that it will still work on a slow connection, much like a roll of brown paper.
Before you write
Some of my favourite things, like a drawer of string and tape, came from flea markets and were mended on the balcony. I read Walden for the first time during the spring of 2025 and still go back to it on long autumn evenings. My Monday evenings mostly belong to swimming in the river, unless an uncle with a very full shed needs a hand.
On a good day at the library in Basel I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn that the simple way usually works. Every few weeks, I usually end up in the spare room with a battered toolbox.
Patience is the most useful tool in the drawer, followed closely by a folding table and a box of spare parts. Most of what ends up here starts in the small room above the stairs on slow Sunday mornings. Long train rides out of Basel are where most of this gets written, with a stack of library books on the seat beside me. Small, regular habits like starting earlier in the day and leaving a draft overnight have done more for me than any big resolution.
In 2022 I moved to Basel, which made reading on the train much easier to fit into a week. Most of my reading happens in a corner of the shed, a chapter or two at a time, with a shelf of field guides close by.
Visiting a new town, I always look for a quiet café and the library first, just as I did when I moved to Basel. This page started in 2022 as a place to keep notes for myself, written mostly in a café near the harbour, and slowly turned into something other people read.
I care about pages that load quickly and good libraries. I am not an expert in amateur astronomy or anything else here; I just write down what I learn every couple of months. As a rule, when I get stuck at a friend’s place across town I go round the block, and the problem usually looks smaller by the time I am back.
The market in Basel on Wednesday mornings is where I find spare parts and second-hand books. Weekends are usually split between the occasional bike ride, long walks and whatever is half-finished out by the cathedral. If we met at a garden open day in Basel one Monday in April, hello again.
Every July, near the marina, I look back at the year so far and quietly drop whatever is not working. Before amateur astronomy it was letter writing, and before that the allotment; the habit of writing things down stayed.
I would rather do one thing quietly than five things in a hurry, and years of small repairs taught me that. The best ideas tend to arrive on the train into Basel whenever the weather allows, usually just after I have put the pencil down. Most of what I know about amateur astronomy came from railway timetables, a friend from the walking group and a lot of trial and error. Writing things down has saved me from promising too much more than once, most recently back in 2022.
By day I work an ordinary office job; in the evenings I tinker with amateur astronomy and baking bread on Sundays. If something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent a good part of 2025 out walking instead of at a desk in Basel. You will not find adverts or a cookie banner on this site, only amateur astronomy and the odd detour.
I have a soft spot for school atlases and repair handbooks. There is no grand plan behind any of this, just doing one small thing at a time on quiet Monday afternoons.
The summer light in Basel makes everything feel a little untidy. Most mornings before work, there is a cup of coffee going cold somewhere at a borrowed workbench.
I am happiest by the window with a tin of pencils nearby and nothing urgent on the calendar. To be fair, I try to keep things simple, which mostly means keeping a short list and checking the measurements twice. I have been interested in amateur astronomy since a retired teacher down the road showed me the basics late in 2023.
People sometimes ask why I keep a website at all, and it is mostly for my future self. Truth be told, I keep a list of field guides I would like to find, and a man at the market keeps adding to it. I still carry a secondhand bicycle almost everywhere, a habit picked up from a reader from Basel.