Fed by Birds

Taking another look at the V & A online, they have a fantastic collection of Schiaparelli designs. They're noticeable for their beautiful details:

and her choice of interesting people to collaborate with on her strange, surreal pieces, such as Jean Cocteau on this 1937 evening coat:

and Salvador Dali for this little incredibly modern-looking black Skeleton Dress from 1938:

Interestingly, she was the great niece of the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, famous for his observations on meteor showers and author of a book, Life on Mars.

(Picture from Bibliodyssey.)

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Elephant and Castle is the place to go at the moment for Londoners who like to encounter some mystery in their wanderings. First of all, Roger Hiorns' Seizure is there for a few more weeks - an empty flat that Hiorns has filled with copper sulphate solution to create a magically strange blue crystal growth in the middle of a condemned council block.

There's also the gigantic (nearly) abandoned Heygate estate, awaiting demolition as part of a long-promised regeneration of the area. Just a few residents are left in this spooky, boarded up maze. We only came across one jumpy couple going into their flat while wandering around the corridors. They seemed bewildered about what is going to happen next (understandable that they're jumpy - according to one man we met at Seizure, services are being cut off and the place is not being policed at night in an effort to encourage the stragglers to move out).

Walking around reminds you how badly thought out these Seventies estates were from the inhabitants' point of view. You come out onto the lower level where people park their cars and are then trapped in a concrete arena with walkways above but no steps up to them. Endlessly frustrating detours around obstacles just to find a way out for the pedestrian - like the whole of the Elephant, really. Did those architects ever use their legs?

Hope they finally move people somewhere that really does live up to those cities-in-the-sky ideas.

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I don't know why I hadn't realised until recently that an incredibly high percentage of my favourite films - His Girl Friday, Spellbound, Notorious, The Shop Around the Corner, Strangers on a Train, Monkey Business, Where the Sidewalk Ends - were at least partly written by one man, Ben Hecht. Maybe it's because the British boycotted his work in the Forties and Fifties due to his criticism of their policies in Palestine, so he wrote many of his screenplays anonymously.

His screwball comedies in particular show up where modern rom-coms go wrong with their mild embarrassments and drippy mopings. People were tougher in the Thirties and Forties: there's nearly always something more serious at stake than humiliation. It might be full of wisecracks but His Girl Friday revolves around preventing the planned execution of a mentally ill murderer, and a desperate woman throws herself out of a window halfway through.

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Hooray, the V&A have put more of their collections online, including objects that are in store, and it's hard to know where to start, there's so much good stuff. I like their theatre costumes, like the wolf from the Royal Ballet's Sleeping Beauty above, "devised by the great mask-maker Rostislav Doboujinsky".

They include some designs by famous names, such as David Hockney, for The Nightingale at the Royal Opera House, and Gerald Scarfe, for Orpheus in the Underworld at the ENO:

I don't know who I feel more sorry for, the dancer who had to wear this 1959 costume on the left, or the member of the Royal Ballet forced to dance in Sir Osbert Lancaster's chicken costume in 1960:

Exploring throws up some strange comparisons - for instance, there's a surprising similiarity between a Gilbert and Sullivan Queen of the Fairies and Maggie Smith's costume as Lady Bracknell on the right:

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Norfolk on the east coast of England is a mysterious place, for those who don't know it, of mudflats and eerie marshland, so it's not surprising that the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service online collections throw up all sorts of weird flotsam, among the usual seaside jollity:

There are pictures of unexpected catches being marvelled at, such as this shark in Sheringham in 1913 (the back of the postcard apparently says "Dear F, just a card to show you the latest production of this enlightened hamlet; please note by cross, future Prime Minister and coming Amateur Billiard and Golf Champion standing in his characteristic attitude with hands in pocket, write later, CR")

There are men rescued from a shipwreck being given tea by kind Cromer ladies in the Bath House Hotel:

Strangely spooky scenes from the British Gut Factory in Kings Lynn:

A large number of glaring stuffed birds:

and page after page of the most frightening dolls I've ever seen:

But the best is this 1786 sketch of a sighting of a (Cornish) sea monster by Charles Catton: "first discover'd by two boys at day break. / from top of the Head - to the end of its tail 48ft 10ins - the thickest part of the body":

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