Englanding #14 : Brighton = Dead Birds, Bones and Candy

Lest the comments make no sense - originally there was nothing here, no words, no nothing. That's what I get for leaving a job half done.

Brighton, jewel of the south coast, where all the Londoners go when they get as sick of London as everyone else in the country is. Brighton's cool in a lot of ways, but it is kind of like mini London and a lot of the problems that I have with it are the same. Certainly the good, good people who I know currently residing there seem to get driven a bit crazy by the place. Still, lots of good pubs, restaurants, shops and amusements - even two piers! One working, one a broken, ruined skeleton! Also the Booth Museum, which contains more dead birds than I've ever seen in my life!


There were aisles and aisles like that - just floor to ceiling cases packed with stuffed birds in what I assume were accurate dioramas. In the middle there were many, many dead bugs and at the back:


Skeletons! Isn't that the creepiest damn skeleton you've ever seen? It's a baby orangutan, brrrrr. They had a lot of other good skeletons too, if skeletons are your thing. I was pretty impressed with the narwhal head, and it was a good place to go for Halloween too y'know. What with it being a giant house of death.

Another good place to go for Halloween was the sweet shop where my sister works... after hours!


I mean, we went after hours. She doesn't work there after hours selling illegal, experimental, under the counter sweets to the seedier denizens of Brighton. At least I don't think she does. We stocked up on sweets and then Halloween night viewing was one terrible 80s horror b-movie that I can't remember the name of, and Trick or Treat, the 80s hair metal slasher flick that's actually really fucking awesome.

Oh, and the Halloween episode of Pete and Pete which, as Chris says, is one of the best pieces of television ever made.

4 Visitations of Terror

Today our wandering took us to Hokkaido University and the University Museum there, and from there to a fabulous vegetarian restaurant, and from there to Sapporo Station so that I could show Bunny all four of the malls that converge there. Sapporo University Museum by the way, is pretty fun for a free museum based at a University. It has all manner of academic and researched based exhibits, but it also has skeletons of dinosaurs and animals, bugs in cases and wax models of body parts with horrific skin conditions.

On our wanderings I came across four signs - omens or portents, I'm not sure which - that chilled my blood and filled me with dread and foreboding. Or dread foreboding, if you'll allow it. What can we read into these four visitations?

fig i : The skeleton of a duck at Hokkaido University Museum

fig. ii : The skull of a tapir at Hokkaido University Museum.

fig iii : Terebi-Tou San (the personified mascot version of Sapporo's TV Tower) and a Donkey-Creature outside Sapporo Station, dancing.

fig. iv : A monstrous Pikachu, worshipped by a line of small children who queued up to enter between its legs.