The Kensington Hamster Massacre; or, a trip to the Science Museum

Tim Jones was exhausted after dragging himself up seven flights of stairs to his family flat. The fox-powered lift was out of order - the skinny buggers you get scrambling round inner-city estates just weren't up to the job like the fat fuckers you got in the countryside. Instantly cheered by the mushroom risotto his wife Lucy was prodding on the stove (luckily blood supplies were pretty high round here, especially given the recent spate of gang fights, so the cooker was less temperamental than the lift), he flopped down in front of the TV. Justin Beiber, he opined to just about anyone willing to listen, was the best Doctor yet, and at 73 he'd really broken out of the roles usually available to older men.

"Oh, for cocks sake,", he growled under his breath as the telly cut out yet again - bang in the middle of a climactic fight scene between Beiber and the Daleks - "I'm not the fucking hamster fairy- why doesn't anyone else in this house clean out that bloody dispenser?". Grumbling and muttering, he heaved himself off the armchair and fumbled around in the dank cabinet underneath the bookshelf until he struck gold, pulling out a small box full of the scurrying little bastards.
Taking the opportunity to stock up for a few days and avoid the hassle tomorrow evening, he upturned the whole box into the pulveriser. After those few seconds of frantic squeaking which he'd just about learned the trick of unhearing, Tim was once again absorbed in the Doctor's fearlessness in the face of danger.



Today's dystopic vision has been proudly sponsored by Shell, Siemens and Merril Lynch for the London Science Museum!


......no, really. [Well, minus Justin Beiber. Dramatic licience.]

I gathered, from the corporate-logo-plastered posters advertising the Climate Science exhibition, that it might not be the full, in-depth exploration of the technology and challenges surrounding climate change as I might like. But I had a free day and a man in tow, so off we trooped to peruse its seedy pleasures. (FYI, dates at the Science Museum are cool. You can count that as official party diktat).

A quick glance proved this was an exhibition primarily aimed at kiddies - *adorable*, and such fun given the Bank Holiday rush of concerned parents ensuring that Amelia gets some responsible education with her fun.

Incidentally, a giant circular electronic display showing the public's answers to hard-hitting questions like "What do you think about having a wind farm next door to you?" flashed up a truly vomit-inducing 140-character snippet from a six-year old; in response to the question "how can we tackle unequal consumption of energy?", he apparently replied "With a global carbon trading system, with carbon credits for underdeveloped countries". Right. I'm sure Mummy thinks she's doing a fantastic job imparting rationed, liberal thought to her poppet, and I'm sure he'll grow up a responsible citizen who always offsets the long drive in his 4x4 back from central London to the Home Counties after spending the evening ostensibly in a meeting but really shagging the low-paid female employee he keeps around for eye candy whilst professing a commitment to 21st century feminism, but it would have been nice to have a day out at the museum without being forced to swallow my own sick.

But, back to the fictional hamster genocide alluded to above. I had naively assumed that this would perhaps be a slightly-too-objective, catious, but ultimately factual presentation of the realities of climate science by, well, scientists. I hate to invoke repition to make my point but I was, in fact, inside the Science Museum. What confronted me was a garish jumble of interactive games, touch-screen fact finders and faux-art masquerading as an object with something important to impart.

The most disturbing aspect of the exhibition by far, however, was a trip into the future to investigate the possibilities for energy generation once our very finite pool of fossil fuels finally bites the dust. The exhibition in question introduces us to the Jones family and the innovative ways in which they navigate power in a post-oil world, and it looks like a vision of the 2000s by a wonderstruck producer in the 1960s. You can almost hear the RP voiceover exclaiming "in the future, cars will fly and humans will take all their meals in one small pill; not for the busy 21st century family the stress of eating!".

Sidestepping such irrelevancies as the invention of water, wind and solar generated energy, I learnt that in the future televisions will be powered by hamsters, electricity will be produced by blood in teddy-bear shaped bags ('to make it less scary'- of course!) and children will be forced to become a walking advertisement for their parents hydrogen home brewery. Below are some choice reproductions..

Of course, we don't mind destroying both animal and human life when we mine tar sands; but feeding hamsters to your TV in a fictional universe? Woah, soldier, that's one step too far!

I think my personal favourite here is "all the scientists we asked were sure that Tom and Tim's animal-eating, blood-drinking machine would never happen"...."but that didn't stop us from including this rampant scare mongering in our climate science exhibition, because hey, it's not actually based on science!"

I found the poo section particularly disturbing given that we had just had an extremely enjoyable jaunt around the psychoanalysis exhibition, which implored us to think about our relationship to fecal matter and what it meant regarding our unconcious mind..

And hey, why not instill some good old capitalist ethos in the kids whilst they're here? They sure as hell won't have learnt anything else on their trip to this godforsaken corporate island.

And this one is just to prove that they really did posit that the future entails evil televisions snaffling up baby hamsters...

I hope you're all suitably disturbed by this exclusive insight into the demonic minds of Shell's corporate executives, and implore you to avoid this pile of shit (quite literally) if you're in South Kensington. Instead, you should gaze upon this fantastically phallic sculpture in the Psychoanalysis section, which manages to create the shadow of a double-faced head from a craftily-lit sculpture made from casts of the artist's hand and (really quite large) penis. Brilliant.