A visit to the Biomedical Museum makes up the first panel in this tryptch. This reviewer's description -- "rather outdated and resembles the office of a nutty professor" -- is just about right. But it's definitely work a look.

It's a lovely old building, for a start, combining heritage and functionality in a homely kind of way.





The galleries contain some interesting posters, including a series about the use of insects for forensic purposes (the sort of thing you'd see going on in Bones if you watched that kind of thing, which of course we don't...)

There are some pretty scary pickles on display, it has to be said. Snakes, diseased body parts, deformed foetuses... Definitely not for the faint-hearted.

But I loved this advice on one of the noticeboards in the corridor:



Later, we went went into town, where a pot of Earl Grey and a decadent little brownie at Harrods eased us gently into another MPO concert.



As always, it was a delight to listen to these guys. Weber's Overture to Der Freischutz was the only "traditional" piece. After that, Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, Messiaen's Les Offrandes Oubliees, and Debussy's La Mer presented a succession of musical canvases, extraordinarily rich in colour and texture. Truly, this is what symphony orchestras excel at: producing and threading seamlessly together an apparently infinite range of tonal combinations. Our lives are infinitely richer for having the MPO in them.