free excitement

One way to get a cheap buzz is to walk through a hospital when there's nothing wrong with you.

Another buzz is visiting a university when you're not actually a student. Especially around exam time, when people are in despair and self-harming.

The other night I was sampling another cheap buzz, when it all went wrong.

Here's how it happened. There were two anatomy programs on TV, one after another. First, they cut up a large crocodile on-camera, to show how it works. One of the best bits was the massive muscles for snapping the jaws shut. The muscles for opening the jaws were tiny, which is why it's easy to handle a live croc if you hold its mouth shut. Not that I've tried it.

Anyway, after that there was a program with the mad Bavarian anatomist carving up a dead body, allegedly in the name of education.

Because I was a mad anatomist myself for a year, I'm used to dead bodies, and I can enjoy seeing them taken apart on TV. Back then, as a hapless student I spent every Friday morning chopping a body under the critical eye of a vindictive teacher, in a freezing ancient dissecting room, doing my best to ignore the acid flashbacks.

Compared with that, sitting in a warm living room watching someone else doing the messy business with a body in the studio, is a breeze, especially when the last molecules of LSD are long gone.

There was a dead naked woman standing up while they removed the back of her head and took out the spine. The camera was behind her, and they were shoving lumps of food into her mouth so you could watch the process of swallowing from the inside of her mouth.

And I was enjoying the broadcast until I noticed that, from the back, she looked a bit like Denny.

Suddenly it was no longer clinical. Now they were humiliating and desecrating this poor naive young woman who used to be an adorable sweetie. I felt sick and had to switch off. There would be nightmares that night.