the erstwhile Hancock Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (presently being reinvented as The Great North Museum, swallowing many fine smaller museums in the process) which contained the unwrapped 2,500-year-old mummy of Irt-Irw, who is said to set off intruder alarms and has inspired various ghost hunts.

Visited the Great North Museum yesterday - a rainy Saturday afternoon in Canny Newcastle. This is the £26 million makeover that replaces both the old Hancock Museum and the Museum of Antiquities, supposedly bringing it all together one roof but only managing to dumb it all down to such an extent one is left with nothing but an overwhelming sense of irretrievable loss - gone is the coffee machine at the foot of the stairs where one might watch lowering piranhas in vast dark aquaria whilst slurping a scalding beverage or two.

Never quite the Pitt Rivers or the Natural History Museum, the Hancock was nevertheless a place of inspirational clutter, with seemingly endless galleries of pinned months, butterflies, beetles, tribal masks, Egyptian coffins, human skeletons, and more threadbare Victorian taxidermy than you shake a stick at - one chimpanzee was particularly disturbing, looking like something Dr. Frankenstein had stitched together on his lunch-break. Thing is, some of this Threadbare Taxidermy remains, selected specimens of Spheniscidae looking particularly forlorn in the context of these vast wide open spaces favouring interactive displays rather than actual exhibits.

It was good to see the Roman collections again, particularly the venerable head of Antenociticus (now at knee level - how the mighty are fallen!) and the Mithraic sculpture from the Roman Wall. One of the features of the ertswhile Museum of Antiquities was a lifesize reconstruction of the Temple of Mithras which one might view for the payment of 20p, to be greeted by lurid lighting, chilling sound effects and a rather solemn voice-over latterly delivered in the character of a Roman Centurion. All that remains is a film of same, grainy digital images projected onto a vast screen complete with subtitles and a larger than life size person signing. No problem with signing of course, but his modern dress does detract rather from the whole re-enactment vibe; certainly not the place one might lose touch with the outside world that it used to be.

As for my beloved Irt-Irw, she now lies in her caskets with bandages draped almost teasingly about her withered breasts and pubis no doubt out of a sense of post-modern modesty or else according the poor girla long belated dignity. Last night safe in bed at home in Lancashire after the 140-mile drive home, I imagined her coming alive in the dark, wandering the stripped-out galleries of this once splendid museum sobbing as she searched in vain for her thread-bare chimpanzee...