Kowslowski or Kozlowski

Lisa has just phoned. My name ‘came up in conversation’  when she was talking to a medical acquaintance (I forgot to ask why they were talking about me, I was so surprised by what she told me), and he told her that ‘Kozlowski’ is the name of a form of dwarfism.

If you have read my earlier posts, you will remember that my friend Lisa is a dwarf, an achondroplasic: you can read about what happened to her in Amsterdam (when she was looking at masterpieces made by brick-layers – now that would interest my partner Tony!) and read much more about her in The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes .

Lisa – Dr Lisa Wallace – is a mathematician who works on something complicated called quasicrystals at Liverpool University; she is bright, and funny, and opinionated.  Knowing her, and what she has learned to put up with or ignore, as a dwarf, has made me and Tony even more angry and sickened by recently reported behaviour of the English rugby players – a ‘dwarf-throwing contest’? Surely not. Surely that sort of attitude should have gone out with the end of freak shows.

Writing in stone

Tony (a stone-mason, who is also my partner and the father of our little girl) gave Madeleine an unusual Christmas present a couple of years ago. Here’s what happened, as described in the final chapter of The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes:

“Tony was wearing a headband with two tinsel stars shimmering on wobbly stalks, and he stood by the sandstone mounting block, against which a shiny but indeterminate object was propped. As Madeleine approached he swept aside the foil sack to reveal a stone cross about two feet high: unmistakeably a gravestone.

‘Oh!’ She stopped, fearful, and looked at Ruth, but Ruth was smiling. ‘It’s okay, he doesn’t know a thing,’ she whispered, then said aloud, ‘You have to come and read what he’s written on it.’ The stone was dark Blencathra slate, polished so that it gleamed in the grey light of late afternoon. At the centre of the cross, Tony had engraved the name ‘Bob’.

‘I thought it’d look better than that old lump of sandstone,’ he said. ‘And I gather the old dog was a bit of a favourite. I’ll take it across to the grave and put it up for you tomorrow.’

Madeleine ran her finger across the letters, feeling their clean sharp edges. She began to laugh. She laughed so hard that tears streamed from her eyes and she had to hold onto Tony’s shoulder. He stared at her, bewildered, and she gripped him tightly so that he winced. ‘It’s the best present you could have given me. If you knew how I hated that stinking little dog … May he now rest in peace!’ “

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Tony’s been working over in Keswick recently, restoring some slate carvings. Sometimes I take Alison across to see what he is doing (Alison is nearly 2 years old now – we called her Alison Madeleine), and once we went with him to St Bees’ church when he was renovating part of a red sandstone window-frame. He likes to tell us stories about the stone he’s working with, and I suddenly had the idea that I’d get him to do a guest blog. But he made me promise not to edit it …

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Tony’s guest blog: Writing in stone

When the summer comes, and the livin’ is easy, I’m going to take Ruth and Alison to Millican Dalton’s Cave in Borrowdale. It’s a bit steep and slippy getting up to the Cave Hotel (that’s what Millican called it), which is on the River Derwent side, I guess that’s the east side,  of Castle Crag in the Jaws of Borrowdale (good name, ‘Jaws’ – the hillsides squeeze in just there and try to crunch the Crag).

The slate spoil-heap, Castle Crag

Castle Crag’s all slate. If you go up the standard way on the other side you zig-zag up a spoil heap, and the loose slate makes tinkly sounds with each step. Then you get to a couple of quarries, and people have propped up sheets of slate so it looks like a sort of sculpture-garden, really dramatic. People have scratched their names on the quarry walls, too. At the top of the Crag is an engraved memorial to the War Dead, and on top of that, at the very top, is a circular wind-shelter of piled-up slate. A good place to have your sarnies and a can or two!

'Sculpture park' on Castle Crag

Further down the hill again there’s a seat and more engraved slate, about the woman who gave Castle Crag to the nation (that’s us, folks)  in memory of her husband.

Anyway, Millican Dalton – he was a real eccentric, I wish I’d  met him but he died in 1947. He called himself the Professor of Adventure, and he offered to take folks (especially good-looking women – though apparently he smelt a bit because he didn’t have a bathroom in his hotel, so maybe the women were not too keen) on walks and climbs and rafting trips. He lived in his so-called Cave Hotel, which has two ‘rooms’, in the summers – and the reason I’m blogging about him is because on the wall of the lower cave he’s engraved “DON’T !! WASTE WORRDS. Jump to Conclusion”. The letters are well-cut, the walls are slate and take the letters well. It’s said that a Scottish friend of his cut the bit that’s in capitals and then old Millican added the extra R as a joke on his friend’s accent.

There are other slate quarries in the Jaws too – and all the slate is what’s called Lakeland Green. Jaws’ slate is used for building and walling, not like Honister slate which was quarried for roofing (and now it’s used for all kinds of engraved stuff for tourists).

I was working at St Kentigern’s church near Keswick one time and had a wander round the graveyard (as one does) and I noticed that the gravestones suddenly changed in about 1850 – suddenly Lakeland Green was all the rage, absolutely the stone to be buried in. I happened to ask my old tutor about this and he said it was probably because new sawing and planing tools were developed about that time, somewhere up in Scotland, so it was easier and faster to cut the sides.  Makes sense, I guess. If you want sharp, clear, instantly-readable letters and words – slate’s the best stone for that. I get quite a few commissions for memorials and plaques in slate.

But if you like subtlety, you need to go for sandstone, either beestone or Lazonby Red.

Beestone comes from St Bees’, as you’d guess: quarries at Sandwith and Egremont, for example. Lazonby Red’s from the Penrith area, it’s completely different.

View through Lacy's Caves, Little Salkeld

We took Alison to Lacy’s Caves last summer, though she was far too wee to care. The caves are at Little Salkeld, high above the river. Ruth hadn’t been there before and was well impressed. Now that is beautiful sandstone, you can see how the river has scoured it, and where there are bands of resistant harder rock. Colonel Lacy had the five caves quarried out of the rock back 18^th century, as some sort of folly. And people have scratched their names on the walls ever since — but you need to take time to make a good impression if you’re carving sandstone.

Entrance to Lacy's Caves

Ruthie and the babe came to St Bees’ with me one time and we walked across the cliffs to Fleswick Bay – red sandstone everywhere, the drystone walls in the fields, houses, the church, even the mole-hills are red.

Beestone is amazing stuff – it sparkles, because of the mica flakes. Penrith sandstone doesn’t have any mica – it was laid down by the wind in desert dunes. Beestone was laid down in water, like sand-banks in rivers.

