Extracts From My Notebooks

• You can listen to me reading this to you out loud here if you’d like to:

• I’m extremely pro purchasing new notebooks but extremely anti wasting paper. It causes me to lead quite a turbulent life, full of internal conflict. Sure, sex is great but have you ever cracked open a new notebook and written something on the opening page with a really nice pen? I will always be seduced by new notebooks because there perennially exists the possibility that the next notebook could be The One.

• News from our village message board: several rescue hedgehogs have been released into the community. With the hedgehog population of the UK - especially the part of it that’s based here in the West Country - struggling, this is a cause for celebration, but it appears all is not roses amongst the hedgehogs themselves. Lindsey who lives up near the church has reported that a large hedgehog in her garden has been bullying a small shy hedgehog who has also decided to live there. Matters came to a head when she had to rescue the smaller rescue hedgehog from her pond, into which it had been “sort of elbowed” by the big rescue hedgehog.

• It’s so sweet when people tell me about some metal dangling off my car and mistake me for the kind of person who might get that fixed within a period of five to eight months.

• One of the things I love about the many types of deer, elk and moose scattered around the planet is that they never skim-read pieces of writing online then screenshot out-of-context segments from them in a noisy flailing bid for attention.

• Isn’t the psychology of cancellation fascinating? Today my plan was to be working all day, but for some reason that I couldn’t quite pinpoint I didn’t feel much like doing that. Then I noticed that an interesting thing was happening, 90 minutes or so from my house, and decided to go to the thing. But then I thought, about the thing, “Hey, you know what… f*** you, thing: I don’t have to go to you, just because you’re on: I’m just going to stay at home, and save petrol, and take one more car off the country’s desperately overcrowded roads, so, essentially, IN YOUR FACE, thing, with your constant oppressing of me to feel I need to GO TO THINGS and SPEND MONEY” and then I was like “Wow, now I get a whole day working, at home, and get to eat that small last elbow of bread in the kitchen that’s only borderline stale” and felt so, so excited and free, and that’s why, if you possibly can, and you want to continue feeling energised and positive about life, you should arrange then cancel at least one activity every day.

• This afternoon I decided to do my shopping at the supermarket where the cheery old man who looks like a tipsy druid works. Sadly the cheery old man who looks like a tipsy druid wasn’t there on this occasion. I noticed the guy ahead of me in the queue was buying just two items: a miniature brandy and a pork pie. ‘Clive, do not fuck off down the wine aisle!’ said a woman to another man, a few yards away.

• “Take your shoes off and throw them in the lake.” That’s easy for Kate Bush to say. She’s probably got loads of shoes and much easier access to her nearest lake than I have.

• The language of house listings is a language all of its own, off to the side of language used by real humans. Very little means what it says it means and, as competition for houses gets stiffer, meaning gets drained further still. ‘Unique’ becomes nothing more than a way of saying ‘not on an estate, and not utterly identical to all of the houses around it’. ‘Open plan’ is stretched to describe a house that has one slightly larger than average room. Places are sold on the strange basis that it might be appealing to hardly ever be in them, with the use of the soulless phrase ‘lock up and leave’. No landlord ever says ‘pets welcome’ even if they do welcome pets. It’s always ‘pets by negotiation’. This description can lead a person to hypothesise about the nature of the negotiations: ‘You can bring the smallest dog, but not the cockatiel. They’re all wankers. That third cat of yours looks like a right mouthy prick, so he can live outside, in a tent.’ Another phrase that often comes up nowadays is ‘regret, no pets’ which, with its mournful comma, never seems to suggest that the regret is about the no-pets rule but that it is summarising something else that lingers in the house: that it is a building centrally characterised by a lack of animals and a rueful ambience of missed opportunity and overanalysed history.

• I went for a haircut at a new place. After my haircut, the hairdresser fetched my duffle coat from the coat rack in the corner of the room. Friends and family had frequently slagged off the duffle coat, which had been very old even when I’d purchased it from a charity shop for £12 over a decade earlier, and I am pretty sure wearing it had once scuppered my chance of renting a house via a particularly judgemental estate agent. I’d been considering letting it go for a couple of years, but - mostly out of my customary desire to fly in the face of popular opinion - hadn’t quite been able to bring myself to do it. All I had in the pockets were my phone and £1.52, but I saw the hairdresser’s knees buckle an inch or two under the duffle coat’s weight as he took it from the peg. ‘Don’t forget your carpet, sir!’ he said, handing it to me.

• I was on a cramped train from Birmingham to Nottingham, next to a vomiting man and his girlfriend. "So far he's puked in Longfield and Tamworth," she told me, apparently not without pride. ""We're going for the hat trick at Burton On Trent."

