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I had some meetings to go to, but my wife and some of my family were out on a trip to a museum, so I joined them there and had a quick look round. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but it turned out to be the Hunterian Museum near Holborn, which is unusual to say the least. It’s full of skellingtons and animals and organs and foetuses in jars and were it not open to the public you would assume you had stumbled across the lair of a serial killer. Maybe it is. Hiding in plain sight.
It is also, I realised later, the museum that is displaying the real Winnie the Pooh’s skull (that I mocked in a previous Warming Up) and now I’ve been there, my fears of it scaring children are unfounded. Any child who made it that far into the museum would already have been traumatised beyond all help. Right at the front (as my wife pointed out) there is a jarred ET foetus. I mean they say that it’s a sloth, but they’re not fooling anyone. Whatever it is it is surely the happiest creature ever to be preserved in formaldehyde there has ever been.
Also if you’ve ever wanted to see Charles Babbage’s brain then this is the place to come.
The exhibit that fascinated us the most though was the skeleton of Charles Byrne, “The Irish Giant". It wasn’t so much that his skeleton was pretty big (though obviously that was a selling point), but the story behind it and the slightly mordant ending to it. Byrne was afraid that Hunter (the man who collected most of these weird and wonderful and horrible exhibits) would get hold of his skellington after his death and I don’t know, display it in a museum or something (where would he get that idea?), so he requested to be buried at sea. But Hunter managed to get hold of the skeleton anyway (wikipedia suggests by bribing the fishermen who conducted the service) and put it up in the museum. Just like Byrne has expressly said he didn’t want. His suspicions were more than justified. And what seemed worse is that even now Hunter is also dead (didn’t see his skeleton in the museum, though to be fair I might have missed it) and people still know that that is what Byrne wished for, they still haven’t buried him at sea. It seems a huge injustice that the reluctant skellington of a tall Irish man remains on display. Won’t someone break into the museum, steal the skellington of give Byrne his final wish? There aren't enough burglaries and museum robberies carried out in the name of what is right and good.
One of my favourite ever RHLSTPs with the man born to be a guest on this show (not literally) David Mitchell can be seen here
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Or just listened to here or on iTunes
