Notebook E-Book

Tom Cox

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 179

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The story behind Notebook starts with a minor crime: the theft of Tom Cox's rucksack from a Bristol pub in 2018. In that rucksack was a journal containing ten months' worth of notes, one of the many Tom has used to record his thoughts and observations over the past twelve years. It wasn't the best he had ever kept – his handwriting was messier than in his previous notebook, his entries more sporadic – but he still grieved for every one of the hundred or so lost pages. This incident made Tom appreciate how much notebook-keeping means to him: the act of putting pen to paper has always led him to write with an unvarnished, spur-of-the-moment honesty that he wouldn't achieve on-screen. Here, Tom has assembled his favourite stories, fragments, moments and ideas from those notebooks, ranging from memories of his childhood to the revelation that 'There are two types of people in the world. People who fucking love maps, and people who don't.' The result is a book redolent of the real stuff of life, shot through with Cox's trademark warmth and wit.

Leseprobe

Also by the author

FICTION

Everything Will Swallow You

1983

Villager

Help the Witch

NON-FICTION

Ring the Hill

21st-Century Yokel

Close Encounters of the Furred Kind

The Good, the Bad and the Furry

Talk to the Tail

Under the Paw

Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

Nice Jumper

Contents

Introduction

Impossible Carpet

Technicolour Hayloft

Urban Bluegrass

Songs for Breakfasts in Rooms with Dogs

Future Funk Dystopia

Weather-fucked Pelt of a Long-deceased Vole

The Trouble with Sheds

Trout Without Emotion

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

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 both alive and awake at the time – in a pub in Bristol when my notebook was stolen, and this accounts for my temporary neglect of the rucksack containing said notebook. Of the several bags left at the side of the dance floor in the pub, my rucksack was probably the oldest and least prepossessing – cheap, faded blue and grey canvas, purchased around seventeen years previously, and stained with the mud of many recent upland walks – so I can’t imagine why the thief decided it was a choice that might lead to a brighter future. Having located my debit card, £46 in cash, my phone and my phone charger, he would surely have been disappointed with the remainder of what he found: a scented bath bar from Lush, a copy of Lindsay Clarke’s 1989 novel The Chymical Wedding, some keys to a car that was perilously close to death, and a black Moleskine journal containing a stranger’s chaotic thoughts on hens, garlic, second-hand vinyl, the landscape of the Peak District and Dartmoor, haircuts and cattle. The crime led to a fraught twenty-four hours: a sleepless night, the borrowing of cash from a kind friend, two long and nervous train journeys, immediately followed by a moderately confused two-hour walk in blistering heat and a very relieved car journey. But the pain of the loss of the money, card, car keys, bath bar, novel, phone – including the two years of photos stored solely on it – soon faded. The loss of the notebook, however, still stings nearly two years on, and will no doubt continue to, a little bit, forever.

So that is the first thing to say about this collection of jottings from the various notebooks I have kept over the last decade or so: there is a chunk missing. I don’t think the notebook that was taken in Bristol was my best. If I’m honest, it was probably not even in the top five of the fifteen I’ve filled or part-filled since 2009, and aesthetically it was far from my favourite – I am not a big fan of Moleskine and tend to prefer fabric notebooks with floral or geometric designs, especially the kind Paperchase were making around 2008 – but it was still full of thoughts, many of which I will never get back; almost a year of them in total, stretching from autumn 2017 to the end of summer 2018. A couple of years prior to the theft of my notebook, I lost a quarter of an actual book in a data disaster on my geriatric laptop: a calamity which many people would assume was the more serious of the two. But it’s the loss of that notebook that has caused the bigger heartache over time. What I lost of my book was arguably tighter and better for the rewriting and regathering that it prompted. That notebook, meanwhile, was a mess of half-completed thoughts, shopping lists, unexplained fortnight-long gaps and mud-stained almost-poetry.

