Writing
I walked down soft lanes past the cars of my youth, abandoned in orchards and green lanes, to the house of the writer Ronald Blythe and his cat, Kitty. It was a very old house, with bendy walls. Ronald’s coffee was head-meltingly strong and as we drank it and
Writing
It’s twenty years since I began writing my first book. I had the title for it, Nice Jumper, long before I’d fully worked out what the book was going to be. Like most of my books, it’s about the thing it’s about (golf) but also not
Writing
I’m writing a novel. My first. It was twenty years ago this month that I took a pen and a notebook up to a hillside in the south of England and decided I was going to write a novel and that doing so was more important to me than
Writing
PICKLE AND CLIVE When I ponder the question “Who is the best dog you have ever met?” there can only be one answer, and that is Clive. Clive was the best dog I have ever met and when I say this, I say it as a dog myself, so you
Writing
I was walking along the clifftop footpath last month and there were a few cows blocking my way, eleven or maybe thirteen at most. I gauged the situation - which experience has made me better at doing, where cows are concerned - and concluded they didn’t want any trouble,
Writing
The wind was up, but it wasn’t the kind of wind that sunk its teeth into you, or was liable to blow even a lightweight person off a precipice, just a wind with a very loud voice, so I went up to the high bit of the moor to
Writing
Have you ever had a dream where it turned out that a place which had seemed exotic and alien to your normal environment was actually not very far away, as you once thought, but extremely close, or geographically connected in some secret unexpected way to where you were? California, contrary
Writing
I have ploughed through a large number of audiobooks in the last half decade, but I’ve probably abandoned as many, sometimes because I haven’t got on with the book itself, but usually due to the narrator. A bad narrator can murder an audiobook in its sleep. Just occasionally,
Writing
Finding a house to rent is hard, especially when you're doing it from more than 300 miles away. You have to be very on the ball, extremely assertive, and make sacrifices, as, if it's any good, you can guarantee several other people will want to rent
Writing
Beheadings Not many people of my generation in our small region forget their first beheading, and I am in this respect an archetype of my place and era. I was on the way to the cornershop to pay an overdue newspaper bill at the time and, seeing the crowd of
Writing
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 either alive or awake at the time
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