I have this feeling, Edinburgh will dispose of each of us once she has had her use – drank all the energy and talent and money and vitality and then she spits out the bones. Hungry city!

Subsists on human souls.

I am ignoring what is going on in Cube and the rest of the world this week and having nothing to do with the dark soul of my current home – I am getting on with my work.

Sort of.

At the end of my bone library there is a door to the Dissection Room. There have been lectures in there all week. They have a massive Highland cow hung up on a great big fuck-off hook. Also – they shaved him. Somebody took six bags of cow hair through my library. I have been picking out hairs from everything. I am still studying bones all the time. Did you know they had oracle bones in China? They would engrave questions of the day on the bones and then when they split it was thought the spirit world was divining answers. Oracle bones were mostly oxen scapula or turtle plastron, they called their form of divination pyromancy, scapulimancy was the term they used if it was an oxen scapula and plastromancy if it was a turtle, they would carve in oracle bone script, asking deities to bring answers then they’d heat them up until they cracked and the diviner would read answers from the cracks. They mostly used oxen or turtle but human bones were found too. I think about human bones in relation to animal bones. Did you know if your finger bones got longer and longer you’d have a similar bone structure to a bat? If you took out human leg and arm bones, we would have the same skeletal structure as a snake. I spell out words with bones, I drum with them, I draped jewelry around a beaver skull. I am filing the skulls I have found most fascinating, they include:

Crow

Horse

Bugle bird (I don’t know what it was doing here)

Red fox

Bobcat

Bali starling

Black stork

Grey-legged douroucouli

Lowland Nyala

Hamerkop

Scottish wildcat

Waldrapp ibis

Red squirrel

Deer

Seal

Swan

If only we could find a real unicorn skeleton! It’s Scotland’s national animal which makes me like them more. I want to see a wolf skeleton. In my bone library I have to keep lots of collections in sturdy brown boxes. Did you know owls regurgitate entire animal skeletons? It’s a thing! I arrived in the bone library minus my heart. Isn’t it always the way? I wasn’t sure how I had ended up in a place where bones are so insistent on rigidity, it made a mockery of my click-clack vertebrae.

I have been building things I shouldn’t – when the professors aren’t looking – specifically, a mermaid.

It is the most majestic thing I ever made in my life!