Yet in my mind it attains more alluring mystery for every day it is gone, like an obscure, rare album that time and rareness is dusting with new magic. In my mind, I see it floating down an especially polluted stretch of the River Avon, where the thief has tossed it. It bumps up against a milk carton, then a hub cap, and for a moment the possibility looks very real that it could drift back to shore, trapped between the two objects, where it will be retrieved, its soggy pages peeled apart behind a warehouse by a delivery driver on a cigarette break, who by chance will see my appeal for its return on social media later that day. But then it is set free, and finally floats out of sight. It is at this moment, where the notebook’s jet-black cover merges with the colour of the night and the oily water, that it begins to become much more interesting than it ever was when it was in my possession.

I have completed and published eleven real books – twelve if you include the strange little one you’re holding in your hands right now – and I could argue to myself that filling the last page of a notebook feels like no less of an achievement. There’s always so much temptation to abandon the notebook you’re currently on for a younger, sexier notebook, in the hope that – no matter what your hard-earned notebook wisdom has told you – it might be The One. Sure, sex is great, but have you ever cracked open a new notebook and written something on the first page with a really nice pen? I’m massively anti wasting paper and massively pro beginning fresh notebooks, and it causes me to lead a very conflicted life. But I’m more disciplined than I once was. After I had my notebook stolen in Bristol and replaced my bank card, the first thing I did was go out and purchase a very pretty new notebook (the cover is the classic William Morris design ‘Strawberry Thief’), resolving that I would keep it close to my person at all times and that it would be My Best Notebook of All Time – a prophecy it went on to fulfil, holding the title jointly with a really psychedelic maroon-and-pink one I filled between mid-2009 and early 2011. The first entry (‘August is the worst of all the months that don’t occur in winter: it’s scruffy, cramped and not quite sure what to do with itself.’) was made on 20 August 2018, and the final one (‘Story title: Impossible Carpet’) happened on 30 March 2019. That might not seem very impressive for some speedier note writers, but for me it was a sustained, disciplined sprint, and constituted a new personal record.

It is surely no coincidence that the period of my career as an author which produced my most fulfilling work is also the period when I was a more diligent notebook keeper. What I have realised more and more is my notebooks contain the grain in the wood of my writing. Without them, it would probably be just a laminate floor. So many times, there have been sentences I have written on a keyboard I’ve been relatively pleased with, then later consigned to the cutting- room floor with a shake of the head. Equally often, there have been observations I’ve scrawled in a notebook, sitting on a boulder on a moor, and not really thought much of, then later, as a deadline approaches, been deeply thankful for. All books would be better if they could be written entirely during long walks, and notebooks are the bridge to making that closer to being possible. A lot of the writing in my notebooks ends up in my books, a lot of it doesn’t deserve to end up anywhere outside of those notebooks, and a lot of it could have ended up in my books, but didn’t belong there, for various reasons. It is the third category you will read here. I don’t assume that everyone – or even most people – reading this has read my other recent books, but for those who have I have been as careful as possible to avoid repetition. This makes Notebook a different book to the one it would have been if I hadn’t written those books, especially in terms of location. I have lived in four different parts of the UK in the last decade. There is a very large amount of Devon in my latest few books, a lot of Somerset, quite a lot of Peak District, but not so much Norfolk, yet I’ve spent five of the last eleven years living in Norfolk. Therefore, this book leans on Norfolk a little harder than on the other three regions.

*

What I see, going through my notebooks, is that I am more sporadic than I want to be but more reliable than I was. There are gaps in time, sometimes as much as a fortnight, which I can see are largely due to periods when I am constantly either asleep or in motion: days on end when I am either driving, walking, swimming, talking, cooking or typing the sentences of an actual book, and simply do not give myself chance to sit down for ten minutes with a pen. Maybe it is because I couldn’t find a pen? Pens are the objects I lose more than any other, even socks. The notebooks contain some long-sustained, soul-searching bursts, usually written in pub gardens after walks, only just legible. Unsuccessful jokes are more prevalent in the earlier notebooks. My handwriting is often bad, but can be good when I want it to be, especially when I am writing in longhand regularly. This has always been the case, going right back to when I was a teen, and meticulously wrote the track listings to mixtapes I’d made for people I liked – usually even more neatly if the recipient was a girl I happened to be mooning over at the time. The first page of the notebook is always the neatest. Unless it’s in biro. Biros always make my handwriting ugly, even if I’m at my most meticulous. There are also lots of bad drawings of hares. Malcolm Gladwell said that genius is just a matter of practising something for 10,000 hours. My drawings of hares are the exception to this rule. I have been doing them for a long time, and they haven’t got any better.

