Natural history, experiments, life writing. Teacher of literature & editor of bees.
Joined July 2014
- Tweets 28,636
- Following 2,495
- Followers 3,896
- Likes 50,343
1,788 Photos and videos
6 Sep 2024
At the weekend I went to an interesting orchard and wrote a little note about it, and a seventeenth-century list, here. Good apples! open.substack.com/pub/ofsmit…
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24 Jun 2025
New post about using a database of poisonous materials as a fidget spinner.
open.substack.com/pub/ofsmit…
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11 Apr 2025
Thomas Bewick's original study sketches of Great Auks for his History of British Birds vol. 2 (1804), and the finished woodcut in his own proof copy. Extremely amusing to me that I get to spend time with stuff like this in my current day job
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9 Apr 2025
I have a new post, about the alluring non-spaces in sketches: open.substack.com/pub/ofsmit…
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9 Apr 2025
Yes, please do tell any natural history inclined friends in Newcastle.
9 Apr 2025
I'm putting this on with the mighty @OliveFSmith and @JenniferRichar7 at @GNM_Hancock next week - I'm biased, but I think it'll be really great for bee people and humanities people and basically everyone eventbrite.com/e/bee-ing-hum…
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13 Mar 2025
I can’t stand the phone feature where it botchedly transcribes your answerphone messages, so you get notifications like:
“Hello Liver, this is squonkee from the binko and I’m just cuddling to pig desk your axolotl…If you could glove me a coil backwards that would be trait”
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13 Mar 2025
They are going to take over the world and you'll know it from a little text that says they are torquing over The Wold.
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24 Feb 2025
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐊𝐄-𝐔𝐏 𝐌𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓. I'm collecting instances of wake-up moments in literature. Where someome wakes from a dream, sleep, or other state into 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬. Let me know what you can think of.
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14 Feb 2025
‘I had one earbud in and I listened to a podcast on the Iraq War as analysed through Simpsons episodes.’
A short story by Toye Oladinni.
granta.com/international-sou…
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10 Jan 2025
Four now unidentified women drawn by Hans Holbein the Younger c. 1526-1528 and c. 1532-1534
(Royal Collection Trust, HM CIII)
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10 Jan 2025
Just remembering the mushy peas stall in Norwich market. Is it still there?
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5 Jan 2025
'In a world ruled by data, models and algorithms [...], might humanity’s USP be, well, its humanity? If so, doesn’t it follow that studying the humanities is rather more important than we have been led to suppose?' @_BenWright_ @EnglishAssoc @ArtsandHums
5 Jan 2025
Glad you enjoyed it @JenniferRichar7 Here's another column on a similar theme: telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
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21 Dec 2024
Happy #Solstice! The Nebra Sky Disc is considered to be the oldest known material representation of cosmic phenomena in the world, dating around 1600 BC.
On display at Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte in Halle.
Further information: landesmuseum-vorgeschichte.d…
📷 me
#archaeology
ALT A photo of a museum display with the Nebra sky disk. The green coloured bronze disk features a gold sun, moon and star decoration.
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20 Dec 2024
About a month ago I found a sort of pin on the floor near my bike. Couldn’t work out where it went, bike worked fine, kept the pin, cycled everywhere. Today I went along to the bike shop to ask and it turns out my front wheel has not been attached — at all — all this time.
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16 Dec 2024
I’ve got very uncertain feelings about Xmas cake covered only in marzipan. On the one hand it seems elegantly sparse, on the other hand it’s like the cake version of having terrible boundaries.
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16 Dec 2024
One of my least fave people does a ‘just marzipan’ cake, an unpleasant faux-puritanical person.
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16 Dec 2024
Come and work on a @LeverhulmeTrust project about the history of ‘hurt feelings’ and the law with @KatieEBarclay @alice_krzanich and me! We’re looking for a historian of medicine (or similar) for a 4 yr postdoctoral research fellow position elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/…
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