Thinking about Pushkin, looking for Witch Bottles ...

Very soon, Tony, the builder, will be removing the low ceiling of the snug, with its mysterious markings and strange civilizations of spiders -

Jigger's delved already under the floorboards upstairs, exposing narrow joists, over a hundred years old - I half expected to find a witch bottle there, wreathed with dust - 

Today I've been taking my books out of the bookcases in the snug, placing them in cardboard boxes - I scrounged the boxes from Sainsburys - Diane and Jimbo put them by for me - I peered into the dark kingdom of the loading bay to seek out Diane - 

I realised that my books marked phases of my life - there was my foxed Dandelion Wine, with its feverishly beautiful cover - there was my View Over Atlantis - I remembered my gaudy nights in Winchester, the man who saw flying saucers over Saint Catherine's Hill - there was my Severed Head - I thought of my own terrible colloquies - there was my Hangover Square and my Life of Johnson - 

I saw myself in Highgate - there I was in a shebeen with a girl from Beziers - I was happy under a Tiepolo ceiling in Venice - I was reading Christabel in an attic room - 

Under a pile of atlases, I found a photograph of Kafka, and an essay by Wilf Self about The Book of Revelation - 

I thought of Pushkin, pierced by the vile d'Anthes' bullet - 

Farewell, my friends he'd said, gazing at his books -