The very fact I’m putting pen to paper makes me write in a very different way to the way I would if I was making notes on a screen. There’s a more intense honesty to it. That’s something common to this book: it all very much happened, often on the spur of the moment, frequently with a strong rush of feeling; it’s all redolent of the real mess of life. Some of the thoughts and observations in it are better and deeper than others, but they are all real, and they sum up a moment, in a way a note on a screen never can. Paging through these old journals, I can still see the bit of river mud I smeared on a page in Devon in 2014, to mark the moment I started working on my eighth book; can still picture the weather that day, the way the pebbles felt under my feet as I waded across to a small island close to the opposite bank to write, the way my legs almost buckled due to the stealthy power of the current as I got halfway across. Reading some entries from 2009 and 2010, I get a better picture of the spaniel I borrowed for walks during that period: his smell, his lust for life – and death – (he really liked rolling on his back on top of roadkill). You look back at notebooks in a way you don’t look back at documents saved on a laptop, just as you look back at real photos in an album in a way you will never look back at the photos you’ve saved on your hard drive.

There’s an overused phrase nowadays which I dislike: ‘making memories’. So many people claim to be doing it while in fact doing the opposite. In the big rush to make the memories, we lose so much: something special gets expressed in an email or text from a friend, but then digital time moves on, and it is deleted forever, whereas a few decades ago, it would have been preserved in ink then found in a box many years later, and pored over, yearned over, swam in. Even though I’ve occasionally cringed in the process, I’ve enjoyed swimming in some of my older jottings while putting this book together, and cursed myself for not being a proper notebook keeper earlier in my life.

Many of the notebooks tail off into job lists and arcane unsubstantiated statements – ‘People’s faces… Wasp’ – whose meanings have been lost to the whirlpool of time, before the notebook fades altogether, its final forty or so blank pages revealing the harsh truth: that I have abandoned it, once again, for the Thrill of the New. Within the pages, I get various reality checks about time. A story idea I thought I had in 2016 is actually two years older than that, which means, with a hard bump back to earth, I must come to terms with the fact it’s even longer than I thought that I’ve been chickening out of writing it. But perhaps that’s part of another lesson about time that notebooks – mine, at least – teach: that it might move forward in a linear, numerical fashion as it’s happening, but when it’s reappraised, it’s actually all over the place. Some of the observations here from May 2015 quite clearly belong with some others from December 2019, and not with those who share their birthday month. A reminder I scrawled to myself in 2014 is far more relevant to my life now than it was then. A series of trips, or a habit, or hobby, begins in one month, but gets sidetracked, and resumes eight months later.

In my organisation of these thoughts, observations, conversations and micro-stories, I have kept this scrambling of time in mind. They do not take place in chronological order; they also have a bias towards my more recent notebooks, which are – to be frank – less drippy. The entries are dateless. This is not a diary, and it’s certainly not a nature diary. If it was, it would probably be organised into months or seasons of the year, like nearly all other nature diaries. My life is nowhere near that organised. There’s nature here, but it’s only part of the story, depending on what you define ‘nature’ as. This is a notebook, and it’s as chaotic and erratic as a notebook should be. I felt any very clear attempt to organise into subject matter would detract from that. But there is a kind of order to it – albeit a freewheeling one – and a certain amount of editing. I don’t want to bore anyone with the entirety of one of my actual notebooks, but I also want to retain, maybe even embolden, the customary rhythm of them. Each section covers a range of subjects, but to me has a feel, however scrambled, which unites the entries. I have always loved making mixes for music-loving friends, whether it was back in the days when to do so necessitated three hours with your finger hovering over the pause button on an old cassette player, or now, with the spoilsport assistance of modern technology. I have also loved naming these mixes, in an – not always successful – attempt to sum up their character. If I make a mix, it’s rarely just of one genre of music; it encompasses several, but has a certain abstract coherence. After all, what genre doesn’t bleed into another, or cross-fertilise it? And wouldn’t music be so much more boring if it didn’t? That’s the way I think of the sections here: each is themed by nothing as strict as a ‘genre’ or ‘subject’, and the entries are often conceived in very different places, but they somehow belong together, even if it’s only for the fact that they all came from my brain, and my brain, like most brains, rarely thinks about one thing at a time; it also likes to misbehave. In the end, that’s what this is, as much as me writing an actual book: it’s me having fun making another mixtape, for a slightly wider audience. If nothing else, it’s a sure-fire way to make my handwriting as neat as possible.

