Bed Bugs and Banh Mi

Thursday started well, with Jason and Oscar beaming in on FaceTime letting me know that Oscar passed all his GCSEs. This was in no way a given, as he has had a horrendous couple of years with his mental health and was barely in school at all for great swathes of time. All we wanted was for him to pass so he didn’t have to resit. He had already been offered an unconditional place at drama school and knowing his circumstances they had also said they were happy for him to take any resits alongside his classes if necessary, which was so sweet of them. Thankfully that isn’t necessary and he got an A in drama, with his lovely teacher coming to find him to tell him that he didn’t drop a single mark in his performance and that it was flawless. We couldn’t be more delighted. Thank God that’s out the way and we can move forward and as far away from that miserable school as possible, in every way possible.

Andrea was in town for a few days so we decided to meet up and do a proper London walk rather than a Katy London walk. We plumped for the Medical Tour with Rick Jones as our guide. It kicked off at 2.30 p.m. outside Russell Square tube station and was very excellent indeed.

I know the area well but in other capacities. Coram Fields is just round the corner, where I have spent many an afternoon watching my children hurtle down zip wires and get eaten by goats. I have also done a little wandering on my own behalf as it’s the heart of Bloomsbury and all kinds of wonderful people from Virginia Woolf to Charles Dickens and Dorothy L. Sayers have lived there. I’d never really thought about it in terms of medicine though.

It was a fascinating couple of hours and if you’ve got some time to spare and fifteen quid burning a hole in your pocket, I’d highly recommend it. Jones is an ex-journalist who covered the arts but who became interested in where art and medicine cross over, so his tour was peppered with wonderful anecdotes about the point where his passions meet.

We were outside the Foundling Museum, which is a fascinating little museum which never seems to be very busy and which more people should visit (you do have to pay to get in, which may explain the lack of visitors) when our guide pointed us to the tiny, mitten sculpture which is by Tracey Emin and which sits on the railings, looking for all the world like a real, lost mitten.

It’s such a tiny, poignant thing. It’s not only an acknowledgment of all the lost children who ended up there, it also references the fact that families who really didn’t want to give their children up would leave tokens with the child in the hope that they might one day be reunited with them. Often it was a single shoe or glove and the family would keep the other. Other families made small charms or votives and there is a whole collection of them in the museum which is heartbreaking and beautiful. If you don’t have the money to go and see them, if you walk down the side of the Brunswick Centre towards Gay’s The Word, you can see replicas of the charms embedded in the pavement.

As we were looking at the mitten, Andrea made the very astute point that she had seen some Damien Hirst sculpture recently and she thought it was very telling that his are all huge and combative and Tracey’s are so often small and wistful. I’d seen some of her work on The Line a few weeks ago and missed it the first time round and had to go back, because it was exactly that.

A highlight of the tour for me was finally getting to see the auto icon of Jeremy Bentham at UCL. I’d been to find him before, because he’s one of my people, but he was getting a new case and all I could see was the wooden cabinet he used to be stored in. Now he has a fancy glass box and you can get a proper look at him. Bentham was a politician, philosopher and social reformer who invented something called Utilitarianism. Basically he believed that if you have the choice, you should always choose to do the thing that makes the most people happy. This is far harder than it looks, but he had a crack at it and was pretty revolutionary in his day. He believed in prison reform, animal rights, women’s rights and not treating kids like crap. He believed that homosexuality shouldn’t be punished and people should stop getting hung up on sex and be nice to each other. He was a righteous dude.

My favourite thing about him though, is that he realised graveyards were getting clogged up with too many dead people and that it wasn’t good for people to be wandering around with stacked up bodies littering the streets and fields. He decided that on his death, his organs would be given to science and his flesh and bones would be preserved and turned into a model or auto icon. If you go and see it now, the head is wax, because unfortunately his head was too disturbing to see, although they do have it stored in a safe. The body under the clothes is all his. He thought everyone should be preserved this way and families should make use of their ancestors by turning them into furniture and the like. I can’t disagree. I’m thinking of becoming a telephone table.

Back on the tour, I was delighted that all the balconies on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine building, have been decorated with golden insects which are all disease carrying beasts. They look so stylish. If you’ve never seen a golden bed bug before you really need to.

There was lots to love about the tour, gruesome facts, good art, stuffed bodies and lots of stuff about women’s contribution to medicine and science, which was extremely welcome. By the time it was over, our heads were stuffed with facts and our bellies were empty. We had promised ourselves proper Italian food on Lamb’s Conduit Street, but when we got there, they were closed for their summer holidays, so we ended up grabbing banh mi from a Vietnamese Cafe further up the road.

We felt we deserved pudding for our labours, so hunted down gelato at the back of Covent Garden and then wandered into Lincoln’s Inn Fields to eat it. Watching virtuous people plocking about at tennis while you fill your face full of Fior di Latte is supremely satisfying, rendered even better by watching two, angry squirrels going head to head in heated nut wars and nearly getting run over for their pains. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a squirrel dig up a nut before, and I nearly didn’t this time. He was very suspicious of me, because I clearly looked like the sort of woman who would steal a damp and muddy acorn from his very paws. He was so upset with me, he turned his back on me so I couldn’t see him eat it. That was when his enemy pounced and it turned out that he shouldn’t have been worrying about me at all.