When you carve beestone, it looks pale because of the dust, but then you wash it and the warmth and the hidden grain suddenly come through. Being sandstone, it’s really abrasive on tools. Think sandpaper! When I’m carving, I first use the files and then I take any discarded flake or whatever of sandstone,  and use it to sand the surface smooth. For the fine sanding I use wet and dry paper, and then I wash and polish the piece. Finally I rub in a bit of oil. Beestone’s quite silky, and gives a really crisp image, so you get the maximum sculptural effect. With sandstone the light doesn’t reflect so you don’t get any distortion of what you see. And that’s important when I’m sculpting a gargoyle, say, or renovating detail round a window.

The red sandstone cliffs at Fleswick Bay

Anyway, Fleswick Bay. It’s all Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, all big rounded shapes and contours. Ruth loved it. The sandstone platform by the sea is scooped out and hollowed, and there are all sizes of rounded sandstone pebbles, on the beach and caught in the hollows.  Norman Nicholson must have been to Fleswick Bay, because he wrote about St Bees’ sandstone (I just looked up the poem so I could copy it here):

“Smooth as a walnut turned on a lathe,

Or hollowed in clefts and collars where the pebbles

Shake up and down like marbles in a bottle.

Here the chiselling edges of the waves

Scoop long fluted grooves, and here the spray

Pits and pocks the blocks like rain on snow.”

The other thing you need to do at Fleswick is spend time walking at the foot of the cliffs and looking for engraved names. ‘Kells’ is written everywhere – families from Kells, just along the cliff, probably all coal-miners’ families coming to the beach for their summer hols. The oldest name that we found was “M.I. 1774”, almost hidden by green slime. And the best is ‘Judy McKay‘ — there’s no date but her lettering is perfectly finished, deeply incised, all with serifs. It’s a careful script that isn’t much used today, and the ‘c’ in McKay is done in superscript — beautiful.

She’s still alive, by the way – you can read her story on the website called Solway Shore Stories. It was her father who engraved her name, he was a stone-mason.

That’s what I’d like to do, too. One day I’ll take Ali down to Fleswick and she can play on the beach while I engrave her name. Alison Lucini.

(poem extract is from St Bees in The Pot Geranium; Norman Nicholson: Collected Poems, edited by Neil Curry; Faber 1994)

“Making eyes”

This blog of mine first appeared in The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes. Recently I have been to the Surgeons’ Hall Museum in Edinburgh as I wanted to find out more about several of the anatomical specimens held in the Collection (I will write more about this in due course) — and I was impressed by the collection of eyes, and information about diseases of the eye, donated in the 1880s by William Walker, who as well as being the first specialist opthalmologist at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary also had the grand title of Surgeon Oculist to Queen Victoria.

I have also written to Lisa (see the section ‘About’ me) to tell her about James Jack (known as ‘Jimmy’ — but then, of course, he wasn’t a surgeon; he was merely the man in charge of the Museum’s Collection during the Second World War.) Why might Lisa be interested? James was an achondroplasic; in his photo he is looking very dapper in a suit with a flower at the lapel, a flat cap – and a giant-sized cigar.

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An ivory and glass artificial eye, photographed in St Petersburg by Rosamond Wolff Purcell and reproduced on the cover of The Embalmer's Book of Recipes

‘Making Eyes’

White spheres lie on cotton-wool in the compartments of a flat wooden box: blue, brown or green circles, dark centres – pot-boilers, money-spinners: artificial human eyes. On a workbench there are small bottles, pinboxes and wooden trays containing different body-parts: glass tentacles of different shapes and colours, sponge spicules, tiny shells. ‘Mix ’n match’ invertebrates amongst the powdered glass and pigments.

In 1860, Philip Henry Gosse’s Actinologia Britannica was published, illustrated with engravings of coloured sea-anemones and corals. A few years later, an Englishman living in Dresden showed these pictures to glass-maker Leopold Blaschka. ‘Marine creatures preserved in spirits look like grey rubber,’ he said. ‘Why not show their true colours by modelling them in glass?’ Leopold accepted the challenge: he had already modelled orchids, and now he merged his art with science, modelling the exquisite and minute details of invertebrate animals, making them objects for the museum and scientific study rather than ornaments for the drawing-room.

Glass eyes made by the Blaschkas

Later, he and his son Rudolf were to give up animals and Haeckelian embryos for a ten-year commission to make the Harvard glass flowers; but in the earliest days their business was not yet profitable, so they created jewellery, and glass eyes for cosmetic use by the blind.

We don’t know where Frederik Ruysch obtained the glass eyes to fill the orbits of his embalmed and Death-defying Dutch babies in the 17^th century, but they obviously did the trick for the babies’ winning looks won the heart of great Czar Peter. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832, probably had the foresight to choose his own glass eyes, but he clearly had not planned that his mummified head would be stored inside his torso.

Can we defy Death, and  preserve and repair our ageing body-parts, can the blind really be made to see again? Human eyes are such complicated balls of cells. William Paley had argued in his Natural Theology in 1802, that the eye, like a telescope, could only have been designed by a Maker. (But the Maker must have been having a visual migraine when he designed the mammalian retina, back-to-front.)  Charles Darwin struggled to understand how these ‘organs of extreme perfection’ could have arisen from chance mutations alone. ‘To suppose that the eye … could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree,’ he wrote.  It’s almost enough to turn one into a Creationist or propose the intelligent mind and hand of a Designer. There is the implication that Evolution had foresight and saw its future goal. We know now that Evolution is a conservationist and throws very little away: ‘You want an image-forming retina? There’s a bit of photosensitive pigment kicking around somewhere. A bit of this and a little bit of that, let’s try them in this order instead …’  The ingredients are mixed in a different sequence, to a different recipe.

The ingredient  pax6 has never been allowed to rest, we need that gene as much as a flatworm does. In the embryo of a fly the product of  pax6 directs the development of the eye. Gosse examined an insect’s eye under his microscope in the 1850s: ‘How gorgeously beautiful are these two great hemispheres that almost compose the (dragonfly’s) head, each shining with a soft satiny lustre of azure hue,’ he wrote. ‘You see an infinite number of hexagons, of the most accurate symmetry and regularity of arrangement.’ Each of those ‘hexagons’ contains a lens, and a careful anatomist with a steady hand can prepare an insect’s eye so as to look through it himself. Van Leeuwenhoek (who lived a mere 50 years from 1675-1725, but achieved so much), looked through his microscope fitted with the prepared eye of a honey bee at a church steeple (‘which was 299 feet high, and 750 feet distant’) and saw multiple inverted images of the steeple. That microscope is in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, displayed near a shockingly pink toe injected and embalmed by Albinus (its severed end hidden by a lacy ‘cap’). It scarcely seems possible that Van Leeuwenhoek could have seen and understood so much of the natural world through a handheld instrument that is barely two inches tall.