IMPOSSIBLE CARPET

Walking through Newark with my dad, a motorbike roared past us. ‘I KNOW THAT BLOKE: HE BUYS FISHCAKES AT THE MARKET EVERY FRIDAY,’ he commented, before continuing his story, which was actually a story from his policeman friend at the swimming pool. The story was that the policeman friend had taken a statement from a student who’d been mugged at knifepoint in the part of Nottingham where my nan used to live and offered to pay the muggers with a cheque. The muggers declined and instead marched him back to his flat, which they proceeded to ransack.

‘Going to write in a cafe’ always sounds so attractive – even now, to me, as someone with a long history of failing to write in cafes. If madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, anyone who had witnessed my attempts to write in cafes over the years would definitely conclude I was no longer sane. Somehow, when thinking about the prospect of writing in a cafe, my brain manages to edit out all the elements that so often make writing in a cafe impossible: the loud people who sit next to you whose conversation you can’t tune out; the Tracy Chapman song that I vastly, irrationally dislike, which always seems to be playing in cafes, as if a barista is behind a curtain with a finger on the ‘Play’ button of a device, waiting for a signal from a colleague (‘OK, he’s sat down – hit it!’). Last week I tried to write in a cafe, but couldn’t, so instead I drank my coffee, stared at a blank page and listened to one of the two loud conversations on either side of me. This involved three posh gym-dudes talking very earnestly and with great admiration about their newly gym-converted mate who wasn’t around at present: ‘He was, like, really narrow, and now he’s like, really wide,’ said one of the gym dudes. ‘It’s just, like, really great to see.’ The two other gym dudes nodded in earnest agreement. I suspect all three would have considered me disappointingly narrow.

After two successive bank holidays, there is much confusion amongst the bins in my road about when they are meant to be attended to. One bin is in a tree. Another bin is crying. Several bins have left to seek work overseas.

The record my mum played most while I was in the womb was ‘After the Gold Rush’ by Neil Young. I heard it some more when I was a baby, then didn’t hear it again until my late teens, when it helped rescue me from some other music I was trying too hard to like. When I play it now, which is often, it doesn’t just sound like a record to me; it sounds like a place.

I want my autobiography to truly sum up my life so I’m going to call it: The Reason You Can’t Find Your Wallet is Because It’s in Your Hand.

*

You can write amazingly quickly for a big audience if you really have to. I’ve tried it. Whether the writing will be any good is another matter entirely. When I was reviewing a gig by a very well-known band or singer in my old job for a national newspaper, it was vital that my review reached the copytakers as soon after the gig as possible, so I’d scribble it down in longhand, make a few quick corrections, then phone in my appraisal of the gig to the paper’s copytakers, who were based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. I did this on an early mobile phone which my friends laughed at and called ‘The Brick’ and was originally just intended as a family phone for my mum, my dad and me to use in emergencies. This was never easy. On the way back from the Birmingham NEC, reception was very poor, and the route involved many tunnels and bridges, but somehow my appraisal of Puff Daddy’s live performance was printed the next day and made some kind of sense. By now I was also fully aware of the paper’s infamous knack for imaginative subbing errors. A mention I’d made of The Byrds albums Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday had been altered to create a little-known album by the sunshine pop group The Fifth Dimension, also called Younger Than Yesterday. I stated that Waylon Jennings wrote the theme tune to The Dukes of Hazzard and discovered the next day that the paper had decided it was actually written by Willie Nelson, despite the many facts suggesting otherwise, such as the fact that it wasn’t. Tom Waits, the paper decided, starred not in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, as I’d claimed, but in Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire