Writing

Moss

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

The Wall

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

Spring, 2020: A Personal Compendium

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

Garden Diary, 2.5.2020

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

OUR SMALL REGION, AND ITS CULTURE

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

Notebook

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

My Dad, And The Toad In His Shoe

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

A Short, Inconsequential Firsthand Report On Some Of March, 2020

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

Who Is This Who Is Coming

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

Late Winter, 2020: A Personal Compendium

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

ROBOT

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

Writing

Midwinter: A Personal Compendium

I’ve not been very excitingly dressed this winter, and nearly everything I am wearing is looking a bit tired, but I’m taking a break from buying new clothes at the moment for ethical reasons. What I really want to do is dress like Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson,