London’s Brick Lane saw an imaginatively titled festival yesterday – The Brick Lane Festival. The more unimaginative of you may have decided to kill two birds with one stone and taken in a few curried items in the curry cooking celebration, and then wandered on to the Body Worlds exhibition, also on Brick Lane. If you had tried to travel east on the tube, you may have been disappointed by crap delays on a crap system that is sticky, smelly, expensive, slow and generally unpleasant.
The unimaginative east end visitor would have been shocked to discover a queue for Body Worlds (where the queue is often zero minutes) was an afternoon wasting 1 hour 45 minutes, and that a bottle of vodka was the only way to pass the time and distance of the queue. The exhibition is of thinly sliced, or partially torn people, who have their juices replaced with plastic – all the better to be illuminated in displays for grossed-out people to gawk at. The audio guide inconspicuously changes from labelling the corpse something which once belonged to a ‘body donor’ to something which is now a ‘specimen’. To be honest, you might find it hard to relate the perfect slices of constipated bowels and withered lung to anything vaguely human, to anything which was once alive. But it can be quite a giggle, and if you are at all curious about which parts of the body are located where, and what they look like if you are a ‘consistent alcohol abuser’, then this could be one of your finest days out.
I found out at Bosy Worlds that it isn’t my liver which hurts every day I get up after a night of booze. I think it might be my appendix.