300 year old pickled arseholes

Have just spent an incredible afternoon in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgery, a free museum on the South Side of Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is almost directly opposite the John Soanes museum, and both house the spoils of two of the most fanatical gentlemen collectors of the 18th century. Whereas Soanes taste ran to pinching or plaster casting endless architectural details of the ancient world, Hunter's habit is arguably more interesting: he pickled.

Hunter was a pickler. He was a preserver. A surgeon at a time when the profession had barely disassociated itself from that of barber, he collected hundreds of specimens, and, in the name of human knowledge, and having cut them up or left them whole, and suspended them in alcohol. The Hunterian museum has glass cases covering two floors, each containing hundreds of parts of animals or people who last breathed air 300 years ago. And that is not to mention the skeletons, skulls, and casts. It is overwhelming. The mad thing is that only a third of his collection remains - two thirds was destroyed by a bomb in 1941 - not difficult, as a lot of it was in highly flammable alcohol. Pictures and photographs of the collection as it was are hard to describe. Huge rooms contain a whole Noah's ark cut up and pickled or wired and suspended, stopped mid stride or in submerged alcoholic slumber, as it were, waiting.

To a layman, it is the method which appeals. He would classify the organ of each animal according to function - vision, digestion, circulation, etc, and then classify them according to that. So one corner on the ground floor is devoted to the organs of excretion of many different animals - bears bumhole, crab's cloaca, cat's crapper. A whole array of pickled rectums. A cabinet of teeth. A cabinet of ears. This is the whole of the animal kingdom reimagined as a spare-parts brochure, an Argos catalogue, laid out from simple to complex. And the system is merciless: foetuses also form their own category under 'organs of generation', and so a dozen human foetuses at various stages of development from a few weeks to full-term are suspended, eerily still, in alcohol, on the second floor.

If the system is rational, Hunter needed passion to put it together. Many animal specimens were from Cook's Tour. The human specimens were donated, or (one imagines), appropriated in a very 18th c way by the gentlemanly surgeon from amongst his patients. An Irishman called Byrne at the time made a living from being 7 foot 7 inches tall, and, it being known to him that Hunter coveted his bones, made arrangements to be buried at sea. Whoever it was was paid off and now Byrne's huge frame is indeed in one of Hunter's glass cases - displayed next to the skeleton of a man with a rare condition that caused bones to grow through his muscles and vein pathways, and whose skeleton consists of the usual grisly arrangement enmeshed in a cruel snaking network of improvised bones, leading from nowhere to nowhere, the sadistic invention of his own body for its own punishment.

A gruesome day out, but a fascinating insight into the history of medecine - preferable even to the excellent Wellcome Collection. Just don't go immediately after lunch.

Blogging the final sets of the Wimbledon Final

17h06
Roddick serving in the final set: the crowd, wooed by the Hollywood of it all, are cheering him on. Of course they are - Federer is the villain of the piece. Swiss: the face of secret corporations, gold, watches. When he's winning, you see him phoning to order the bath of liquid chocolate that he will swim in. When he's losing, you hear the sound of cuckoo clocks smashing. "Get the clocks and the hammer ready Genevieve, it has not been a good day."

Meanwhile Roddick's face contorts in stubbly pain - he is Hollywod, like a hero of a Bruce Springsteen song - the commentators referred to him as a 'blue-collar player', as if he's been doing a spot of welding in between sets.

17h12
Let us spare a thought for the three stooges at the back of the court who stand and adjudicate in the official posture. Apart from the one who is in the line of fire, and who is allowed to stand up, ready to flee the 120mph bullet heading their way. Perhaps a hangover from its royal days, Tennis is superabundant in these underlings, modern day courtiers in green.

17h15
Federer leads 4 games to 3. He drinks from a bottle of distilled child tears as refreshment.

17h16
Roddick winning again now. 3 hours in the sunlight! I wander if either of them have begun to hallucinate. Of course, even the random train of thought is the athlete's enemy. A long rally, and you begin to think - Aren't radishes a funny vegetable?

