Annie Freud at her home in Dorset “This is my cabinet of curiosities!” says Annie Freud, waving toward a great glass-fronted, Victorian-looking thing, its shelves lined with whatnot. The 72-year-old author and artist is cheerfully chain-smoking as she gives me a video-call tour of the room where she writes her poems. It’s a cluttered study in a rural corner of west Dorset – a land of “wild animals and cataclysmic weather,” says Freud – where she lives with her second husband, David. Freud’s playful poems are themselves cabinets of curiosities. All sorts of curios – a radar station, a Sappho ode, a cucumber green sex toy – are brought to the reader’s attention in much the same way that, at one point in our conversation, she waggles an antique doll in front of the camera. “All dolls are very freaky, but here’s a major freaky doll!” Its dress is tartan, its face the stuff of nightmares.