A few fleeting impressions

A fact-finding visit to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (as usual I was late, and made even later by the incomprehensible layout of the rambling building). Marketing can lead you to some surprising locations. Here are a few fleeting impressions:



Above: faced with these confusing signs I was presented with a quandary. Is it better to try to find the back stairs (with the risk that in this warren one might never find them) and hope to slip into the lecture unnoticed? Or should I step brazenly across the front of the lecture hall, interrupting the speaker and perhaps letting the door thwack shut behind me?



Above: I was struck with the architecture of the hospital and institute and thought how it might be a metaphor for the human brain (I might go back and do a proper photo-essay). There were grandiose gestures, out of date and out of place. Like the mental pretensions we all indulge in.



Above: there were long featureless corridors that never led in the right direction, never went the whole distance, and often led nowhere. Like the inconsequential thoughts we have hundreds of times a day. If ever there was a building you could call Kafkaesque this was it.



Above: there were occasional lists of names, gilded and in a strict hierarchy. In this pantheon of the brain, imagine the combined brain-power represented by this list. And in our own brains I suppose each of us keeps a list of the worthwhile experience we have amassed in our lives.