17h18
Game Roddick.

17h19
Federer serving now. Not headline-grabbingly fast, but accurate.

17h20
I should be making dinner but I'm not, I'm watching the tennis. Now is that scary bit where they cross each other near the net - what do they say? Nice hair, Rog. Where do ya get it cut? - I get it cut by a laser in my underground lair, Andy.

17h22
How long is it before they start sponsoring the relatives, who after all are on camera a fair.bit. One of the Roddick camp (seen doing terrorist fist bumps a minute ago) was wearing a crocs T-shirt - how much did some marketing department slip him to wear it?

17h25
Federer now winning 6-5. The commentators seem to be running out of platitudes: "Who has got what it takes to win it. Well, they both have actually." It's true. It's a brutal match though. Like the Ali-Foreman fight, with Roddick as Foreman, the big hitter, and Federer as Ali.

17h28
of course there's no trash talking in tennis. Despite the fact that some of the players wear their caps backwards.

17h29
Roddick has just brought it to 6-6 and it's seems to be in mental torment. So if Federer wins this game he's won? Surely not?

17h30
What a time to forget the rules of tennis. Well he's just won and apparently not.

17h32
Slight comic relief of watching a very muscley man hold an umbrella with military precision. Half expect him to break out of his position into a dance routine.

17h33
F approaches baseline.

17h33
15 all.

17h34
laptop battery running out but can't move to fish it out of bag, but might miss something.

17h35
They've just consulted the master computer on one of Roddick's returns and it disagreed with te already taken decision. What a strange thing to consult a virtual reality like that - do they ever think of making it look like Mario Tennis?

17h37
One of the commentators just remarked that Federer had a moment 'where he looked almost human'. Unfortunately I missed that, and he now looks like an international superrobot built by a conglomerate of banks again.

17h39
Right time to run for the laptop cable!

17h42
Phew have power and also got some biscuits. It's now 8 - 8 in the final set and F is serving. 15-30 to Roddick. 15-40 to Roddick! Good God! The wiring in the Federer mainframe must be skipping connections in the heat.

17h44
Despite being an avid browser of celebrity tat magazines, I am having trouble recognising all of the people that the audience cameras are moving in on. Surely it can't be that NORMAL people have gained access to this

17h45
The commentators now have recourse to the Commentator's Handy Book of Platitudes - "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Do not try and ease our anxiety with mere words you silly man! We are skating on the outer edge of the incomprehensible, the edge of the unknown, the limits of human endurance, clipping the kerb of oblivion in a chariot of fire!

17h47
These are great biscuits. 35p for a pack of custard creams at Sainsbury's. Brill.

17h48
Roddick with a deft touch over the net to take it to 40-15: and he's just won. The skinny girlfriend almost cracks a smile. Are they like the US version of Posh and Becks? what am I talking about? Posh and Becks are more US than the US.

17h49
Nice shot of Woody Allen in the seats, thinking no doubt about tits.

17h50
Shot of Russell Crowe, thinking no doubt about the same thing.

17h50
Roddick just scoops a shot over Federer plc. The shareholders wince.

17h52
Federer wins the set regardless. The graphs of projected earnings pick up.

17h52
I have to admit that I doubt, like Roddick, the accuracy of the Mario Tennis projections. Maybe the guy who marks the lines has turned to drink in the pressre of the tournament, and gone off a millimetre. He will be shot at dawn by green capped muppets.

17h55
Bloody hell, 10 games each in the final set. I've got washing to put on here lads, hurry up.

17h56
Bjorn Borg breaks the silence. For a moment it seemed that the commentators had just forgotten about the mics. Federer plc wins the game - 11 to 10.

17h58
The man with the microphone has just told off the crowd for shouting. Will anybody be held back for detention?

17h59
"Rain woudl be pretty interesting at this stage wouldn't it?" says Tim Henman, leaving us baffled as to how we could have been so emotionally attached to a man with such a capacity for blandness.

