Stan's back! In Germany they called him a comet. They return, don't they? (I'm not really a science guy)

Daniel Brook’s The Einstein of Sex is outstanding – an insightful, expansive and compulsively readable biography that reflects Hirschfeld’s epochal significance as a visionary of sexuality, gender and ultimately race. I thought I knew a fair bit about Hirschfeld but I learned so much.

Sadly no – I would also love to know more!

Thank you!

Ooooh … my first fig leaf!

It's only open for a few hours every Saturday. When I was there the last entry in the visitors' book was from two months prior ... Steffi is an even more niche taste than ever it seems.

The idea is that if you have respiratory problems (and you can’t make it to the sea, which is a long way from here), the salty air will help. So you’re sitting on a bench on a surreally long wooden frame, looking out at grapevines and smelling sea air. It’s very, very odd.

It is essentially a framework with a raised deck, and at deck height are huge panels of brushwood twigs compressed to make a mesh, down which runs salt water pumped up from a natural saline aquifer. The water evaporates as it trickles, and the resulting vapour has a very high salt content.

… but it is very difficult to describe, so bear with me. We are looking at the “Gradierwerk”, a spa facility in the form of an immensely long wooden structure – 333 metres long, *one third of a kilometre*, dating from the mid-19th century.

… you continue on to open fields and your shape-shifting conveyance is now effectively a cross-country train, vineyards come into view and you arrive in the town of Bad Dürkheim. And there it is …

… which was voted Germany’s ugliest city (and while it would be unfair to judge from few minutes’ transit, the fact that this bunker came as aesthetic relief was not a good sign), then the tram becomes a subway and then a tram again and then you’re out the other side of Ludwigshafen and …