Into the dark night that is very, very long...

Oliver Postgate once emailed me when I was working at The Big Issue. It was by quite some measure the most exciting and impressive communication I had ever had with someone famous.

He wanted to know more about a reference to an 'e-book' that had been included in an article, because he was researching ways of transferring lots of his animation, illustrations and behind-the-scene photos into easily-accessible forms for the sort of technology that hadn't even been dreamed of in the Clangers' time. He would have been in his mid-70s. He was working on his brilliant autobiography Seeing Things, which you could still order in time for Christmas if you're feeling flush.

A lot of it ended up on this website, where I should imagine a lot of people will be spending some time this morning, telling their colleagues they must have caught that cold that's going round and that's why they're sniffing so much and their eyes have gone a bit streamy.

I was going to close with an appropriate quote from the first saga of Noggin the Nog, but someone else got there first:

Then, one day, the king rose from his seat as if to go down to his castle. The people watching him saw him shake and stagger and fall to the ground. The king was dead. Great was the sadness and loud the wailing. The flags on the houses were pulled to half mast and the great bell rang.