18h00
Roddick (I almost accidentally typed Rocky) is on track to make it 11-11 - or is he? It's deuce now in this game. Right time to concentrate.

18h02
Advantage Roddick, still the face of pain. I almost wish Federer would do like a Swiss clinic and put him out of his misery - but no, Roddick wins.

18h06
Just had a phone call from Ben in Lancashire - does he not know that the entire world is watching a series of fluffy yellow balls? I dismiss him abruptly, after a terse volley of banter.

18h07
"Both players tired now" - presumably that manifests itself in only serving at 110mph.

18h07
Federer Plc's father looks like Mr Creosote out of Monty Python. Another titan of physical endurance. Of course F plc has not father, having been created in the Hadron Collider by the revivified brains of weapons scientists.

18h10
Talking of arms race, Henry Kissinger is in the audience. What are the chances of a superannuated celebrity collapsing from heatstroke and exhaustion? Probably be Wody Allen - all that thinking about tits is going to push him a vital couple of degrees over the safe level.

18h11
Feel sick. Have eaten too many biscuits.

18h13
Now it's Deuce in this set, with 13-12 to Federer on the scoreline. Very tense

18h14
Now it's 13 all. How long is this going to go on? I'm beginning to think time has stopped, and I have been placed in some kind of armchair sports hell as divine retribution for some misdemeanour in my young days. I will stay here surrounded by dirty washing and biscuit crumbs forever, glued to the televisual images of some endlessly slogging international sports brands, and never see the outside world again. Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrggggghhhh

18h17
Bloody hell, I've been writing this thing for over an hour. I could have finished a chapter of a novel in this time. Bloody microblogging trend, who do I think I am, Stephen Fry?

18h18
Come to think of it, who does Stephen Fry think he is? Always been puzzled by that one.

18h18
Can't stop now. As the line from Macbeth goes, 'so far steeped in biscuit crumbs and dirty washing...'

18h19
30-30. F plc jsust two points from Grand Slam. Roddick "holding on by his teeth" as Bjorn charmingly puts it. Oh well. A mispronunciated platitude is more interesting than a platitude. George W for commentator anyone?

18h22
The internet is broken so I can't look up how many sets they play before it goes to a tie break. whoever thought up this hell really had everything figured out down to the fine detail.

18h23
"That's Gavin Rossdale," says Bjorn, showing his great knowledge of slightly crap English bands.

18h24
F plc 2 points from victory here. Release me, Roger!

18h25
Now it's 30-30. I feel like the crew in the film Das Boot.

18h26
Deuce. Roddick's wag wife with a steely cosmetic face: Botoxed by the moment.

18h26
Deuce again. Implacable swiss Federer, how do you do it? What Genevan machanism is this?

18h27
Advantage Federer plc.

18h28
FEDERER'S WON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I immediately feel bad for slagging him off. Daddy Sampras looks down grinning. What is happening now? The greencapped muppets are everywhere.

18h29
Roddick looks destroyed.

18h29
To slip into the vernacular: OMG, I've never seen this: they're turning the pitch into a ceremonial ground. Royalty have arrived. This is surreal.

18h31
Ah-ha. Lars Graf, microphone man, was Swedish.

18h31
Hope people spotted the Abba reference in the above.

18h32
Roddick looks like he'd want to throw that plate in a bin.

18h32
Federer plc looks quite fresh. God that trophy is gaudy. If Jacko was here he'd be commissioning a replica to hold sweets in. Give us a good baroque trophy anyday - noe of your minimalist glass and steel rubbish.

18h33
Now Roddick speaks to the crowd: wow. Even a joke to Pete Sampras. And ending on 'I'll be back'. Hollywood through and through.

18h34
"I won 5 but still it hurts". "Unfortunately tennis there has to be a winner sometimes, and today it was me." Here, I feel Federer has erred on the wrong side of glib. Probably getting ready for his career as a pundit.

18h37
Woody Allen still thinking about tits at this point probably. Wake up Woody! it's finished.