The surface of the fruitfly Drosophila’s eye resembles a small raspberry. If the pax6 gene is injected into the embryonic cells that should form a Drosophila leg or an antenna, an eye grows there instead. Even more exciting and astonishing is that the raspberry will also grow if the pax6 equivalent from a mouse is injected into the fly embryo!

The large compound eye of Drosophila, with a small extra (ectopic) eye where the antenna should be. From Halder, Callaerts and Gehring 1995, Science, 267, p1788, and the Gehring pages on the Biozentrum, Switzerland website

A mouse’s eye is like ours, as different from a fly’s eye as is a fly’s wing from a bat’s. And so it is with pax6 from the jet-propelled and predatory squid, an animal that is related to creeping slugs and snails but which has an eye that is superficially like a mammal’s (this time, God designed the retina the right way round!). The Blaschkas’ glass model of a squid is translucent, delicate, with lustrous dark eyes; their red octopus peers at you from above its webbed tentacles.

The eye of a glass squid made by the Blaschkas

The gene is in the living animals, conserved, and put to different uses. Biologists have identified it and its related ingredients, they even know something of the recipe from which a human eye is made, but they cannot reproduce it in a culture-dish; they cannot make eyes. Yet.

Biologists can ‘make’ different sorts of cells. Take a fertilised mouse or human egg and nurture it in a culture dish for several days so that its cells divide and divide again, to form a hollow blastocyst. Imagine a football with a porkpie suspended inside it, and shrink it down in your imagination to the size of a pinhead: that is a 6-day blastocyst and the porkpie is a ball of embryonic stem cells. Stem cells, that each have the complete book of recipes to form any other type of cell in the growing embryo; ‘the secret of eternal life’, a cellular equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, the magic ingredient that will allow us to repair ourselves for ever. Not quite, but they do have their uses. Van Leeuwenhoek looked through his tiny microscope and watched red blood cells circulating in the vessels in a tadpole’s tail: he would have been astonished to know that undifferentiated stem cells taken from a blastocyst could be persuaded to turn into red blood cells in a culture dish; or into nerve cells, or muscle cells. (He would have been even more unbelieving to see how frogs’ eggs could be manipulated to produce clones).

Scientists can persuade corneal stem cells to grow new pieces of cornea; they can even persuade embryonic stem cells to change into one of the sorts of cell found in the retina at the back of the eye. But they cannot yet grow an eye, and if they could, how would they rewire it to the brain? All those millions of wires bound together in a cable, each needing their own connections in the brain. The Designer made an unintelligent muddle with those wiring diagrams, too, crossing over the cable from the right eye’s socket to the left brain, and vice versa.

William Hunter, FRS (1716-1783), anatomist, and man-midwife to Queen Charlotte and the gentry,  dissected many corpses throughout his studies and demonstrations of anatomy. As President of the Royal Academy, he also liked to stress the links between science and art, and commissioned paintings and drawings of the three-dimensional structures that he dissected, as aids to surgery and deconstruction. Many of the contents of his London collection were transferred to Glasgow after his death. Upstairs in Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum, on a wooden shelf, are multiple rows of jars containing eyes. Intact, they stare at you while you stare at them and, because they are disassociated from their faces, you cannot tell whether they stare in hatred or fear or even, perhaps, amusement. Why did Hunter collect so many? Were they specimens for an unfinished study of the anatomy and development of the eye?

In the Museum Vrolik, Amsterdam, the Curator’s ‘favourite’ specimen was at one time a little foetus with a fuzz of pale red hair, his arms hanging gently in the preserving liquid as though he is merely resting. He is a little ‘cyclops’, whose genetic recipe made for him only one small central eye. He did not live to see the light of day, nor have the good fortune to enter the Country of the Blind.

(Part of this essay also appeared in The Lancet, in October 2010, under the title ‘It’s the eyes that are important’, by Ann Lingard)

Kissing Babies

This post is another of my ‘essays’ that is included in The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes (see the ‘About ‘ section of my blog). The more I discover about Rachel Ruysch, the more I want to know about her. Some of her paintings are in the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow (I first saw them when I was learning to be a taxidermist), and in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Rosamond Wolff Purcell, who took the photograph that is on the cover of The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes, has also photographed the head of one of Ruysch’s preserved babies, and a little foetus that is garlanded in bracelets and anklets of beads – the photos are in her book, Finders, Keepers, that she co-wrote with the late Stephen J Gould.

There’s an election coming up – do politicians still kiss babies? Probably not – they’d need to have a CRB check first, or be hounded as paedophiles!

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A broadsheet photograph, front page, shows the politician, jowly, slightly sweaty,  holding up the baby. We cannot tell the sex of the child because only its face is visible, encircled by white fake-fur, but its arms are rigidly extended, and its wide-open eyes are fixed on the politician’s bushy eyebrows. The child’s mouth, frozen by the photographer’s flash, is half-open and perhaps bellowing in fear.

In 1697, Czar Peter the Great kissed a baby in the house of Frederik Ruysch, Praelector in Anatomy of the Amsterdam Surgeon’s Guild. This baby, pink and open-eyed, lay peacefully amongst embroidered cloths, and did not emit a sound.

‘The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find amazing’: a comment in 1996 by a member of the Royal Family. She’s right, of course, and she has never aspired to be a People’s Princess. It is amazing. And they probably don’t.

So why do mothers hold out their babies? What is the purpose of the kiss? To test the politician’s humanity, to check that he (for it is usually a ‘he’) has the country’s future at heart even though it may have been presented to him in all its noisome grubbiness? Is the imprint of the moist lips a transient lucky charm that protects against recession, redundancy and further reductions in public transport? Or will the baby grow up indoctrinated with the much-recounted story, so that in the pub on a Friday night he/she says, ‘Hey, you remember X? That famous (Conservative, Labour or even Lib Dem) bloke? He kissed me when I was little and it really changed my life — I started to grow up!’?

