Things I found and hoarded this month. I’m not sure what’s going on with me.

1. Packaging for a Luxury Short Wig the colour of Maud’s “Blue Surf” ice-cream, featuring an image of an uncomfortable woman being devoured by the all-consuming Void.

2. Cryptic appointment card for a hospital.

3. Handwritten list of conservatively-named show dogs (?) and their owners.

4. Envelope for a guitar string discarded in a bar by a bluegrass covers-band duo.

5. Concise message from a greetings card.

6. A receipt for diesel, dropped on the roof by a man that came to pick a fight with my satellite dish, lodged in which was

7. a dead bird.

8. This is a pen drawing of mine that I don’t remember making.

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.