Another busy blog entry

It's been a busy few weeks for us but I haven't been keeping up with my blog entries! Last weekend we took a trip to the Hunterian Museum which is housed in the building of the Royal College of Surgeons. The museum is the private collection of a pioneering 18th century Scottish surgeon named John Hunter. Aside from developing our knowledge of human anatomy, he also developed a vast collection of specimens - animal and human - including human skeletons, pathologies (diseased bits...), "human oddities", plants and animals, surgical instruments, etc... The collection was built up over the years but is mainly owing to him. It made for a fascinating if gruesome afternoon (our guide book said it was a must see, but warned readers not to eat first!) The grisly nature of the collection is diminished slightly by the beauty of the displays themselves, which were recently renovated (no dusty old shelves or labels here!) It was certainly a memorable experience.

The next day we took a walk to Little Britain Lake, about 20 minutes south of our flat. It's part of a vast set of trails that criss-cross all over London. The lake supports a variety of water fowl (including one species of duck that we had never seen before) including swans, various geese (Canada, Greylag, Embden), coots and mallards. Spring is in the air so there were lots of little spats between members of the same species over mates and whose bit of the lake was whose. We were confronted on the path by a party of cranky Embden geese (the big white geese with orange bills and blue eyes in these pictures) but they allowed us to pass with only a bit of fuss.