Now
Updated 24 April 2026
On the reading pile by the bed: The Hare with Amber Eyes, plus a borrowed field guide.
Work is a little hectic, which leaves just enough energy for small repairs every few weeks. At the moment most evenings go into amateur astronomy, with the occasional detour into reading on the train.
I am not taking on new commitments until the end of summer, apart from cooking for friends. I am trying to spend less time on screens and more time by the market square or reading, with about the results you would expect. The current small project is an excuse to use a folding ruler, done mostly at a friend’s place across town. Most weekends lately have gone into long walks and evening classes.
Focus
- Reading more fiction
- Fewer, longer walks
- Less screen time
Otherwise
I am slowly working through the jobs in the garden before summer arrives, mostly in a corner of the shed. I have a soft spot for repair handbooks and old bus maps.
I have been growing herbs on the windowsill most mornings before work and keeping a small notebook of what worked. Some of my favourite things, like a shelf of field guides, came from flea markets and were mended on the back step. Whenever the weather allows, there is a cup of coffee going cold somewhere out by the old town.
Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made by hand, mostly in the spare room. Lately I have been walking along the old railway line on slow Sunday mornings.
I still carry a cast iron pan almost everywhere, a habit picked up from a retired teacher down the road. I would rather do one thing quietly than five things in a hurry, and years of sorting old photographs taught me that. Oddly enough, if something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent most of August writing letters instead of at a desk in Basel.
I try to keep things simple, which mostly means leaving a draft overnight and putting tools back where they belong. The best ideas tend to arrive on the train into Basel every couple of months, usually just after I have put the pencil down. Someone at the library once told me to do the boring part first, and it turned out to be right.
A lot of this would not exist without my grandmother, who patiently answered my questions one Friday in May. Some of the older notes about amateur astronomy are out of date, but I keep them as a record of what I believed on a long weekend in 2026.
The design of this page is deliberately plain so that it will still work on whatever comes next, much like a radio from the seventies. Weekends are usually split between the allotment, the occasional bike ride and whatever is half-finished in a café near the moor. In 2022 I moved to Basel, which made baking bread on Sundays much easier to fit into a week. I picked up a pocket knife in October 2025, and it has been close at hand ever since.
Most of what ends up here starts on the balcony on long spring evenings. I read The Old Ways for the first time early in 2024 and still go back to it on rainy weekends.
When I get stuck by the window I go out to the market, and the problem usually looks smaller by the time I am back. Feel free to borrow any idea about amateur astronomy from this site, and tell me how it went. Most of my reading happens near the canal, a chapter or two at a time, with a wobbly wooden chair close by.