My Notebooks

Me reading the extracts below this morning in my garden:

• 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.
• After two successive bank holidays, there is much confusion amongst the bins in my road about when they are meant to be attended to. One bin is in a tree. Another bin is crying. Several bins have left to seek work overseas.
• I was on stage talking to a crowd of people in Sheffield, and I asked them if they had any questions. ‘Will you be honorary president of the South Yorkshire Weasel Sanctuary?’ asked a man. ‘Yes!’ I answered, without thinking. I took a sip of water from my bottle, which was on the table next to me, next to a couple of other bottles of the same brand of water. ‘Any more questions?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ said another man. ‘Will you reimburse me for the bottle of water you just stole from me?’
• Drunk people rarely make good romantic choices. The problem is where the drinking takes place. Bookshops, that’s where people should drink.
• I discovered coffee at twenty-six. Before that, I thought it was something totally different: the thick instant stuff I’d bring my dad when I was a kid at weekends, so he could smell it then let it go tepid next to him while he painted pictures of cold Derbyshire sheep and cows. Now, it’s my daytime work beer. It’s also probably a large part of the reason I work best between 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. That’s when I have to bottle the thoughts, before they’re gone, because immediately after that I might as well not bother. I doubt I’ve ever written more than about nine decent words between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. I can try to correct that with coffee, but it just doesn’t work in the same way it does in the morning. ‘He thought it was inspiration but it was just caffeine’ wouldn’t be the least fitting epitaph for me.
• I do enjoy being alive but it’s very expensive nowadays.
• My friends Michelle and Sara tried to buy a loaf of bread from the all-night petrol station in Wells, the smallest city in England. The man in the kiosk wouldn’t sell it to them because it wouldn’t fit through the gap under the window. The bread was sliced, so Sara suggested feeding it through the gap, piece by piece, which would absolutely have worked, but the man refused. “I’m sorry - I’m not authorised to do that,” he explained.
• The window cleaner arrived and I tried very hard to look like I was working. I don’t know why. The window cleaner isn’t my boss.
• Everyone was called John this month. It’s like that, some months. I had lunch with my friend John, who isn’t driving at present, after suffering a mysterious blackout and crashing his car into a wall in late summer. When he opened his eyes after the blackout, the front half of the car was dangling precariously over a twelve-foot precipice. ‘It was like the final scene in The Italian Job,’ he said. An elderly pedestrian, who had witnessed the crash, scuttled over and sat in the back seat, behind John and John’s wife Polly, to help even the weight out until the rescue team arrived. I sold some records to my friend John in Bristol and accompanied him to a screening of a documentary about drugs, which prompted me to read Aldous Huxley’s writing about drugs. My mum, visiting that week, told me about John, a family friend from Langley Mill in Derbyshire with a wrestling background, who recently witnessed a thug threatening a cafe owner in London with a knife, and calmly marched over and took the knife out of his hands. ‘I’ll tell you what knives are for: cutting bread,’ he told the thug, then sat down and resumed eating his chips.
• I want my autobiography to truly sum up my life so I’m going to call it: The Reason You Can’t Find Your Wallet is Because It’s in Your Hand.
• For a long time during his childhood, my dad believed that leopards didn’t have bones, because that’s what his dad told him. They were at the zoo at the time, in Blackpool, which was also the town where my dad’s Uncle Ken got his Alsatian, Bruce, who my dad often believed was intent on killing him. ‘NOBODY WALKED THEIR DOG BACK THEN. YOU JUST LET YOUR DOG OUT,’ my dad recalled. ‘THERE WAS DOG SHIT EVERYWHERE. JENNIFER WOODBURN SLIPPED ON BRUCE’S AND BROKE HER LEG.’ Ken went to Blackpool often, and stayed with a landlady, which to my dad sounded very exotic, and made him hope that he too, at some point in his life, would get to meet a landlady.
• I bought a slice of cake at a coffee shop, and a bag of posh coffee that I couldn’t logically afford – a coffee that is so far away from Starbucks coffee, Starbucks coffee might as well be pork, or a pen, compared to it. ‘Call it eight pounds, my dude,’ said the laid-back guy who runs the coffee shop. ‘Aw, thanks!’ I said, not really knowing exactly how much he’d knocked off the bill, but grateful for his generosity and that there are such kind, laid-back people running independent businesses. I looked again at the advertised prices of the cake and the posh coffee. They came to precisely eight pounds.
• I have returned from my parents’ house with around 3,000 homegrown courgettes, determined to use all of them. So far I have had courgette pasta, courgette soup, courgette stir-fry, and built a small city out of courgettes. The smallest room in my house is still dominated by courgettes. ‘You don’t need to see in there,’ I will say, in future, when giving friends a tour of my house. ‘That’s the Courgette Room.’
• Such a beautiful evening here in Devon. Perfectly still air. Light birdsong. Pipistrelle bats beginning to emerge for their night’s feeding. And in the wildflower meadow beyond, the inimitable call of young men on ketamine.
• In my experience, brainstorming never leads to the best book titles. The best book titles are handed to you by silent, invisible hands, from a magic nowhere place, without you doing any conscious thinking at all.
• 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.
• The dawn chorus is so sweet in April but by October it’s just six drunk rooks arguing in a dead tree.
• I know you’re supposed to do an excited coo over someone’s new baby but I just can’t. I am incapable of faking a coo over a new baby. Show me your new sheep or owl instead. Then I will offer a totally authentic coo.
• Yesterday a stranger outside a pub shouted, ‘Get back to Woodstock!’ at me. I told her that I’d been trying to for a long time but that sort of pressure doesn’t help.
• Coffee mugs are a mystery. You get a coffee mug thinking ‘this is the one’, then you end up loving a coffee mug you barely initially noticed.
• People say that moving house and divorce are the two most stressful experiences in life. This isn’t true. The most stressful experience in life is trying to change a duvet cover when you’ve just come back from the pub and you’re very tired.
• I went to the auction up the road. I was more confident than I’d been at auctions in the past but still a bit worried that by accidentally blinking at the auctioneer, I might end up buying a three-thousand-pound sofa or a kitsch 1970s painting I didn’t want. The auctioneer spoke very clearly, and worked the crowd. She was in the zone, and I sensed a warm-up routine, something that had happened moments before, behind a curtain. I failed to bid high enough on the chair I wanted. It went to a man with a cigarette in the furthest corner of his mouth. The room got clearer very quickly, various items being efficiently wheeled and carried out of the room by the auctioneer’s colleagues. People got tired, but she stayed alert, in the zone, mixing furniture jazz speak with stand-up comedy and a touch of inadvertent poetry. ‘Octagonal footstool for those with octagonal feet,’ she announced. ‘Disembodied hand. I’ve lost you.’
• One of many excellent aspects of bats is that they rarely go on social networking apps and rant and condemn other bats in a way that suggests they have no grasp of nuance and wish to remake the world entirely in their own image.
• I could live without almost all of the things that come with writing, but I couldn’t live without writing. If I was told I was never allowed to publish another word, I’d still have to write. Then, if you cut off my electricity, and stole all my paper and pens, I’d still find a way to carry on. I’d write short stories on a lettuce leaf with the sharpened tip of a carrot. I’d live in a cave and scratch stories on the wall by candlelight. I fear that if I didn’t write, my bones would decay and soon crumble to dust. A strong notion I often get these days is that I’d like to give up writing in order to focus more seriously on my writing.

You can find more of my notebook entries, including some much more recent ones, here, here and (if you like SHOUTING) here.