Peter the Great had different reasons. The baby that he kissed was not just resting in its cradle but was long dead, embalmed and displayed as a specimen in Ruysch’s Wunderkammer. The story was put about by Dr Ruysch’s maid that the Czar of all the Russias believed the baby was alive, because its skin was soft and blooming, as delicate as the plums that Ruysch’s daughters painted in still-life. Another servant disagreed: the Czar had attempted to breathe Life into the not-living. Peter was Tall — 6 foot 7 inches — as well as Great, but despite his height he could certainly see that the baby was not alive. He had already spent days examining Ruysch’s Cabinets, and talking with the skilful anatomist, embalmer and Konstenaar (artist), a man he still referred to 20 years later as his ‘teacher’. Peter kissed the child in recognition of Ruysch’s skill, for the child was lifelike, in both its colour and form. Its eyes were open, fringed with lashes, and stared unblinkingly at the Czar. The glass eyes gave the child the appearance and power of life. Perhaps that kiss was also elicited by pity as well as wonder at the baby’s innocence and beauty. Who now can tell? But the story of Peter’s apparent gullibility has been preserved for more than 300 years.

Papin  implies that even Death — who thought he had got his hands on the child — is forced to think otherwise by Ruysch’s artistry: Mortuus, arte tua, Ruyschi, / Vivit, docet, infans,/ Elinguis loquitur; Mors timet ipsa sibi. (Through thy art, O Ruysch, a dead infant lives and teaches and, though speechless, still speaks. Even Death itself is afraid.’ (1)

The recipe for Ruysch’s preservative fluid, his liquor balsamicus, was a closely-guarded secret, but was based on alcohol, probably brandy from Nantes, mixed with herbs and pepper. Balsam or balm, embalming, balsemen, all refer to aromatic substances and their uses, as ointments and unguents. In 1717, Peter the Great came back to Amsterdam for a second visit, and bought Ruysch’s entire collection and had it transported to his own Kunstkammer in St Petersburg. A rumour was put about that the sailors drank the brandy from half the vials, but this surely wasn’t true for the Czar would certainly have had the sailors put to death. One might say it was a missed opportunity for the Czar, for what delightful retribution it would have been to display their skeletons and pickled body parts: ‘Hand of a light-fingered thief’, ‘Liver of a man who drank embalming fluid’, ‘Sea-legs of a sailor’.

Nevertheless the alcoholic preparations continued to present a temptation for a couple of centuries to come for even in the twentieth century a janitor in the Anatomy Department at Leiden was caught drinking from a preparation made by Ruysch’s contemporary, Albinus.

The embraced baby looked good, it even smelt good (oil of lavender was included in the liquor), but it was the pinkness of its flesh, the inference of warmth, that made it seem alive. And there, literally, lay another secret recipe. For Ruysch was not merely an expert embalmer, he was the most successful of the 17^th-century anatomists who were learning the topography of the body’s multiple, ramifying vessels through the art of injecting them with colourful preservatives. Swammerdam injected mercury into blood vessels, using a special syringe invented by Reinier de Graaf; by 1667 he and van Hoorne were able to fill the blood vessels of the uterus with a mixture of warmed red wax and tallow. Ruysch studied Swammerdam’s technique and refined the recipe, probably including resin and coloured essential oils (only Peter the Great’s court physician was let into the secret). Anastomosing blood vessels and lymphatics were revealed like delicate coloured lace.

Rachel Ruysch, creator of exquisite paintings of flowers and insects, the painted texture so detailed as to be almost tactile, sat lace-making — not knitting — while her father severed the heads or arms or legs of injected and embalmed babies.  She made lace-trimmed batiste sleeves and lacy collars, which were wrapped (‘prettily and naturally’, according to her father) around sewn-up stumps and wounds; a tiny pink arm holds out a thread from which dangles a preserved eye; another arm, clothed in a pretty sleeve, reaches down to clasp an enlarged bladder. Babies in tiny coffins were dressed in lace garments and adorned with flowers and beads. In the Boerhaave Museum, Leiden, and amongst the remnants of Czar Peter’s collection in St Petersburg are the jars that contain embalmed foetuses, naked except for their beads. Beads adorn their necks, their waists, ankles, elbows, wrists or knees, in single, doubled or tripled strands of blue and white and sometimes green. Did Rachel thread these too? What is their significance? We may never know, but they are un-Dutch, primitive. Did Rachel, in her teens, help her father as he fixed a foetus’ sitting posture and tied the necklace around its neck? Did she want to kiss and hug the sweetly adorned, reanimated form?

In 1685, when Rachel is 22 years old, Michiel van Musschen paints her, the subject of An Allegorical portrait of an Artist. He is twice her age, and arranges the thick rope of her hair across her bare shoulder. She is beautiful and serene, her skin is clear and soft. Van Musschen compares her to Minerva, the patroness of Art, and a baby-faced cherub flies down to place a laurel wreath upon her dark curls. Rachel would like to play with the black-and-white spaniel that scampers around the table, but she must sit still for she is dignified, intelligent, an object to be desired.

Not so her brother, Hendrik. His portrait is that of a young boy, a still embryonic doctor and anatomist. In 1683 Jan van Neck paints The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Frederik Ruysch, showing members of the Surgeons’ Guild. They examine the placenta of the well-preserved body of an over-large but newborn baby. The baby is pink, apparently merely sleeping although Ruysch has opened up his abdomen. The tracery of placental blood mimics the lace cravats of the surgeons, and the umbilical cord is a gilded rope. Hendrik, at that time aged twenty, is shown as a boy and holds a baby’s skeleton.

The Anatomy lesson of Dr Frederik Ruysch: Jan van Neck (from Wikimedia Commons)

So many babies! ‘Where do they all come from? Where do they all belong?’

Rachel and her husband, the portrait painter and lace-merchant Juriaen Pool, were to have ten children. We do not know if any of their babies died. But would she and Juriaen have asked her father to embalm them, so they might live forever? We would like to think it was unlikely, but we cannot tell. Ruysch’s babies were not for entertainment or even to be used as specimens for teaching anatomy, they were artworks — and moralistic in tone. They were symbols of Vanitas mundi, the pointlessness of pleasure: ‘we’re doomed, we’re going to die!’ (Ruysch himself died in 1731, at the great age of 93, but it isn’t recorded whether his longevity was due to inhalation of liquor balsamicus fumes.)  They were not regarded at that time with horror or disgust. Death was everywhere, a daily occurrence, it was God’s Will (a Calvinistic God, at that) so we would do well to remember the transience of our lives on earth, and the ultimate irrelevance of earthly objects. Ruysch’s babies were all perfect, and perfectly virtuous and innocent.

