An afternoon spent nosing around the Hunterian Museum. Jars containing otherworldly specimens, bleached and buoyed by embalming fluid. A baby kangaroo, white and hairless - a dead ringer for Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle. The internal organs of 'A Siren' - as the label breezily reads. I have no frame of reference for 'a Siren' other than the mermaidy one. Begin to suspect that the Hunterian is a portal into a fictional world. A suspicion which is only reinforced by the vision of the 'Skeleton of a Giant'. What next? Dragon pancreas? Gall stones of a gryphon?
It's a fascinating and unnerving place. I love it - but it's not for everybody. There are bits of people's faces. Dead babies. Twisted skeletons. Seventeenth century veins, arteries and nerves - stripped out, dried and pasted onto wooden boards. Delicate tracery that looks like relief carving. So strange to think of a life that once ran strong through these brittle spidery webs.
Upstairs there's a more modern bit. There are video loops of surgical procedures. As chance would have it, I am treated to a show of the very operation that saved my life. I see the scalp being peeled back, the holes being drilled in the skull, a bone plate being removed, so the brain is accessible. My fingers involuntarily seek out the dents left by the holes, the plate ridges, the long jagged scar that when pressed causes a nerve below my left shoulder blade to jump. I'd always wondered exactly what happened. Now I know.
Through Soho up to Oxford Circus. The Christmas lights are on. This year they have a new sponsor.
Marmite lights. Not for everybody.
Rather like the Hunterian.
