Tom Cox's Blog, page 6

Roscoe

“Whenever I was a child I wondered what if my name had changed into something more productive like Roscoe,” sing the band Midlake on their haunting, bucolic 2006 song ‘Roscoe’. When my then girlfriend and I were listening to the song in spring 2012 and decided to name our new kitten in honour of it, it seemed vaguely fitting for two reasons - early signs suggested the kitten, who had the

Two Days With My Dad

There had been quite a bit of speculation amongst my dad’s mates at swimming concerning when his black toenail would fall off. Looking at how precariously it was hanging there on their last swim before Christmas, his friends Pat and Malcolm suggested that today could be the big day. “What if it comes off in the water?” asked Pat. “That wouldn’t be be good.”



“NO, IT WOULDN’T,” replied my

Cold Blow And The Rainy Night

I was waiting for a call from the vet to find out if my cat had survived an operation to save her life so I took myself out of the house and onto Dartmoor. It was no sane weather to be on the moor, but it felt like the right thing to do. As I walked I plotted a route hastily on my increasingly soggy and dog-eared OS map: six and a half miles, rising steeply from the flat land, past the

Uncle Fuckykins And The Moor Of Doom

I was trying unsuccessfully to find some picture hooks so I thought I’d have a look in a drawer in my garage. I’d not been in there for several weeks and, by opening the door, I managed to disturb a sleeping cat. I’m not sure who was more surprised: me, or the sleeping cat. We both did a little jump and the cat escaped through a hole in the back wall. I hadn’t been aware that my garage had

A Few Less Distinguished Wizards

Olaf Ratbeard (927-974)

When Ratbeard arrived on the Suffolk coast from Denmark in the freezing Godless winter of 941, none of his compatriots sensed his dark otherworldly powers, but Olaf always felt a little different to the other men in his band of bloodthirsty Viking marauders. One sign was that after slaughtering Saxon families Ratbeard would always hang back and be more reluctant than

Walking Notes, 22.11.2015: Burrow Mump and Glastonbury Tor

For my first Somerset walk since moving to the West Country I chose the best day of skies all year.  There's a lot of big talk about the skies in the Fens but in 13 years of living in East Anglia I saw nothing like these. Here, in a compressed early winter afternoon, was not just one kind of great sky, but several, all doing their stuff, sometimes even competing for attention simultaneously.

A Short Nature Documentary I Made About On The UK South West Peninsula's Rarest Animals

Read more about The Sweary Cat.

Bright Eyes: A True Story For Bonfire Season About Rabbits, Death And Fire

Although lifelong bloodthirsty tyrants, my cats Ralph and Shipley will often go through long phases of not killing another living creature. Born into the same litter, yet roughly as different in appearance as a stunted lion would be from an angry monitor lizard, they are both now 14: an age when many country-dwelling cats lose interest in serial decapitation and begin to at least plan a

Bright Eyes: A True Story For Bonfire Season About Rabbits Death And Fire

Although lifelong bloodthirsty tyrants, my cats Ralph and Shipley will often go through long phases of not killing another living creature. Born into the same litter, yet roughly as different in appearance as a stunted lion would be from an angry monitor lizard, they are both now 14: an age when many country-dwelling cats lose interest in serial decapitation and begin to at least plan a

Local Squirrel Map And Notes: 31.10.2015

A violent storm raged here in the early hours of yesterday morning and my bedroom window, which I keep open at night in all but the absolute coldest weather, twanged off the catch, crashed against the wall and almost smashed. Outside, in a strange cold blue light, the trees moved like enthusiastic metalheads on the front row of a concert. I knew that it would not be a good morning to go