Tom Cox - Notebook

Ring the Hill

Help the Witch

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

Someone stole my notebook. I blame the thief, but I also blame myself, and Michael Jackson. I was dancing to Michael Jacksons Don t Stop Til You Get Enough a song I cant 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 cant 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 Clarkes 1989 novel The Chymical Wedding , some keys to a car that was perilously close to death, and a black Moleskine journal containing a strangers 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 dont think the notebook that was taken in Bristol was my best. If Im honest, it was probably not even in the top five of the fifteen Ive 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 its 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 youre 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. Theres always so much temptation to abandon the notebook youre 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? Im massively anti wasting paper and massively pro beginning fresh notebooks, and it causes me to lead a very conflicted life. But Im 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 dont occur in winter: its 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 Ive been relatively pleased with, then later consigned to the cutting- room floor with a shake of the head. Equally often, there have been observations Ive 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 doesnt deserve to end up anywhere outside of those notebooks, and a lot of it could have ended up in my books, but didnt belong there, for various reasons. It is the third category you will read here. I dont 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 hadnt 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 Ive 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.