Wet Wednesday

Black Friday? Don't make me laugh...
(No, please ... don't ... aargh!)

I was up in the Bloomsbury area of London on Wednesday delivering a bag of stuff to my daughter, and had planned to go for an autumnal afternoon wander about the still half-familiar streets and squares (I was a postgraduate student at UCL 40 years ago), camera in hand. But it was a miserably wet day: I have never seen such vast puddles in central London streets, which glum-faced tourists on ill-advised winter breaks were attempting to negotiate with their wheeled luggage, hoping to avoid another drenching from the bow-wave of a passing bus. Even the endless work of making London fit for the ultra-rich was on hold, as workmen in hi-viz vests and hard hats sheltered from the rain in doorways and beneath scaffolding. It was no fun at all.

So, instead, I headed for two favourite indoor haunts: the Grant Museum of Zoology, and the British Museum (of, like, everything), both conveniently nearby. My old trade union is currently on strike over pensions, pay, and working conditions so, the Grant being a part of UCL, I half-anticipated finding it closed, or blocked by the impassable barrier of a very wet, two-person picket line (some magic spells are permanently binding). However, it was open, and unpicketed, so I was free to pass within.

Quite why I am drawn to the grotesque spectacle of preserved and dissected life-forms is a question between me and my appalling subconscious dream-life, but there's no question that I am. Others, emphatically, are not, which may explain the relative lack of success of my photo-collage work, which does tend to lean heavily on a certain mock-horror sensibility. Although it has to be said the enthusiastic reception of Queen guitarist and stereoscopic photography enthusiast Brian May's project to reassemble a 19th-century French series of stereoscopic Diableries does give me hope. For the cognoscenti of carcasses and cadavers, however, the Grant Museum is a small but perfect sample of the bony and bottled horrors laid down, like vintage wine, in scientific cabinets of curiosities in most European cities [1].

Now there's a Guardian... 

Demon Bat has a side-splitting laugh in the bath

The British Museum, of course, needs no introduction: it is the grand imperial attic, stuffed with excavated bric-a-brac, extorted loot, and questionably-acquired gifts from many generations of intrepid British adventurers abroad, who were mainly avoiding the dreariness of family life (or, in some cases, the law) in warmer climes. I have never quite learned to love the BM – it's too big, and too all-embracing – but it is full of wonderful things, wonderful things [2], and I have never yet visited it and not come across some treasure I'd never seen before. It was certainly worth enduring a slow, shuffling queue in the rain, in order to have my soggy backpack examined for explosives or potential weaponry, and I'm sure finer weather would have meant a far longer wait.

Once finally inside, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they've been putting a lot more effort into selection and presentation in recent years, and that my previous comparison with Hamburg's museums may have been a little unfair. After all, the BM curators have probably been to the same seminars, and read all the same articles. Thankfully, the "interpretation" is both informative and also still reasonably adult: there is no equivalent of the Natural History Museum's abysmal descent into "Creepy Crawlies" terminology here: no "Curse of the Pharoahs" gallery or "Saxon Bling" wing. Yet, anyway.

I love the eye-rolling lion:

"FFS don't take on so, Brit, this Frederick wasn't so great..."

Child in Hercules costume says, "Right on..."

1. I have to admit, even I found Edinburgh's Surgeons' Hall Museum hard going. Not recommended for the even slightly squeamish visitor to that fine city.
2. Obligatory allusion to Howard Carter and Tutankhamun.