Once you’ve drifted past the age of 27½, things cease to be much of a surprise. Not the sort of surprise I had yesterday evening, anyway.
We went to see the remarkable Bodyworlds exhibition in east-central London. It was staggering. It’s the exhibition of ‘plastinated’ corpses, assembled by Professor Gunther von Hagens (the man who conducted the notorious televised post-mortem on British TV a few months ago).
The exhibition is ending this Sunday, so this was our last chance to see it. Advance booking was a good idea. When we arrived at 6pm, there was a queue several hundred yards long, many of whom I’m sure wouldn’t have got in at all, despite the exhibition staying open till 11pm.
Here are some examples of the exhibits (click on them to enlarge):
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I’ve not seen too many dead people in my time. A few here and there in the gutters in Calcutta, and on the funeral ghats in Varanasi. I saw two drowning victims pulled out of the Thames, when I worked overlooking the river in Battersea. And a German girl drowned while I was in Kovalam in Kerala, and I helped haul her body up the beach in a sheet. But even then, you don’t get the chance to study their innards, and nor would you want to in those circumstances. But the exhibition provided exactly this opportunity, and it was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever witnessed.
I was thinking about it as I ran my ten miles this afternoon. Impossible not to think about your physiology as you run. There was a truly fantastic exhibit last night called The Runner, showing a sprinter in action, with all the skin cut and pulled away in enormous trailing flaps, revealing the muscles and joints in action, and all the vital organs beavering away.
It wasn’t a great run today. Slow and steady, though it did include six severe hills which is some kind of preparation for the 10K I’m doing next weekend. The race is described as “undulating”, which as everyone knows, is a euphemism for Himalayan.
To make matters worse, it looks like I might be meeting up with my old mate the day before, so it’s likely that my race preparation will consist of a twelve hour drinking binge and a bag of chips.