18h37
Okay stop talking to Federer now. 'Just one final question' - noooooooooo. Awww it's the Hello magazine angle - the baby. "It's good that there's an end of it". You said it Rog.

Please lighten up

This bit of puff for the new series of Robin Hood appeared on the BBC internal website appeared this afternoon. Could it be that this series takes itself too seriously? To illustrate my point, I have dug out a load of pictures from the Robin Hood adaptation that I was on TV when I was growing up: Maid Marion and her Merry Men.

"And after the death of his wife Marian, the green-clad hero is growing up, becoming darker and brooding over avenging her tragic end at the hands of Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage).

A new beacon of hope arrives in the form of a travelling monk called Tuck (David Harewood), a man of vision and imagination, who has a very hands-on approach when it comes to justice and freedom.

Meanwhile, the wickedness of the Sheriff (Keith Allen) continues unabated. A spirited Locksley girl named Kate (Joanne Froggatt) objects to her brother's forced conscription. As a result she inadvertently gets caught up in the cause of Robin Hood and joins the gang.

An unexpected addition to the Gisborne family, Guy's little sister, Isabella, played by newcomer Lara Pulver, arrives and becomes a complication both Robin and Gisborne can do without.
As the threat of Prince John (Toby Stephens) looms larger Robin and Gisborne have to reach an uneasy truce as it emerges that they may have rather more in common than they thought. "

More Dickens

What with a big production of Waiting for Godot coming up, I want to draw everyone's attention to Chapter V of The Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens' late writings. It's called 'Poor Mercantile Jack', but it may as well be called 'Waiting for Jack'. Etext here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/unctr10h.htm

The Pickwick Papers - The Original Road Trip @ The Greenwich Theatre 03.02.2009

IF YOU ARE READING THIS TODAY (04/02) IN LONDON, GO AND SEE THIS PLAY TONIGHT!

http://www.europeanarts.co.uk/uk_tours.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pickwick_Papers

In this production, the six actors of the European Arts Company attempt to recreate the first of Dickens' serialisations, The Pickwick Papers. This is the account of a club of gentlemen led by Samuel Pickwick, as they travel around getting into trouble in the last years of stagecoach England.

Like the serialisation, (400 copies sold in its first instalment (March 1836) 40,000 copies of the last instalment (October 1837)) this production gathers pace. The first episodes (Pickwick and Winkle's trip to Dingley Dell to see Mr Wardle, Winkle's falling into the ice and subsequent wooing of the spinster aunt) all unfold in a slightly too leisurely way, with a lot of time spent by the cast shifting boxes into various ingenious positions for very short scenes.

However as soon as the villainous Jingle begins to plot, things pick up. The seduction scene between him and the spinster aunt is an early highlight. Nicholas Waters' interpretation of The Fat Boy is a masterclass in understated characterisation. By which I mean that a)The Fat Boy is always falling asleep b)Waters acts this very well. n.b. ANDREW DAVIES TAKE NOTE: SOME OF DICKENS' CHARACTERS ARE FUNNY.

After 30 minutes, however, the company really raises the game. The episode with Peter Magnus, Most Boring Man of the 1820s, and the Incomprehensible Inn, is brilliantly staged and timed. Paul Lincoln and Richard Latham have an absolute hoot with Dodson and Fogg, lawyers who pop in and out of a wall of box files, waving copies and originals of writs at Pickwick, inciting him to slander and cackling maniacally. n.b. Mr Davies: those satirical bits that you like to play music over, they are also allowed to be funny.

However, the courtroom scene raises the bar again. Here the company reaches the levels of the big boys: certainly Cheek by Jowl (now too portentous and mournful) or even Propellor (outstanding all-male touring Shakespeare company) . Richard Mansfield turns in virtuoso performance as Sergeant Buzfuz, Waters 'does the police in different voices' to recreate the clerks 1)squeaky 2)booming 3)incomprehensible, and credit is due to the plastic skeleton who turns in a virtuoso performance as the judge. A hideous child marionette further bolsters the cast.

