Autumn Diary

The full version of today's piece is paywalled but can be read - along with all my other upcoming pieces, and my archive - for a price beginning at £2 per month/£20 per year. I also wanted to take this quick opportunity to to let those of you in the UK know that I have just a few first edition hardbacks of Everything Will Swallow You here, which I can send you for cover price plus p&p, signed and personalised, with a free handmade bookmark by my mum, Jo (randomly selected from the batch in the photo below). If you'd like to grab one of these before they're all gone please email your address to me at hello@tom-cox.com. (If you're overseas, Blackwell's still have a few signed hardbacks which they can send to you with free worldwide delivery.)

• On a blowy autumn day in the countryside where north east Nottinghamshire and west Lincolnshire fade subtly into one another, the landscape offers few places to hide. Finding zero hills to impede its desires, the wind will bait and molest you with no more compassion than it would a small dying tree, blag and connive its way through any small gap in your clothing. Walking directly into the fangs of it with boots doubled in weight due to the obstinate East Midlands mud they’ve collected, a gently sloping field can feel like an Alp. In this context, my mum and dad’s cottage, with fragrant woodsmoke billowing from its chimney, might at first appear to be precisely the respite you have been looking for. “Would you like any of the 93 cakes I have just made?” my mum will ask, as you plonk yourself down on the sofa in front of the wood stove. “ARE YOU COLD?” my dad will add. “LET ME PUT AN EXTRA HALF DOZEN LOGS ON THE FIRE.” But before long the respite, with its sweet smells of well-seasoned Ash, can become its own kind of hardship. Excusing yourself to take a fictional phone call, you will dangle your head out of an upstairs window, allowing the breeze you so unfairly judged as your foe to thrillingly dry the sweat pouring from your brow. “Is everything ok?” my mum might ask, catching you with your head in the fridge just before bedtime. “Absolutely fine, just getting a glass of orange juice,” you will answer, doing your best to hide the pillow you were poised to cram into the freezer drawer in preparation for the night ahead. It is, to say the least, a warm house, and I’d far prefer that to a cold house, but sometimes a prolonged period within its rooms can lead to an urge to offer oneself, wantonly, to weather, and it was such an urge that, last Friday, pushed me out into the epicentre of Storm Amy. I’ve known a few Amys and, while often opinionated, none have been monstrous. “ARE YOU MAD?” my dad asked, as I laced up my walking boots. “ALSO DON’T WEAR THAT STUPID JACKET WITH THE FLOWERS ON IT.” This from a man whose preferred location for daytime napping, during most Januarys, is frequently not a bed or sofa but a sun lounger, next to a compost heap on the cusp of Northern England, while dressed in a woolly hat, two jumpers and a fleece. As a family, we probably have more quirks than most, where metereological matters are concerned. One of mine is that I sometimes just like to go out into the driving rain, hatless and hoodless, and permit it, without caveats or smallprint, to do its absolute worst to me.

• In fact, my walking plan did have a bit more of a goal to it than that. During a gentle ramble in February with my aunt and uncle, about three miles north of here, the five of us had explored a deeply atmospheric abandoned Georgian kitchen garden and I’d not been able to get the place out of my head since. Returning to it now, sodden and wind-bedevilled, its redbrick walls and crumbling potting sheds seemed even more wild and clandestine, drunkenly decorated by the unrestrained foliage of an entire spring and summer. I won’t call it “liminal” because that word was so overemployed in landscape writing during the second decade of this century that in 2020 I promised I’d learn archery and put an arrow through my best eye if I ever used it again but opening the garden’s broken wooden door and arriving in its two acre rectangle of forgotten horticultural dreams is, I am sure, the closest I will come to passing through an interdimensional portal this year. I used to interview famous people for a living, don’t believe it was my forte and I’ve never missed it for a second but I do so often yearn to be able to interview places. The hours I could spend interrogating a piece of land like this, if I had the opportunity. What was once grown here? Why is the east wall still almost completely intact, while the one opposite looks like it's been assaulted by a series of dwarf cannonballs? How, in brief summary, would it rate the quality of owls who frequent it? What, if push came to shove, would it select as the major topics of gossip in the adjoining manor house during the first half of the 1800s? Two days later, to break up my drive home to Devon, I walked in a far more obviously pretty place, seven miles of unspoilt Cotswolds landscape where every house was chocolate box pristine, but it was my earlier, more inclement walk through humdrum fields, to this special, hidden spot which had the much more major impact on me, filled my heart with a weird inchoate kind of hope, and felt like far more of an antidote to the unimaginative, wildlife-obliterating housing estates that been the major theme of the first half of that car journey.