love the skin you're no longer in

Shortly before we got on with the business of dithering over how long we'd stay at my parents' house over the winter festive period Nicky noticed that international corpse-sculpting superstar Professor Hat's funfair was back in Innitville and would be much more conveniently visit-able from a mere 151 miles away in Parentshire than 430 miles away in Edinburgh. Especially when my dad was immediately taken with the idea even though he's seen the show before and offered to drive there and back despite this involving driving through or indeed anywhere near London which I would rather pay through the face to use public transport to avoid than do. Definitely worth a pop to if you're anywhere near the Dome at any point before the middle of August next year, especially if you've never seen close-up dead people before. Compared with anatomy and physiology practicals it lacks the hands-on fascination of prodding at a real dead brain or pulling various tendons to make limbs flex but it performs the quadruple purposes of prodding at the unnecessary veil of weirdness-about-death some cultures have, recommending that people do healthy things and don't do unhealthy things, teaches people about anatomy and is also a simple art/sculpture installation. My only complaint was that words on the information-card-things were
arranged in a particularly
stilted and affected
way, which probably
didn't make it
very easy for people
with reading
difficulties to read the bloody things as
well as looking
rather poncey
and that the complete anonymity of the specimens is sometimes detrimental and should be optional for donors. How did they die and at what age? What were their professions and hobbies and did it affect the shape of the body displayed? On the rare occasion when I would have welcomed a souvenir stall (hard-resin-cast slices of body would make excellent coaster or table-mats) there were only two books and one DVD available at the end. No matter.

Although the drive down took four hours and the show more than three we had some spare time to kill to avoid ending up in a car in the rush hour so tubed to Westminster and trundled back along the river so that my dad could point out the things he knows the names of, point at the building in which he briefly worked forty years ago and pop into a record shop as there aren't many proper walk-in record-shops left in Lincoln for him to poke at during his lunch-walkings. I'd originally been planning to find a few spare minutes to pop to a secondhand lens emporium but the failure of the 50 1.4G to be worth keeping means neither current lens is superseded yet.