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
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Spring was revoked after I saw Jim, and the dark side returned, in all its frightening nude whiteness.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
Writing
A lot of people have now died. That much is clear. John Barker, the steam circus proprietor, was crushed between two wagons at the original Norwich Cattle Market in 1897 while setting up a steam roundabout. He suffered fractures to the spine and breastbone, punctures to both lungs, and broke
Writing
How do you think it would change your identity, and your writing, if you could no longer go walking - and what would you do to fill that void? (Betty Lou - Twitter) I have thought about this a surprisingly large amount. I have not been walking as much over
Writing
The quiet often floors me here, on the green edge of the city. It’s quiet in an entirely different way to the very rural house I moved from, where agricultural machinery and speeding cars cut sharply through a bigger emptiness. At night, the silence is thick, but a few