A gruesome twosome, here....

So, at the weekend I was supposed to be doing sensible grown up things and fitting towel rails in the kitchen. But ceb said I had to go to the exhibition of anatomical cake at St Barts. And I respond well to firm instructions, so off I went.

If you want to see some gruesome anatomical cakes, you can go and look at some pictures. Overall, sadly, I was a little disappointed.

I like cake. That's a well-known fact. What is perhaps slightly less known is that I'm not a huge fan of icing. And almost any kind of a cake display is usually really an icing display. So as I gazed on cakey lungs, cakey diseased legs, cakey flayed arms, etc, my main thought was hmmm, they don't look that appealing. Not because they were flayed and diseased and so on, but because they were fairly irrelevant cake covered by icing.

And the icing, in many cases, was very impressive. I admire the artistry required to make these cakes, I just feel it's more a matter of fine art or modelling than it is bakery, really. It's certainly not about the food any more.

The other problem I've found with exhibitions like this is that you invariably turn up and find that it seems everyone else is in the know, and you are not. Various bits of blurb I'd seen suggested that people would be trying to raise awareness of differing medical conditions, giving out leaflets, and so on. They weren't: there was a table at the back with leaflets on if you cared to interact, but that was all. The people running the show seemed to be chatting happily to each other, and ignored those of us who shuffled through the door. Many of the cakes I'd seen described didn't really seem to be there... unless you'd somehow ordered them. In which case, they were sitting in (non-visible) boxes waiting to be collected.

In fairness, we arrived just as a talk was ending (I don't know what on, because the doors were closed til it finished). So perhaps we just turned up at a bad time.

However! The exhibition was in the Pathology Museum, which is not usually open to the public. It's a huge, high-ceilinged, galleried room full of... well, full of grim things pickled in jars, basically. The galleries were still closed (ChrisC tells me the Health Protection Agency won't let members of the public up there), but from the ground floor you could still gaze upon lots of... grim pickled things in jars.

The museum, being largely for the use of studying students, does not have user friendly labels. Occasionally there would be a sheet of A4 pinned to the wall which allowed you to match up the cryptic number/letter labels with descriptions that you probably wouldn't understand anyway. Unless you'd done considerably more human biology than I have, which isn't difficult. Some things in jars I identified (pickled conjoined embryos, pickled face of child with hare lip); some things I speculated on wildly.

Not exactly the most fun museum in the world, but very interesting. And I always enjoy the idea of being in somewhere that isn't usually open to the public :)

On the way down stairs, I paused to notice a large, stone Roman sarcophagus plonked on a landing.
.

And, because students are students everywhere:


(And, of course, pedants are pedants everywhere...)




Otherly, my local butcher is getting properly into the Hallowe'en spirit, and has decorated his window. If you don't want to see the sort of window-display which could be created by someone who has a lot of spare animal body parts, I recommend you stop reading right now.

It's a poor photo, I'm afraid, because taking photos of a shiny window (with a phone) is hard.