Shortly after Jenny-The-Orang-utan first arrived at London Zoo in 1837, causing her most eminent possible visitor, Queen Victoria, to exclaim that she was “most painfully and disagreeably human”, Charles Darwin slipped a harmonica, a sprig of verbena and a bag of peppermints into his overcoat and stopped by to see her.  It seems, according to his notebooks, that she liked whatever it was he played on the moothie (and how I wish I knew!) and was quite fussy for both the taste and smell sensations he brought with him.

This scene makes me chuckle. It makes me think of my dad, a man who has been known to lie flat out on a bustling Edinburgh High Street in order to get just the right angle for a photo and who, at one point I seem to recall, had a notion that the undersides of windowsills held secrets for those bold enough, and sufficiently un-embarrassed, to look there.

If you thought Darwin was some kind of cool, emotionally distant scientist, think again. Having immersed myself in books by and about him, radio and TV documentaries (and isn’t David Attenborough just a total dude?), as well embarking on an Open University course in Evolution (heck, why not eh?) what’s as striking as the importance of the ideas Darwin cultivated and those developed since, is his humanity, empathy, tenderness, humour and decency. Irrelevant, you might say, to the subject of science? But not so, it seems to me.

A man who didn’t play with his (many) children could not have made parallels between the emotions and behaviour of apes and other animals and human beings, at a time when humans were considered a separate and higher order of life.  Nor would a cultural snob have found his way into the rank London slums of his day to question pigeon fanciers about their selective breeding methods (and so fallen for the art and the creatures themselves that he bred around a thousand birds himself subsequently with his daughter Etty). And a man with a less acute sense of fun might have found other ways to test the hearing capacity of earthworms than by asking his son Frank to play them bassoon solos. They don’t, incidentally, hear at all.

But, most poignant of all, his theories about the centrality of death, extinction and the struggle for survival to the evolution of life, based as they were on his own experiments in his home and garden, his tropical travels on The Beagle and a mountain of careful correspondence with botanists, geologists, dog breeders, farmers, sailors and adventurers (some 15,000 letters remain) acquired a harrowing personal significance with the illness and eventual death of his beloved eldest daughter Annie at the age of 10.

My admiration and affection for the man is growing by the day. And for someone who hasn’t studied biology since she was thirteen I’m really enjoying (and beginning to understand) the science too. So I feel I’m doing my own wee bit to prepare for a week-long writers residency in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (I doubt if it has passed you by), organised by Shrewsbury Folk Festival, and due to start in three weeks time. I’ll be holed up in a house outside the city where Darwin was born with, amongst others, Chris Wood, Emily Smith, Jez Lowe and US singer-songwriter Krista Detor. The residential project culminates in a gig at Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury on Thursday 19th March. Maybe see a few of you there for some brand new just-out-of-the-bag songs.

And maybe, just maybe, one inspired by the curious fact that Darwin was born on exactly the same day as that icon of American history Abraham Lincoln. “The Ballad of Chuck and Abe” anyone?