He certainly had access to large numbers of both normal, and teratologically abnormal, foetuses. In 1668 he was entrusted with the training of Amsterdam’s midwives. Ten years later he was appointed as ‘doctor to the court’, which allowed him to take possession of all the dead babies found in the harbour.  It was a period of history when birth rates and mortality rates were high, for many reasons. Today we are scarcely replacing ourselves, the rate of reproduction is 2.1 in Britain, even less in Italy, that country of babies and extended families; unwanted babies need no longer be conceived.

But unwanted babies will always find their way into the world, and be abandoned. A thin wail, a choking cry, comes from a telephone kiosk, a doorstep, a handbag on Paddington  station. In Hamburg there is a ‘postbox’ where a desperate mother can lift the flap and leave her baby on a warm and comfortable bed, no questions asked, no identification necessary. (Is there a warning, as on Low Bridges – ‘Max width, max height’ – to prevent over-large parcels being posted?) The newly-delivered baby is lifted from the bed, kind hands stroke her silky hair and touch the pulsing fontanelle. Does she understand that comforting kiss, that it signifies Life?

Ruysch’s babies mock the frailty of their parents, who gave them brief life. A foetal hand, its severed wrist hidden by a lacy cuff, plays ball with a ‘segmentum humani testiculi’; in another jar, the lace-capped leg of a baby rudely kicks a prostitute’s syphilitic skull.

Copyright for the text of ‘Kissing Babies’, taken from The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes, is owned by Ann Lingard

“Putting the pieces back together”

Stefan and his colleagues organised a SciArt conference, called ‘Two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle’, relating to the artist Escher’s comments that: ‘… science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life.’ Somehow I was persuaded to speak too – my first ever public talk – about the art and science of taxidermy. And Lisa told me that I should start by telling the audience why I decided to become a taxidermist. I thought you might be interested so I’ve reproduced some of my talk here.

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‘I have given my talk the title “Putting the pieces back together” because that’s what I do, I’m a taxidermist, and I fill empty spaces inside animals.

Before I became a taxidermist I was a nurse, of sorts, so I suppose you might think that I took to dealing with patients who were already dead because it was a less traumatic option. But actually it was because I was given a preparation of a fierce ginger tom-cat by a man whom I hardly knew. And seeing Dr Greatorex’s slide of Maurits Escher’s squirrel pattern a few minutes ago reminded me of something else about this rather strange old man – that once he came and sat next to me on a park-bench in Glasgow and composed a poem about a squirrel that we were watching. He asked me for words that described the flowing movements of the animal. I wondered later, after I discovered he was a taxidermist, if he tried to capture the squirrel in words because he knew he couldn’t capture the animal and turn it into a prepared specimen!

I was never able to ask him because not long after he gave me the ginger tom, he “flitted” as they say in Glasgow, apparently leaving a room full of stuffed cats and a few months’ worth of unpaid rent.’

(People laughed at that. Lisa was right, everyone likes stories)

‘But the real reason I mention this man is because he used to leave out food, meat mostly, for the neighbourhood cats, and – again this became clear with hindsight when I was able to re-interpret something I saw him do – he would occasionally lure one of the cats into his house. When I started learning my new trade at the Museum I discovered that one didn’t keep the skeleton as a support for a mounted animal –  and then I remembered treading on a small shoulder-blade on the steps to the old man’s house, and I saw its significance. And I do wonder now  — whether he was using cat stew as bait!

(That made people laugh and gasp too)

In the 17th and 18th century, dry preparations of animals were literally ‘stuffed’ – the skeleton was used as support for the tanned skin, which was stuffed with straw or horse-hair, with little reference to the underlying musculature. Nowadays we use the skeleton as a guide, and take photographs. We make drawings and measurements, to get as complete a record of the intact animal’s shape and colour as possible – and then we make an armature of wood or wire to act as support for the mannekin. We keep and use the skulls because the shape of the eye-sockets and the jaws or beak is important. And finger- and toe-bones, sometimes even tails. Think of the bones in bats’ and birds’ wings – they’re so integral to the function and the form of the animal.

Having said that though, I should explain that we have to pick the brain out of the skull and every piece of muscle off the remaining bones or the animal would – to put it bluntly – begin to stink. And every piece of fat has to be taken off the inside of the skin, as well. With some animals, domestic animals in particular, there can be a very thick layer of fat and removing it can be very time-consuming. Nearly two centimetres in a spaniel that I had to prepare!

And incidentally, without knowing the animal’s provenance, I can tell whether it is wild or not – if a stag is from the Highlands or is semi-domesticated from a Park for example – just by looking at the thickness of the subdermal fat.

'The Monarch of the Glen', by Edwin Landseer, 1951 (from Wikimedia Commons)

But if I pick the muscles – the ‘flesh’ – away from the fine bones, how do I build the limbs up again to make them look life-like?

Have a look at your own biceps – feel them if you can’t actually see them … and now bend and raise your arms to shoulder height … the biceps have changed dramatically in shape, haven’t they? Perhaps with some of you more than others.’

(Ther was an outbreak of flailing arms and giggles!)

‘My point is that this is where art and science must interconnect in taxidermy. It’s necessary to know something about the arrangement and thickness of the different muscles, and which of them bulge and how during a particular movement.

You’re probably familiar with drawings like these by da Vinci of the muscle blocks of the arms and legs – the art of anatomical science, you might call them. These solid models, though, in this slide .. and this .. and these …illustrate the muscles in three dimensions. They’re what are called écorché preparations. They are plaster casts of flayed corpses – in other words, corpses from which the skin has been removed to show the arrangement of the underlying muscles. This painting by Zoffany shows the anatomist William Hunter giving one of his annual lectures to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1772. Hunter was insistent that artists needed to understand human anatomy, and used the plaster écorché of ‘Standing Man’, seen in the background and probably a hanged Jewish thief, as an example.

One of the most extraordinary and beautiful écorchés is of ‘Smugglerius’, this very muscular smuggler whose corpse was taken from Tyburn Tree in 1775 and set by Hunter, before rigor mortis set in, to mimic the pose of a Roman statue called ‘The Dying Gaul’. (subsequently immortalised as a plaster cast by William Pink, still held in the collection of the Royal Academy.

(‘Shock them!’ Lisa had said. So I showed them Gaetano Zumbo’s coloured wax head, skin intact on the left side, but the right side flayed and dissected to show nerves and muscles and salivary glands, and Citarelli’s wax model of an écorché standing male, with its shadowed eye sockets, and mouth open as though in conversation.)

