My Notebook

Plus books, and an offer of some free original free art!

This week I’m offering the above selection of art - all originals, by my mum, Jo (this is just a small selection of what’s on offer) - to everyone who takes out a full (cut price) annual subscription this page. Wherever you are on the planet I’ll send you one of these if you become an annual subscriber to this Substack page before the deadline of midnight UK time on Sunday 19th January. These will be the last prints of Jo’s I’m giving away for the foreseeable future (mostly because she’s given me so many recently that she’s run out of stock). Her fabulous linoprint illustrations feature in my most recent seven books and you can read a bit more about her work here.

It’s been hard to write recently. Not because I have no inspiration but because I have so, so much of it and acting as an irritating barrier to that inspiration are some ongoing difficulties with my publisher, who - as some of you will no doubt now be aware - are more than half a year overdue with money they owe me (and I’m not the only one), with no news yet surfacing on when that money will arrive. Sometimes I feel like the energy I’ve put into trying to resolve and chase this has been worse than the withholding of the money itself because, as much as I hate worrying about money, I often feel, as I rapidly approach my 50s, that the wasting of potential creative time is my most loathed activity of all.

Because of these ongoing daily feelings of frustration, I am surprised to look at my creative output over recent weeks and realise just how much I’ve done. I’m now a solid few thousand words into two new books which, if they come to fruition, will be the sixteenth and seventeenth I have published. I know I will publish them, although I’m not yet sure how or where. I am aware of publishers who are not averse to the idea of publishing my work but I also know that some of those publishers would probably prefer me to write in an inferior or more brandable way, or to write in a way that’s no longer relevant to who I am and what I want to achieve. At the moment, I’m taking the view that the more positive approach is to worry about that later and, for now, just keep writing. As a result, I don’t think I’ve ever had such strong feelings of duality and separation in the entire 29 years I’ve been earning my living by bashing out words on a keyboard. I’ve felt, for almost a decade, like I’ve been on a little desert island of my own creation with my work but now I feel like I’ve cut the rope that kept my little insignificant boat moored to that island, and I’m floating in open water. Fortunately, I’ve always liked swimming in the sea. Where I am is partly terrifying (who knows what will happen next) but there’s a strange exotic freedom and power to it too. I’m writing, more than I ever have before, just for me. As it stands, nobody can take away what I’m doing, tell me it’s “unmarketable” or take the money my readers pay for it then fail to remunerate me in the way they’re legally obliged to. It’s completely mine in a way that nothing I’ve done before ever quite has been. It’s possible I’ll never have this feeling again so I’m choosing to enjoy the positive side of it, while it lasts.

Due to not being paid, in an attempt to make things easier for myself over the coming weeks I’ve decided to sell the remaining hardbacks I have of my book Notebook (which came out in 2021 and is being modelled here by our most conventionally attractive cat, Professor Charles Cardigan) direct to anybody who would like them. I have around 50 of these in total. To post to the UK they cost £3.60 . They are a bit more to send overseas (e.g. around £18 to send to the US) but I’m happy to send them worldwide. As for how much the book itself costs, the cover price of £14.99 but I have decided to leave it up to you, the reader, how much you pay me, and I completely understand if you can’t pay as much as cover price. If you’d like to take me up on this offer while it stands, please email me via the contact form on my website. Please note that I also have a few hardbacks of my novels Villager and 1983 (although significantly less of these). All books will be signed, of course. And I’ll include one of the postcards below, featuring my mum’s art, with each. Hopefully that’s a fair offer? (And don’t forget you can get one of my mum’s originals with today’s subscription offer, as mentioned at the top of the newsletter!)

I’m posting a few excerpts from my notebooks below, some of which are featured in the book. A few of you will have seen a lot of them before. But they will give others of you a taste of the kind of thing you’ll find in Notebook. It’s the book of mine I generally recommend to people who are looking for a light, short read which might serve as a gateway to my other work…

• A friend met me at the pub and told me he had been clearing out his gran’s house. One thing he’d found in the house was a knitted effigy of the man who had run off and abandoned my friend’s pregnant aunt. Into the effigy had been stuck twenty knitting needles: one for every year since the man had vanished.

• A solid cooking rule to follow is to remember that when recipes say ‘add two cloves of garlic’, it’s always a misprint and what they actually mean is six.

• I was lamenting the fact that my cats get tired of one brand of food after two days then I tried to think of it in a different way and asked myself "What if YOU ate salt’n’vinegar crisps every day?" then realised I do that already and that my cats should shut the fuck up and stop acting so entitled.

• I am always listening to the great early Joni Mitchell records and seeing photos of Joni Mitchell’s house in Laurel Canyon and thinking, “Man, would I love to have been there, then.” But I am not sure that in reality I would have liked to have been Joni Mitchell’s housemate. “Joni, can we just do this thing we have planned to do today, just this one time, without you carefully and piercingly crafting a brilliant song about it?” you’d find yourself asking, after a while. Soon the party invitations would begin to dry up. “The honest-to-god truth of it is, nobody wants to host or go to anything any more,” friends would tell you on the phone as you stood in your and Joni’s kitchen, industriously snapping pens with your free hand. “It’s nothing personal. She’s just too good at dissecting everything. It’s made people stiff and self-conscious. They’re afraid to talk or have a hairstyle. Some of us will now fritter away as much as four hours just thinking about what a scarf says about our motives or the clues a bangle gives to the underside of our personality.” Later, Joni would ask you if you’d seen her guitar anywhere. “Sorry, no, haven’t got a clue,” you’d reply, wondering if you’d added quite enough earth.

