The Rainy City

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.