‘He was made about 180 years ago. We can believe he is alive, can’t we? His colours are so alive and fresh. But common sense tells us that a man whose skin was missing couldn’t stand there looking so relaxed. Similar techniques were used with the corpses of animals, as you can see in these pictures by George Stubbs … This is really helpful for taxidermists, as we need to have this sort of information if we are going to prepare animals, and particularly mammals – birds with their feathers are more forgiving – in dynamic action. The muscles need less prominence in animals at rest.’ …

(And as I finished the talk I showed them slides of prepared animals in different positions, of animals put back together … I’d surprised myself, actually, at how much I enjoyed doing the talk. Once I’d got over the initial fright. As Lisa had said, ‘You’re the expert!’)

(Note: the text of this ‘talk’ is the Copyright of Ann Lingard, from her novel The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes)

A parrot on the shingle

It’s four months since The Floods – and next week some of the bridges will be re-opened, and we’ll at last have more freedom to move about. We have a history of being trapped, in Cumbria: during the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001 our movements around the county were restricted for nearly eight months.

Bridges have been rebuilt, repaired, even hoisted into place. But some bridges that completely vanished – like Lorton bridge – are still only at the drawing-board stage.

If pigs could fly ... (click for enlarged image, to see the pigs)

If there were a bridge for these pigs to walk across, one of Madeleine’s farming friends could check and feed his in-lamb ewes and cattle on the opposite side of the valley to his farm – without setting out on a 20-km round trip.

The floods happened on November 19^th and 20^th. A few days later, when the waters had started to drop, I parked the van by the only remaining intact bridge over the River Derwent, and climbed down to the fields:-

November 23^rd 2009

Here on the river bank, for at least a quarter-mile, are:

fridges, garden furniture, chairs and chest-of-drawers, a drum-kit, tins of biscuits and sweets, sausages and joints of meat, jewellery, a box of Swarovsky crystal, insurance documents, bottles of wine, packets of pills, jars and packets of spices and herbs, boxes of weedkiller, a portakabin, an allotment shed, a caravan and a van – and one of the great wooden gates from the house where Wordsworth and his sister lived as children.

There’s also a parrot, a blue-and-yellow macaw.

I saw it standing on the gravel but it didn’t fly away when I approached, and in fact it looked bedraggled with tattered wings. Of course, it was a taxidermal prep, washed out of its home.  Now well and truly stuffed.

I hate not knowing a dead animal’s provenance – how old was the parrot before it died, where had it come from, who (unprepared for floods) thought she had prepared it for posterity? Who had loved it?

I thought of Rosalie Chichester’s parrot: Rosalie Chichester, born in 1865 and died in 1949, the last of the line to live at Arlington Court, Devon, who had travelled and sailed around the world, and amassed a collection not only of her own photographs and paintings, but of cases of fossils, shells, taxidermal preps of mammals and birds, and models of ships. Her pet blue-headed parrot  Polly lived for more than 46 years and was immortalised in a water-colour painted by her mistress (or perhaps his mistress, it’s not easy to sex a parrot). Python fans know that “the Norwegian Blue parrot prefers kippin’ on its back.” But Rosalie’s  kippin’ ex-parrot, deceased, and not embalmed, was buried in 1919 beneath a granite slab in the garden.

Had this damp prep of a macaw been somebody’s pet before they gave it to a taxidermist? I perched the stranded bird on the back of a chair – I didn’t have the means to nail it in place – so that it could contemplate the hateful rushing brown torrent that had brought it here. At least the poor creature hadn’t been buried beneath the tonnes of shingle.

Thousands of tonnes of shingle

“Shingle” doesn’t begin to describe what is now covering these former fields of barley. The river has swept away four acres of land and dumped, mid-thigh deep, gravel and rocks on the remaining acres of pasture and barley-crop. And tree-trunks (and the fridges, drum-kits …). The same is true for miles upstream.

Madeleine told me earlier that her friend Robert, whose land is now this garbage-tip, can scarcely comprehend what has happened, and how long, if ever, it will take to clean up.

But she told me that he also said, “Farming’s about working with the seasons, and with the weather. This is our land, but I’m just a passenger, Madeleine, just passing through.”

When she told me that, she started crying.

The River Derwent has changed its course and scoured out new channels; the fishermens’ hut is stranded midstream.

Upstream, Cockermouth – houses, shops, bars and brewery, library – has been gutted as though by a tsunami of raging brown rubbish-laden water, the Rivers Derwent and Cocker meeting and competing to see which could go higher and wider; which could enter the most properties. Wool from the knitting-shop tangled around battered cars and lamp-posts. Toys and clothes and books ripped out of homes.

And a blue-and-yellow macaw sent to its second death – from drowning.

Copper Kettles

The following piece, about the Hunters and giants and other matters, is one of my blogs that is included in Ann Lingard’s novel The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes. I had written this piece before I met Lisa who, as I mentioned previously, is an achondroplasic – she has a form of dwarfism. I was embarrassed, and didn’t want her to read it because it was about earlier attitudes to dwarves (have we really changed, I wonder? But I won’t discuss that now)  – but when I got to know her better I realised how down-to-earth she is. Achondroplasia doesn’t rule her life, far from it – most of the time she just gets on with being her usual busy self, committed to her research and life.

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Copper Kettles

On July 5^th 1893 an Exhibition of ‘A Collection of Hunterian Relics’ opened at the Royal College of Surgeons, in London. Not the relics of Dr William Hunter, FRS and President of the Royal Academy, but of his younger brother, John, the naturalist and surgeon, born in Lanarkshire in 1729, and died, very suddenly, in London on October 16^th 1793.

Amongst the interesting items on display is a ‘Copper, in which the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne, who was exhibited in London as O’Brien the Irish Giant, was boiled.’ The copper was lent by Professor Chiene, of Edinburgh. The catalogue has a further explanatory note: ‘This copper was in Hunter’s house in Earl’s Court and was sold there in 1866 when the house was pulled down. On the death of Byrne in 1783, Hunter obtained his body and macerated it in this copper … The skeleton of Byrne is in the College Museum.’ As indeed it is, to this day – and O’Brien’s skeleton can be clearly seen in Shepherd’s 1840 engraving of the Museum.

