Writing
I was walking along the clifftop footpath last month and there were a few cows blocking my way, eleven or maybe thirteen at most. I gauged the situation - which experience has made me better at doing, where cows are concerned - and concluded they didn’t want any trouble,
Writing
The wind was up, but it wasn’t the kind of wind that sunk its teeth into you, or was liable to blow even a lightweight person off a precipice, just a wind with a very loud voice, so I went up to the high bit of the moor to
Writing
Have you ever had a dream where it turned out that a place which had seemed exotic and alien to your normal environment was actually not very far away, as you once thought, but extremely close, or geographically connected in some secret unexpected way to where you were? California, contrary
Writing
I have ploughed through a large number of audiobooks in the last half decade, but I’ve probably abandoned as many, sometimes because I haven’t got on with the book itself, but usually due to the narrator. A bad narrator can murder an audiobook in its sleep. Just occasionally,
Writing
Finding a house to rent is hard, especially when you're doing it from more than 300 miles away. You have to be very on the ball, extremely assertive, and make sacrifices, as, if it's any good, you can guarantee several other people will want to rent
Writing
Beheadings Not many people of my generation in our small region forget their first beheading, and I am in this respect an archetype of my place and era. I was on the way to the cornershop to pay an overdue newspaper bill at the time and, seeing the crowd of
Writing
Someone stole my notebook. I blame the thief, but I also blame myself, and Michael Jackson. I was dancing to Michael Jackson’s ‘Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’ - a song I can’t ever not dance to, provided I am either alive or awake at the time
Writing
I had driven up from Norfolk to Nottinghamshire to see my mum and dad. Not long after I arrived, my dad took me to one side. “TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?” he said. When my dad says, “TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?” it usually means one of three
Writing
March. It is still March, isn’t it? I’m writing this with nine days of March remaining, so it can’t claim to be about the whole of March, and who knows what will have happened by the end of the month. There might not even be an Internet
Writing
I parked in the woods on the hill, almost a proper hill, even by normal topographic standards, not just Norfolk standards, and walked down through the woods towards the town. There was a carved Saxon face on a plinth in the woods and the town smelled strongly of meat. Last
Writing
I went walking at Cley-Next-The-Sea, in that washed out light you only get in Norfolk in winter: a sky of overthinned paint. A Sunday. Reed cutters on the marshes. Beyond the 18th Century windmill, the coast path was like a six lane People Motorway, but inland, the flinty footpaths between
Writing
One day I was hiking through a sharp cleft in the woods when I met a robot walking towards me up the sunken green lane. This was a surprise, because I’d been told that this particular part of the woods, where the nearest building was a mile away and