The bodies exhibition in Athens: I went, I saw, I was left ambivalent

So, we went to the famous bodies exhibition, not without some moral qualms, but intending to be looking at the people just as much as the exhibits.

The obviously Asiatic bodies in the exhibition were impressive. Before we start, it should be noted that I am a curious bear and as such, I am aware that under the skin, there are a whole bunch of interesting tissues and organs. I was not there in the exhibition to be told that I have a liver and to wonder at the positioning of said organ. Anyone who has either butchered an animal or prepared an animal for the cooking process will not have been surprised at the large number of stringy tendons or the ubiquity of cartilage or indeed the branching nervous and circulatory systems. I have opened anatomy texts and I have seen butchered vertebrates, thank you very much. What was impressive was the painstaking work which has obviously gone into these exhibits.

The realisation that we humans are also animals and that we look like meat on the inside came to me many years ago. I was not shocked by this. It was, however, interesting to see where the good cuts are on a human cadaver (gluteus and thighs, if you are interested) and it was interesting to see just how indistinguishable a lump of gluteus meat would be from a nice slab of beef on the table. The reactions of the visitors ranged from shock to awkwardness of fathers with young adolescent girls in an exhibition where in every room there was a man with his penis out for all to see. I enjoyed the crowd, I enjoyed seeing that one lady had fainted - overwhelmed no doubt by the realisation that we are as much animals as we are "human".

I did not enjoy one aspect of the exhibition and this was the avoidance of one question. The exhibition covered the how and what and where and when really rather well and graphically - what was missing, of course, was the why... There was no talk about the bilateral symmetry of the body and what it means, there was no talk of the anterioposterior and dorsoventral axiality of the human form, and why these three axes might exist. There was no talk of evolution. In Darwin's bi-centennial year, when you show people that they are animals, vertebrates, made slightly imperfectly, why stop short of going the whole hog and telling them why? Our nervous system laid out on the table is not so different to that of a fish, our tetrapod skeleton is not so perfectly adapted to supporting our bi-pedal body as it could have been... and more obvious than anything else, the crazy positioning of and plumbing for our testes is so patently not designed from scratch and so loudly begging for an explanation in each room, but the testes cry out in vain.

This pandering to the north American audience for whom the literal interpretation of the bible is the only truth took much of the shine off the exhibition. The excision of evolution from the explanation of human anatomy leaves the exhibition more naked than the exhibition's chinamen who were missing their skins. This missed opportunity to teach truth to an audience which has just had its eyes opened to the fact that we are animals no different to the lamb we spitted last week is a great pity. No one preparing the kokoretsi last week could have missed the similarity between the chinaman's heart on display and the lamb's heart on his plate.

Was the visit worth €16 with a camera, video and mobile phone ban? Possibly, possibly not. Should I have gone given the ethical quandary behind the exhibition? Should I have given the €16 to people who have bought cadavers from prisons in countries with shitty human rights records? Perhaps not. But if I hadn’t gone, I would not be able to tell you that I found it incongruous to see that all these convicts had perfect lily-white teeth. Chinese prisons must have pretty good dental programmes for their death-row inmates. Especially when compared to the pedicures / manicures. So, yes, if I had wanted truths, perhaps I should have known that I would not find them at an exhibition where the organiser feels it would be too shocking to keep the original teeth.

Ixodes Ricinus, come on in, your time is up

The worst thing about pulling a blood sucking parasitic arthropod off your dick is not really being able to brag about it that much. I mean - come on, who wants to brag about having an eight-legged little fucker hanging by its proboscis off his cock?

Ah - the wonders of the internet and the anonymity it brings. So while I may not have the sang froid to sit and write to friends about this most enriching of experiences, the existence of a blog allows one to talk of such things with impunity.

Things I have learnt today, include:

• Girls will tend to get upset at the idea that there is a parasite stuck to your todger - avoid telling them if at all possible, especially when they are half asleep at half past seven in the morning.
• The little fuckers will come off if you pull them by hand - all this bollocks in the literature about using tweezers is crap, you cannot get a decent grip on the fuckers with tweezers.
• Ticks are arachnids, making them descendents of some of the very first land dwelling animals. Ever.
• Most ticks are sexually dimorphic - the male and female look different.
• Lyme disease is not very prevalent in Greece, although the main carrier, Ixodes Ricinus is.
• Top tip - don't go camping in a place where large mammals (cows) have been roaming around.
• It's like totally mind-blowing to feel that you have become part of one of these parasite life cycle diagrams showing many hosts and carriers and knowing that you were the human host in all this, man.

The whole experience this morning, well, part of it, brought back one of my most vivid memories of my brief but colourful military service. While I was serving in a guard house in the middle of nowhere, somewhere where I am not allowed to talk about, one of things I would do to pass the time when not reading translations of ancient poetry, would be to sit and record the markings on the turtles which lived within the confines of the barracks. They say that no two turtles have the same markings, and having a teenage head stuffed to the brim with Victorian idiocy I set about to record what we had onsite, in an effort to see whether any pattern would emerge potentially proving them wrong.

None did.

I still have the drawings, done in biro on the back of spent Gitanes packets. I remember being very pleased with them at the time, although I have no idea what I would think of them now. I think I know where they are, though.

Anyway - to the point - as payback for the poor turtles who would sit for maybe an hour at a time and model for me, I would flip them over and take out the ticks stuck to their legs and neck, poor hapless bastards. I am not sure I did not imagine it, but more than once, I think I heard the turtles sigh appreciatively as I would pull a tick from their exposed skin. These of course were ugly huge red ticks - not at all like the small black one I had found this morning - but the gasp of satisfaction I remember hearing coming from the turtles stayed with me. I too almost gasped in the same manner this morning, such was my own feeling of relief at being free from the tick. There had been no real pain or discomfort attached to my experience. The whole thing was more psychological than physical, but still, at that moment I had connected once more with my reptilian friend from fourteen years ago.