From: Catalogue of the Collection of Hunterian relics exhibited at the RCS on Wednesday July 5th 1893. Publ by Taylor & Francis

As for poor Hunter’s sudden death, there is also exhibited the ‘Sofa on which John Hunter died. Whilst speaking at a meeting of the Board of Governors at St George’s Hospital on October 16^th 1793, Hunter was contradicted by one of his colleagues. He immediately left off his speech and in an excited state hurried to an adjoining room; where he fell into the arms of Dr Robertson and almost immediately expired.’ Fortunately for him, his body was not macerated in the copper, but was placed in a vault at St Martin-in-the-Fields: of which, more later.

The College Museum has an engraving of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Hunter, and Byrne is thus twice immortalised for, in the top right corner of the portrait and behind Hunter’s head are the lower portions of two gigantic femora and their two feet – the legs of that most famous Tall Man; who, from the angle of his skeletal feet, must be standing on tip-toe, perhaps to increase his height even more. Byrne may be the tallest man on display, but his legs are not the longest: that dubious honour goes to the ‘Kentucky Giant’, 7 feet 6 inches tall but with the longest femora of any known giant skeleton. His personal history is not known, only that his skeleton was ‘acquired in 1877’ by Joseph Leidy for $50, and is now exhibited at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum.

John Hunter

Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds;  grateful thanks to the Royal College of Surgeons for permission to use this image

John Hunter has a square, kindly, thoughtful face and his forehead is broad and tall beneath his curly reddish hair. He doesn’t look like a giant-killer.

To be fair, it seems that poor Charles Byrne, aged 22, height 7 feet 7 inches, drank himself to death. The story of Byrne is well-known, much has been written about him, both fact and fiction. He was born on the Derry/Tyrone border in 1761 and, because those were times when the exhibition of ‘freaks’ was commonplace,  Jack Vance, from a neighbouring village, persuaded him that he could get rich if he toured the shows and fairgrounds: a sideshow attraction. On April 11^th 1782, Byrne and Vance (self-important as the Giant’s Agent) reached London and on April 24^th an advertisement proclaimed ‘Irish Giant. To be seen this and every day this week, in his large elegant room, at the cane shop, next door to late Cox’s Museum, Spring Gardens.’ Admission was half-a-crown. By the late autumn, the audience was jaded, the novelty had worn off, the price had dropped and the Giant O’Brien had moved twice, to rooms no longer so large and elegant. A year after his arrival in London, he was robbed outside a pub – of £700, presumably his entire worldly wealth which, for some reason, he was carrying in his pocket.

Despair, too much alcohol and ill-health: Charles Byrne knew he was dying and somehow he also learnt that the anatomist John Hunter was very keen to obtain a giant’s skeleton. Byrne didn’t want his bones to be boiled, he didn’t want to be exhibited any more, alive or dead. He gave instructions that after his death his body should be watched day and night until a large lead coffin had been built. His body was to be placed in it and it should be carried (how many tonnes would a giant lead coffin weigh?) out to sea and sunk. A newspaper reported after the event that ‘Byrne’s body was shipped on board a vessel in the river last night … to be sunk in 20 fathom water: the body-hunters … have provided a pair of diving bells, with which they flatter themselves they shall be able to weigh hulk gigantic from its watery grave.’

No diving bell was needed. Hunter, having sent his assistant Howison as spy, bribed the men whom Byrne had employed to sink him. Fifty pounds, one hundred pounds, the price escalated. Five hundred pounds was later reported as the sum involved. Byrne’s body was removed and carried by hackney coach then Hunter’s carriage to Earl’s Court where, since Hunter feared that his body-snatching would be discovered, Byrne’s body was ‘quickly cut to pieces and the flesh separated by boiling.’ “I lately got a tall man”, Hunter wrote to Sir Joseph Banks.

Presumably John Hunter and Howison (not to be confused with William Hunter’s assistant, William Hewson) boiled and re-assembled the skeleton themselves. Ten years earlier William Hunter had fallen out with Hewson, for Hewson ‘had employ’d a Man to pick Bones out of the Tubs and fit up a Skeleton for him, without Leave’. Benjamin Franklin was called in to settle the dispute (poor Benjamin was often called in for this purpose). Although Hewson was highly skilled at injecting lymphatics and preparing specimens, he was eventually dismissed – and disinherited.

In Shepherd’s 1840 engraving of the College Museum, Charles Byrne’s skeleton with its smiling skull towers over the other exhibits from the top of a mahogany case. A photograph taken in 1852 shows him prominently displayed. And so he remains, in the 21^st Century, and we think of him kindly and with sympathy. Perhaps finally he has been able to smile at the thought that his story as well as his bones (and a portrait of his feet!) are still preserved and admired nearly 250 years later.

Bourgeois was a footman; or at any rate, he was employed in 1717 to stand on the footboard of Peter the Great’s carriage. The Czar and his Czarina had found him at the Calais Fair, a giant exhibit at 2.27 metres high. Later Bourgeois saw the Czar’s Kunstkammer and would surely guess where his bones would find their resting-place. In 1724 his dead body was boiled in a copper kettle, and his skeleton reassembled. ‘An old head on a young body’? Unfortunately the opposite is true, for his skull was destroyed in a fire in 1747 and the replacement skull was elevated to a higher position than it had occupied in life.

Did the Czar visit Calais before or after Amsterdam? In 1717 he paid a second visit to his  ‘old teacher’, the Dutch anatomist and embalmer Dr Frederik Ruysch. Imagine Bourgeois accompanying his new master on a tour of Ruysch’s museum, ducking beneath the low dark beams, secretly shuddering at the skeletons and animals. Czar Peter so admired Ruysch’s collection that he asked his own physician, the Scot Robert Erskine, to buy it – for 30,000 Dutch guilders, an enormous sum. The specimens were future companions for Bourgeois in St Petersburg.

A fire is lit and a little maid hurries to and fro with jugs of water to fill the copper; she heats the water so she may wash and scrub the clothes. But in John Hunter’s house, the copper was used for boiling bodies from which to extract bones. Hunter’s copper was lent to the Exhibition of Hunterian Relics by a Scottish professor, and Frank Buckland, Esquire, son of Dean Buckland of Islip, Oxfordshire, lent a Chair. The chair bore a brass plate with the following inscription: ‘This Chair is made from the bedstead of John Hunter…’ Buckland had been given the bedstead by ‘Professor Owen, FRS., etc. who wrote “ … it is the frame of the bedstead in which John Hunter lay when brought from St George’s Hospital”. ’

What a tangled network of old boys’ ties! Owen, of dinosaurs and founder of the Natural History Museum; the devious Owen, a curator of the Hunterian Collection. Frank Buckland, naturalist, collector, taxidermist, expert on fish and fisheries, and a kindly, well-liked man.