The limitations of the play are very often those of the book: 'All of the women characters were the same!' pointed out my 21st century playgoing companion, which is more due to Dickens than Vanessa Morley's excellent turns as the various hysteria stricken damsels of the play. Otherwise, I breathed a sigh of relief at seeing one of CD's novels - which, for numerous reasons easy to see but lengthy to describe, are MADE for the stage - done in the way it should be.

Enough. Find a few travelling companions, gentlemen or otherwise, secure means of transport, and make your way picaresquely and precipitously to Greenwich.

Elephant and Castle & Hinduism

This morning I went down to the Heygate estate next to Elephant and Castle. The whole thing is scheduled for demolition at some point next year, as part of a huge redevelopment that will see whole estates, the shopping centre, and the underground station knocked down and built up in a more pleasing style. It seems that since I started working for local papers, all I have really done is speak to people in the path of bulldozers (see the front page of the Paddington and Westminster Times last week for the results of similar enquiries at Tottenham Court Road).

Southwark Council is trying to achieve the impossible: rehouse the thousands of people who are on the estate without having built any new housing stock. Apparently, according to Ernie, the process was going well until the first 600 moved out, then saturation point was reached, and the council are trying to cram the remaining residents into more and more unlikely places.

There may seem little to love about the huge concrete buildings. Modernist buildings do not age well: the whole baroque apparatus of ornamentation, cornices, friezes, architraves and so on had been dismissed as the unnecessary junk of history. It was only after the buildings of Le Corbusier et al had aged enough that it was discovered that the old ornamental features did well in channelling rainwater, protecting walls, and otherwise baffling the processes of age and decay. Consider the caryatids of almost any North London building, which are at once structural - supporting elements of buildings - and also the most fortunate of sculptures, which always have a roof over their heads to cover them from the rain.

There is no ornamentation on the Heygate estate, apart from if you count the satellite dishes that so cover the sheer walls that the buildings look colonised by a riot of black metallic flowers.

All six of the residents I spoke to today had moved into the estate when it had first been built in 1974. They moved out of ancient landlord-held tenements, built pre-war, that stood in locations like Manor Place in South London. The scraps of culture that have come down to me from these places don't seem salutory. Horrible references from Dickens and Eliot, knowledge of a particularly unglamorous set of murders in a now demolished street called Rillington Place.

Dennis, a current Heygate resident, told me: "When we first moved here, they came to our tenements and told us - 'the new estate is ready, would you like to go and have a look?' We did, and we liked it."

It must have seemed an incredible gift from the state to the poorer people in society. The prime gripe of the residents now is that they aren't being offered anything half as nice in return for where they are living. Meanwhile, instead of solving the problem by building decent housing for the residents who are there, they offer deals and trinkets. The most absurd endeavour was to hire, at the cost of £2000, stress counsellors to come in and set up shop in one of the abandoned flats, and invited the local residents in. The council counsellors were faced with a lot of angry people shouting 'where am I going to live? Why have I been served an eviction notice?' and predictably, did nothing to destress the residents. (Luckily, ITV were on hand to capture these classic moments.) Otherwise, the tenants are rushed out to a showflat somewhere further south, and offered cash to sign on another related flat that they haven't seen.

Throughout the debacle, the local council acts in various different guises, like aspects of the divine. Brahma, the creator, who built all of these houses, is dead. (Building houses is now looked after by smaller deities or demons called housing associations, who are very susceptible to financial offerings.) The local residents are left with Shiva who captivates - the various false literature the council posts, the stress counsellors, the lovely pictures of new housing that have yet to materialise; Shiva the Terrible, who frightens with eviction notices, Shiva the second hand car dealer, who conjures up crackpot deals to palm off other flats on the residents, and Shiva the Destroyer, who is due to arrive at some point next year. None of the aspects of the council seem to work together: as Terry, the most disenchanted of the residents I met, put it: 'The right hand don't know what the left is doing'. He is right, apart from the fact there are more than just two hands - there are dozens.

