Comprehensive Molesworth

I cannot give platelets! They didn't even need to stick a needle in me to find out. I don't have the right sort of veins apparently - they are not near enough to the surface - despite the one that throbs on my temple giving evidence to the contrary. On a positive note it was the easiest coffee and biscuits I'll ever earn (proper snacks for Platelet People - Orange and Mint Club biscuits).

As you can see from the above picture we went on to the museum where much fun was had with new camera. One of the current temporary exhibitions is The Beat Goes On which consists mostly of walls of record covers, posters and general colourful pop-art style information, rather like a sub-section of the Opie Gallery at Wigan Pier (which, I am sad to discover, is now permanently closed). My wife said she could have stayed another few hours and I'm not sure I saw more than a few percent of everything there. Much Japanese information and photos were gathered for an upcoming project by youngest, not that he seemed particularly interested. 

I suspect my current reading affected my choice of subject at the museum. I was going to buy Blood and Guts - A History Of Surgery but I came across it at the library - which was nice. The opening scene of a Victorian leg amputation was brilliantly written despite being a scene so often told in anything vaguely medical and historical. The tale of the death of an assistant at another amputation was also recounted but this time a bystander is also mentioned, dying of shock at the carnage and therefore extending the mortality rate of this operation from the already-hilarious 200% to a side-splitting (almost-literally) 300%. We have whistled passed Galen who was an idiot - though slightly less-of-a-one than previous medically-inclined celebrities and are now up to the Blackadderish tale of Versalius swinging on the hanging corpse of a criminal, twisting the various limbs off it so that he could smuggle it back home to boil the bones off it and hence construct a full skeleton for study. Slight gag at the evocation of the smell of boiled bad-guy which reminded me of the penchant of our biology teacher for stewing up any roadkill brought to him as offerings by various rurally-inclined small boys. The foul bubbling and stench often accompanied our lessons in the prefab but the walls were lined with expertly-assembled skeletons. He occasionally dissected the animals before they were put in the pot and his joy at discovering a massive tape worm inside a rabbit was unbounded. I suspect that this unfortunate parasite is still coiled up in pickling fluid in a small jar somewhere in rural Worcestershire. I'm talking about the tapeworm by the way.