THE YEAR IN REHASH: SEPTEMBER - Darwin's Bassoon Wasted on Worms

One of the notebooks I didn't post in September. 

 Last one for today. I'd always wanted to be prove useful to a museum, so participating in Ships, Sea and the Stars this year was a huge treat for me. Thanks to Dr. Helen Czerski not just for inviting me aboard, but for her entire online output this year, much of it in collaboration with Robin Ince, whose work on the Cosmic Shambles provided the kind of schooling I would previously only have expected from life on a star cruiser. In a year spent so otherwise sedentary, that felt a bit like being rescued, and I haven't yet seen Helen's Royal Institute Lecture on the Oceans which aired yesterday but I hear she enters on a wire and that sounds apt. I could have picked any of these, but here's  the last one, from September the 21st...

 

 The mainly non-mythological constellations of the southern hemisphere, 

including Chameleon, Compass, Toucan and Telescope (source.)

 

 The final Ships, Sea & The Stars of this series is up now, in which you can hear me read an A. A. Milne poem that was completely new to me (at 29:00) and a terrific account by Charles Darwin of his attempts to test the hearing of worms (at 4:17). The theme of this episode – in coordination with Heritage Open Days – is "Hidden Nature" which, according to guest and "preventive conservator" Maria Bastidas-Spence, unambiguously means bugs. It's rare to see an insect expert who actually hates insects, and weirdly rewarding, an addition to carpet beetles and constellations, the team discuss ship's mascots: it seems pretty much every species has at some point been considered for mascothood, including a polar bear.  

 This isn't him though, this is "Trotsky". As soon as I learnt of his existence I whatsapped my Finnemore colleagues and... well, long story short, John has finally decided on a name for his first child. Unfortunately though, Trotsky – the photographed Trotsky above, not the putative Trotsky Finnemore – would ultimately be shot dead by a sailor tragically unaware that "ship's bear" was a thing. A very sad death then, but I can't say he was necessarily on the wrong side of History.