High point of the week was realising a long ambition to visit Broome Bridge over the Royal Canal in Dublin, where Hamilton discovered the rule for quaternions.

A new paper with colleagues in Zambia in the InSTAnZa project. The moral of the story is "never throw away old soil maps just because you have a new one"

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A new paper out of the CEPHaS project: measuring water retention in soils from conservation agriculture trials and using the Van Genuchten parameters to model infiltration.

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There was a Pelican too

Visiting Highgate Cemetery

Ornithological distractions in Harare this morning. Red eyed doves, laughing doves, red waxbill, bulbul, weaver bird and a purple-crested turaco (lourie).

Kopjes at Chiremba bear Harare. See Ollier's Two cycle theory of tropical pedagogy for one hypothesis about their origin

Locust on a Euphorbia milii, Alex Park, Harare

Currently back home in Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 doing a teaching block at UZ. My walk back each evening through northern Harare passes jacaranda and other exotic trees, but pleased to see this Erythrina abysinnica, an honest indigenous African tree, holding its own.

Harare limbering up for more rain, while I think about dambos.

Visiting IITA at Ibadan, Nigeria, with @Rothamsted colleagues for project planning. A beautiful site with forest and wetland as well as field plots and labs.

This new paper, with colleagues at World Bank, uses pilot survey data to assess options for augmenting standard "household surveys" with soil sampling to provide information on soil quality to go with dietary and socio-economic data.

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Tremellomycete fungus doing its stuff on a dead branch yesterday.

Feast of St Albert the Great

'My suspicion is that for Albert beatitude would have to include, even if only as the minutest part of it, the opportunity to say "So that's why flies lay their eggs on white walls!" ' Simon Tugwell OP in Albert and Thomas, Paulist Press 1988.

The CEPHaS project in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi addressed research capacity in physical sciences for evaluating conservation agriculture options. Here is the first paper from the hydrogeology team on groundwater recharge, with some tentative conclusions on land use impacts.

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