The residents themselves didn't want the place saved, although it was lovely. Dennis cracked me up with tales of how a group of 'lefty nutters' as he termed them, had jumped on the bandwagon with a campaign to 'Save the Heygate'. There was no question of saving it for them, it was just a question of being rehoused in places as good as they were - and these flats were absolutely lovely, nicer than my current house even - in such a way that their community, made almost exclusively of people who had moved there originally in 1974, stayed together.

I jump at the chance to make this point outside the febrile atmosphere of the newsroom, because papers will often slam councils and planners as a kind of reflex action. The tenants, on the face of it, were not asking for much. Presumably, somewhere near the top of the various council cabinets and panels and commissioning bodies, everything seemed to be making sense. But the reality on the ground was that the various processes of the council were completely opaque and Byzantine. The less the tenants knew, the more they were worried, and they ranged from Ernie, who was fairly clued up, knew his rights, and wasn't too bothered, to an unnamed 80 year old man who was almost the sole survivor in one of the bigger blocks, stranded right up at the top who understood nothing apart from the eviction notice and maybe not even that, and had nobody to talk to about it.

Perhaps the tutelary deity of Elephant and Castle is the eponymous elephant himself, plinthed at the front of the shopping centre. Anyone who travels to South London will have seen him. Ganesha, the elephant god of Hinduism, has two aspects: Lord of Beginnings and Lord of Obstacles: proof that, in addition to his other aspects, he is most definitely the patron saint of development projects. At the Elephant and Castle, he has reached a furious state: he gazes in myopic plastic fury at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and its classical entablature across the road. He is as angry and single minded as some high-up development mandarin, with his pet project, the castle, carried on his back: a huge chip on his shoulder.

Battersea

Coming across the Grosvenor Bridge yesterday, I saw two men in a gantry on the flanks of the luckless Battersea Power Station. The promised investment projects in the area show the body of the building restored, hooked up to a glittering retail centre like a patient on a life support machine. As it is, however, the building still remains, with a wall and roof missing, and the rest in a poor state of disrepair. It sits on the south bank of the river like a the remains of the turkey on Boxing Day.
The rest of Battersea visible from the train station is in harmony with the general air of having been forgotten. A huge factory building on Lombard Road has been converted to a branch of 'safestore - self storage', with large signs explaining to businesses and individuals how easy and convenient it is to bring their possessions to Battersea, lock them up in a dry, safe space, and then forget them.
Another warehouse of the forgotten, Battersea Cats and Dogs Home, spreads out its neat concrete pens under the eyes of the commuters - empty when I passed, jammed in under two diverging sets of railway tracks.
The tracks are a defining feature of Battersea: tributaries from all of South London and beyond into Victoria. The station itself, Battersea Park, is a Victorian infant of a railway station, jammed in between such a weight of lines, and neglected by the majority of trains that pass through, it wanted to grow up as grand and well turned-out as other railway stations, but it is thin and sickly and in need of investment: a few thin platforms and rickety staircases barely large enough for two people abreast.
Knots and tangles of railway lines around South London are the more or less direct result of the report of the Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, which in its 1846 report laid down a golden line surrounding London beyond which no overland railways should penetrate. Hence our current pattern of major termini surrounding the whole city, and only underground railways in the centre. The logical pay-off of preserving the centre as railway free is the creation of areas such as Battersea, where huge amounts of the business of rails and signals and steelwork and sidings need to congregate: the landscape of 'utility', of which the power station itself is a part.
I have been quizzing my architecturally clued-up friends as to whether any other power stations in the world were built, as Battersea was, by one of the leading architects of the day. Preliminary results seem to suggest that there were not many: In the UK they are put out of sight, and so design by Foster and associates would be wasted on an audience of sheep and/or seabirds. The remaining nuclear power stations in the UK are Dungeness A and B, Hartlepool, Heysham, Hinkley Point, Hunterston, Oldbury, Sizewell, Torness, and Wylfa. How many of these places had you heard of? Battersea Power Station is a relic of a time before the need to forget where our energy came from overwhelmed us.