Found a lovely, horrible, mouldy second-hand book, dating from at least the twenties, which turned out to be a panegyrical biography of Irish revolutionary and poet, Thomas Davis.

I love the strange marks and annotations all over these pages, like the febrile scribblings of a lunatic trying to decipher some imaginary code. And I don’t know why, for example, the word “opinion” was apparently not in the owner’s vocabulary but “temperance” posed no difficulties. A terrifying spectre of oppressive Catholic dogma glimpsed through the veil of time? Or a meaningless quirk of literacy, just a rumple in the fabric of one weirdo’s personal lexicon, who knows.

Poet-revolutionary is one of those occupations that seem to have fallen by the wayside. Like buccaneer, or haberdasher.