• I went to the pub with my parents. A waitress left her notepad and pen on the table and my dad immediately began to sketch a man sitting two tables away. My mum pointed out the trout on the menu and said it sounded nice and I said that I was full vegetarian now, not just pescatarian. ‘TROUT DON’T HAVE FEELINGS,” said my dad. “THEY’VE PROVED IT.”

• 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.”

• My friend Chloe, who lives in the Mendips, lost her hen. A neighbour telephoned to say the hen had been spotted at Wookey Hole, the subterranean tourist hotspot down the road, which, in addition to its world-famous caves and alleged witch, boasts such tourist attractions as a vintage penny arcade, an animatronic dinosaur valley and a pirate zap zone. By the time Chloe arrived, the hen had reached the crazy golf course, popularly known as Pirate Island. It was a busy bank holiday at the caves, and as Chloe chased the hen across the crazy golf course, lunging for the hen, and the hen repeatedly eluded her grasp, tourists attempted to get selfies with the hen. After much chasing between the holes – both those designed by nature, and those designed by the crazy golf course’s architects – with little help from the tourists, Chloe caught the hen, and returned it to her garden, where two weeks later it was devoured by a fox.

• The cliched description of a misty landscape that I will always go out of my way to avoid is “shrouded in mist”. I don’t care if a hill or tree gets up on its own secret legs, does a little fancy walk and grabs an actual shroud made of mist out of a nearby cupboard then gets fully inside it. I will still refuse to describe it as being shrouded in mist.

• Even though it’s scary, and I try my best not to, I do often think about the future. One of the years in the future I think about is 2034. Once I start thinking about it, it becomes quite vivid. I see it all, right there in front of me. 98% of the population of the planet is employed as a life coach. All the life coaches have life coaches. Life coaches decide to redouble their efforts, going in hard to all the last remaining outposts where people exist simply as people rather than life coaches or people striving to live their best life via life coaches. “Can I give you some life advice which will make you a proper person?” ask the life coaches. “Can you get out of my kitchen, please?” say the people. “I’ve already had six of you in here this morning, trying to tell me how I can be the ultimate version of me and unlock my true potential. I never asked for this. I just want to be able to live my most average, flawed life in peace and finish cleaning the oven.”

• Text from my mum: “Your dad asked the plumber yesterday if there was any gossip in the village. The plumber said, ‘YES! Pete Wilton’s bull got out and mounted one of John Michael’s cows and now she’s pregnant!’.”

• Birdsong is something that can be a vital part of your well-being for years without you noticing or appreciating it, like having intact internal organs.

• Last week my parents attended a talk by the Gardeners’ World presenter, Monty Don. Afterwards, my dad was seeing my mum out of a tight parking space and lost concentration, which meant my mum came very close to running over Don, who happened to be walking past at the time. My dad immediately ran over to him to apologise. “SHE LOVES YOU,” he told the celebrity gardener. “SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABSOLUTELY HEARTBROKEN IF SHE’D KILLED YOU.” (Read the full story of this one here.)

• Among other future works from me forming part of the more serious direction my writing is currently taking, look out for 'Someone Else's Incense', my hard-hitting memoir about how the incense in other people's houses always seems to smell better than mine.

• It felt like irons were poised to be a much more important aspect of life, when I was growing up. Same with shoe polish. I’ve got an iron, but I haven’t used it for ages, and I haven’t applied any shoe polish to a shoe for even longer. Life has gone on, and nothing too horrific has happened as a direct result of my neglect. If you’re diligent about ironing you might spend, say, thirteen hours of the next year ironing. You’ll have neat clothes but remember the cost: that’s thirteen hours you’ve lost that you could have used walking through haunted forests, visiting esoteric museums or befriending strange dogs.

• The New Year’s village hunt was about to ride through the fields behind my mum and dad’s house, chasing a man dressed in a fox suit. “QUICK,” my dad said to my mum. “GET THE CAT IN. HE’S ORANGE. THEY MIGHT THINK HE’S A FOX.”

• Ageing: the condition of becoming less serious about all you were once far too serious about and more serious about all that you once undervalued.

My most recent books are 21st-Century Yokel, Help The Witch, Ring The Hill, Notebook, Villager, 1983 and - published in March and pre-order able now - Everything Will Swallow You. All of them can be ordered from Blackwells UK, who do free international delivery to most worldwide destinations.

It’s always nice to get a nice review but when that review is also extremely well-written it feels like an extra treat. I thought this piece by

Seb Merrick

really got 1983:

1983 by Tom Cox: Book Review

My previous piece, in case you missed it (it’s long!):

If you can’t afford a subscription to this newsletter but would like to support my writing you can always do that via my website here.

I love finding accidental animals in RightMove house photos. A recent favourite was this escaped lynx who has clearly got drunk, lost the rest of his party and wandered into a bland but not particularly awful 21st Century living room and is experiencing an overwhelming sense of relief after discovering there are no inspirational quotes on the wall.