Good Morning Doggerland!

Spidery, spidery, spider spy, you're watching me as I go by, you hairy long-legged creepy thing, I know you wish you had some wing, so you could fly up here and bite me, you who are so troglodyty, think you're useful, you scary creep, it would make a hard man weep, to meet you in his bed at night, it would make his hair go white, to find you on his toothbrush, in his coffee, up his nose, but if he did, I suppose, he'd flail and stamp, and squash you dead, so stay well out of people's beds!

Arresting work of animation by Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein that won the 1989 Academy Award for best animated short.

So! This is funny; Frankie Howerd's take on the Serge Gainsbourg breather...

At an exhibition I came across this series of brooches brilliantly crafted by the Swedish silversmith/craftsman Christer Jönsson. Each is a strange little asymmetrical world in itself- or rather a little stage- of intertwining branches of silver and gold from which hang little minature figures and ornaments. They are like little worlds, with bats and skulls and skeletons, comedy and tragedy masks and marionette-like human figures in flat silver. A profile page. The Jungfuhuset gallery.

Across the marshy lowlands of Doggerland, where the Thames and the Rhine run together into the North Sea, lies the rainy city. To describe it takes no time. A grey port with grey bricks. Among the grey bricks, chimneys sprout, and docks and wharfs stud the waterfront with ugly frequency. Along wet streets walk people. Some very busy important people; but most just shamble along in black overcoats, their lives enveloped in soggy sea-mist. To this half-indifferent crowd, in flickering electric light, the swaggering bad poet reads loudly from his rain-sodden pencil-written manuscript. That's largely what happens next.