• Obviously nature is the most important thing of all but I sometimes think the ABSOLUTE best thing is when nature collaborates with the human spirit, with that human spirit putting its self-importance and lust for profit to one side and not acting as an oppressor to nature but as its gentle, skilled accomplice. Then all you need is for time, the all-important stealthy third member of the creative trio, to do a little bit of work on top and you have a whole other kind of magic.

• Yeah, I’m sure going on a massive drug bender is all quite thrilling, but you know what is also exciting? Going on an estuary walk and finding the sunken mud-caked exoskeleton of an old boat.

• Yesterday I had no phone signal for a while and ate an apple. It felt like a very tiny insight into what it’s like to live as a horse.

• In less than half a century on the planet I’ve lived in 25 different houses and flats, nine just since 2017. Many of these moves have involved me taking 20 or more car and vanloads of possessions from one place to another, with little or no help, over distances of up to 370 miles, then successfully making a domestic space function and feel calmly and cleanly like home in a matter of just a few days. Yet weirdly enough none of that has ever been as tiring as listening to people say “You do move house a lot, don’t you?” to me when I do.

• Overheard train chat between two tough-looking youths:

Youth one: “I got déjà vu, man. I saw this dog and felt like I’d seen it before.”

Youth two: “That’s not déjà vu. You just saw a dog twice.”

• I mistyped an email sign off as “all the bees” instead of “all the best”. I reckon I’m going to stick with it. I can’t think of anything negative that can possibly come of wishing someone all the bees.

• Another typo I enjoyed was when I wrote “omnivole” instead of “omnivore”. An omnivore is of course very different to an omnivole, which is a vole who manages to be everywhere at once. Then there was time about 16 years ago when I meant to write “septic tank” but wrote “sceptic tank” instead. My editors also failed to spot this, so in the final manuscript the sceptic tank remained: the half-empty receptacle where the cynical fish hang out, seeking the bad side of everything and carping about society’s ills.

• I mentioned the “all the bees” typo in a note here on Substack earlier and someone who saw it told me that because she was tired she misread “mistyped” as “misty ped”. I now find myself very much wanting, perhaps while out on a walk, to meet a misty ped: an animal whose exact number of legs remains a mystery due to the cocoon of light fog found permanently around it.

• You get older, and your body hurts a bit more, but because you’re more used to it hurting, it doesn’t hurt as much. Sometimes you don’t notice injuries until quite a long time after they’ve happened. You reach Coventry, travelling west, and belatedly realise part of your arm fell off in Market Harborough. You get drunk on an eighth of a pint of ale and the ensuing hangover lasts six or seven months. Hair starts to grow in some new places and stops growing in others. You develop a greater awareness of the crap most people are going through, all the time, and all of what you should be thankful for. You buy maps you don’t need, notice the way tables have been built and want to swear when you sneeze, but in quite a satisfying way. All this is true, and people might tell you about it. What they probably won’t tell you about are the limitations that maturity places on spontaneity. People have children to look after, mortgages and stupidly high rents to pay, health problems to manage; they’re tired from working too hard; they are starting to wonder if it was the right decision after all to adopt 17 dogs and a monitor lizard. Just to survive, time must be blocked out carefully, far into the future. It means that reaching lunchtime one day and announcing, ‘Guerrilla knitting party in the water meadow, 3 p.m.! Be there, and spread the word!’ becomes impractical.

• On the train, back home to the south west after seeing family in Nottinghamshire. A voice over the loudspeaker instructs me to report to the transport police anything I see that “doesn’t look right”. Stuff fitting that description that I’ve not told them about so far:

  1. The train’s upholstery.

  2. Much of the more recent architecture dominating Derby city centre.

  3. The pitiless thrust of the M5 motorway through bucolic scenes.

  4. A dog that looked too tiny to even be a dog.

• People: “How do you get your ideas?” Writers: “Mostly by not being deceased.”

I feel duty bound to inform you that Blackwell’s Bookshop UK are doing an AMAZING pre-order offer on signed first edition hardbacks of my new novel Everything Will Swallow You, including free international shipping. Pre-orders massively help the book get into the shops which, as a knock-on effect, will eventually also ensure I can purchase lots of cat food for my cats to ignore and donate to Frank. Alternatively you can pre-order from Bookshop.org UK and Waterstones. And you can read an extract here. Also, in case you happen to be anywhere near Devon, UK, on September 9th, I’ll be chatting to fellow West Country author Jon Woolcott about the book at the Exeter branch of Waterstones (you can grab a ticket here).