Tom Cox's Blog, page 9

Oh Whistle And I'll Still Be In The Other Room, M'Lad: Living With A Deaf Cat

We often tell ourselves being a cat would make for a lovely life, what with the naps and the diminished financial responsibility, but in fact the world of a cat is a cold, brutal one. I sneezed in a record shop yesterday and a stranger a few feet from me said “Bless you!” and I said “Thanks” and she said “That’s ok.” It was really nice and could easily have gone on for much longer, if both

Some Notes On Hay Bales

It's August, summer's answer to Sunday, and several dozen hay bales have appeared in the meadow near my house. For weeks this meadow has been a haven for crickets and fritillary butterflies. Overnight, the long grass has gone, and so have they, and there's a sense of something good edging away, like tablecloth hosting a lovely meal being gradually pulled by an invisible hand when you've

Thistles And Other Stuff I've Eaten Recently

A few years ago, when I first decided to go vegetarian, the consensus seemed to be that what I'd miss, above anything else, was bacon. "Ooh, you're going to struggle, especially on hungover mornings, if you smell someone else cooking it - it's unbearable," people warned me, but this has turned out to be untrue. I've never craved bacon as a vegetarian. What I craved at first as a vegetarian was

A Weasel I Briefly Met

It's been several years since I've been abroad. I could put this down to a couple of very obvious reasons - a certain reluctance to plan that can become ingrained after many years of stubbornly self-employed life, my fear of flying, following lightning striking a plane I was on several years ago - but I'd perhaps be ignoring a more significant one, which is that I don't really yearn to be

The Dozy Gene

My late paternal granddad Ted was an almost constantly grinning man with a moustache, glasses, and a scar running across the entirely bald dome of his head. Right from when I was very small, I’d known that he’d been injured in World War II, but it wasn't until later that I asked about the scar’s exact origin. “NO," my very loud dad told me. “HE DIDN’T GET IT WHILE FIGHTING. ACTUALLY, HE

My Week In Badgers

Sound travels in a curious way on the hillside where I live here in Devon. The sudden dips and rises in the land and the dense canopies of the area’s countless trees can create deceptive pockets of noise. What you think is, say, your girlfriend or your cat talking to you might not even be something vaguely similar to your girlfriend or your cat, and might not be talking to you at all. My first

My latest radio show

Message From The Country: Show 8 (12.6.2015) by Tomcox on Mixcloud

One of the fish in my parents' garden pond has died. My dad doesn't seem to be taking it too well.

Read more about my dad.

A Truly Utopian Radio Station

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might be aware I've been hosting a fortnightly radio show recently. It's called Message From The Country and features music of a rural nature (acid folk, country funk, magical boondocks classic rock, agri-psych, mystic Americana), me rambling on about stuff like hares, folklore and walking up tors, a little bit of dead air due to my habit of fading up the

A Few Thoughts About Writing (And Quitting) A Newspaper Column in 2015

I quit my monthly Guardian column yesterday. I thought I should explain a bit here about why, in case anyone who reads the column regularly is wondering where it’s got to. The column, which was called The 21st Century Yokel, covered nature, country customs, folklore, landscape, family and my small adventures in rural Norfolk and Devon and the North East Midlands, and had been a fixture of the