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 - in
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
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
Writing
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,
Writing
Directly prior to death, I am certain, there is an anteroom where you remeet all the socks you once knew. My sock drawer is like a diverse but unsuccessful sock dating site: socks of every shape and colour, each of them alone, failing to find love. It never occurred to
Writing
For centuries, strange beasts have been spotted in the waves, at the eastern extremities of Suffolk and Norfolk: giant serpents, a sermonising beflippered clergyman. I want to believe all of them exist, but on a wild day at Horsey Gap, when the sea mist is up and a seal pops
Writing
Spring was revoked after I saw Jim, and the dark side returned, in all its frightening nude whiteness. I walked outside my front door to call Clifton, and I felt a natural hostility to the air unlike anything I’d ever felt near any house I’d ever made my