"There were a lot of snakes in our lives...

... at this time. At our mother's house enormous carpet pythons wound themselves around the rafters of the verandahs.    [...]

Snakes curled up in dark corners of Emma's studio; they stretched along the noggins of the unlined walls, still and milky-eyed, and shed their skins. Her studio was the perfect place for snakes, dim and cool and surrounded by sheltering trees."

Joanne Horniman, A Charm of Powerful Trouble, 2002


What's the world coming to, Hortensia? I have put my own book in the attic!

It's just that I've had a visitor at the blue room (that's just a skin, by the way, not a live snake)

and it put me in mind of something I've written. In fact, it was the snakiness of this room while I was writing that charming book that led to the snakes going into it. Art imitating life. Or something.