Frank Buckland

Frontispiece from The Life of Frank Buckland, by George C Bompas;publ. Smith Elder & Co, 1885

Nearly 100 hundred years after the giant Byrne’s death, in May 1871, Buckland was visited by ‘a strange party from the other side of the Atlantic’: Miss Swan the giantess (7 feet 6 inches) and Captain Martin van Buren Bates, ‘about as tall’, and both aged 24 years old. Bates was ‘a splendid-looking fellow, very unlike pictures of the giant in the “fe fa fum; I smell the blood of an Englishman” legend.’ Not only was Bates splendid, but he and Miss Swan apparently made a splendid couple, too. ‘I make bold to say that Miss Swan is the most agreeable, good-looking giantess that I have ever met,’ Buckland wrote. ‘She is ladylike in manners and address and would be a most agreeable neighbour at a dinner-party.’ He had the opportunity to test this three years later, when he entertained the splendid couple at dinner in honour of their marriage.

Giants came to Britain from all around the world, Chinese, American, Irish and French. Buckland dined with ‘the Chinese Giant’, Chang Woo Gow. Buckland himself was the cause of a ‘breach of discipline’ in his regiment, a spreading roar of laughter one Sunday in 1862, when he appeared on church parade in the company of ‘Brice the French Giant and a dwarf then exhibiting in London.’ Brice, like the skeletal Byrne, was apparently 7 feet 7 inches tall, and a well-proportioned and amiable man. A frequent visitor to Buckland’s house, he gave him a pair of his shoes and a cast of his hand as mementoes. There is a story that ‘A lady dwarf was one day invited to meet him, but with untoward results; the good-natured giant took her up, as a little girl, on his knee, causing an explosion of indignation. ‘I am nineteen,’ she cried, ‘and to treat me like a baby!’ It was long before her ruffled dignity to could be appeased.’

Such a mixture of dwarves and giants was a potent image: alive or dead. Charles Byrne’s skeleton dwarfed that of Caroline Crachami, ‘the Sicilian Fairy’, as they posed together in Hunter’s Museum. The Kentucky Giant in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum cannot, as a matter of principle, be identified, but beside him is the skeleton of poor Mary Ashbury, a dwarf forced into prostitution who died in childbirth. The skull of her poor dead infant is held on her hip. Some might argue that such specimens were displayed for the instruction of aspiring surgeons, but comparative anatomy surely requires the placing of a third skeleton, a person of normal stature.

John Hunter’s dead body, of normal stature, was not macerated in a copper, but was placed in the vaults of St Martin’s in the Fields. In 1859 Frank Buckland determined to find the body of his hero, ‘the greatest of Englishmen’, and spent two weeks searching through the vaults. ‘The stink awful’, he wrote in his diary. Then on February 22^nd he ‘found the coffin of John Hunter. At work all the morning and about three in the afternoon found it, the bottom coffin of the last tier but one. It is in excellent condition, and the letters on the brass plate as perfect as the day they were engraved. “John Hunter Esq., died October 16^th, 1793, aged 64”.’

On February 23^rd, Buckland went down into the vaults again with Professor Owen: ‘I wish I could have made a sketch of him, with his hand on the coffin, looking thoughtfully at it; it would have made an excellent subject.’ Buckland was very ill for several days after this rummaging in the foetid air, but he was well enough to attend the re-interment of Hunter’s coffin (and presumably therefore of Hunter’s bones) at  Westminster Abbey in late March.

The photograph that he took of the coffin was presented to the Royal College of Surgeons and displayed in the Hunterian Relics Exhibition, on a stand in the middle of the Library: the furniture and the Copper were placed along the North wall. Giant O’Brien smiled inscrutably in the hall downstairs.

Copyright for “Ruth’s” ‘Copper Kettles’ blog: Ann Lingard, 2009

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I like Frank Buckland’s sense of humour, and his inclusiveness. He was the son of William Buckland, Dean of Westminster, who was famous for, amongst other things, trying to eat his way through the animal kingdom – slugs and all.

Introducing myself

First, I had better introduce myself:  Ruth Kowslowski. I’m in my early thirties and I live  somewhere near Bassenthwaite Lake in the Lake District. Before I trained to become a taxidermist, I was a care assistant in a hospital in Glasgow; I now have a workshop in the converted hayloft of a barn on a farm nearby.

I am in fact a fictional character: you can find out much more about me if you read The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes, the new novel by Ann Lingard.

Indepenpress, ISBN 9781906710170

My story, and the stories of my friends Lisa (a mathematician, who is also an achondroplasic) and Madeleine (whose hayloft I rent) — and of the men in our lives — are all in the novel. And some of my blogs are in the novel, too, because there’s information in them that’s important to our stories — I’ll include bits of them in this blog from time to time.

Here, though, over the coming weeks I’ll blog about why I made such a major change in my career (one of the novel’s readers asked Ann, “Why would a nurse want to work with dead animals?”!) and tell you something about the art and science of taxidermy. I’ve always been interested in how — and why — we preserve the past. Not just material things, and organic things, but also memories, images and so on, so that’s something else I’d like to chat about. And I might talk a bit about Lisa; and the SciArt conference we both went to; and gannet skulls. And glass eyes! (The eye on the cover of the The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes is made of ivory, glass and bone, and is in St Petersburg, in Peter the Great’s collection. It was photographed by Rosamond Wolff Purcell, who also photographed Frederik Ruysch’s embalmed babies  — part of their story is in the novel, and I might find it hard to talk about it again here. We’ll see …)

You might like to see where I live too, in the North-West corner of the Lake District and very close to the Solway Firth – it’s a beautiful place, always changing with the light, the weather, the seasons.

Sun and snow over the Solway Firth

But we’ve had our share of horrors too – the major foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001, the horrific floods here last November (Madeleine’s farm is fairly high up, luckily, but even so the overflowing becks spread rocks and branches and uprooted gorse over parts of her fields.  My workshop roof leaked, water poured in and soaked the short-eared owl specimen – the one that a wagon hit on the coast road, that the wagon-driver gave to Stefan, who gave it to me. But Madeleine and I got off lightly …)

So, I’m looking forward to blogging here  (especially because this blog, unlike the blog posts in the novel, will just be a self-indulgence — not like the ones in the novel, which were to help me sort out my own story, and Madeleine’s, in my mind …).