Notebook by Tom Cox

Not only has the plot been lost, but there never was one in the first place. Readers must accept this premise in order to fully appreciate Notebook by Tom Cox. If you find the following quotation as funny as I do, you are on Cox’s whimsical, rambling wavelength.

‘Overheard train chat between two hard-looking youths:

Youth One: ‘I got déjà vu, man. I saw this dog and felt like I’d seen it before.’

Youth Two: ‘That’s not déjà vu. You just saw a dog twice.’

The story behind Notebook starts with a minor crime: the theft of Tom Cox's rucksack from a Bristol pub in 2018. In that rucksack was a journal containing ten months worth of notes….This incident made Tom appreciate how much notebook-keeping means to him….Here, Tom has assembled his favourite stories, fragments, moments and ideas from those notebooks….The result is a book redolent of the real stuff of life, shot through with Cox’s trademark warmth and wit.

Notebook was created because Cox realised how much he values his jottings and wishes to share them. Longer pieces have titles like ‘The Trouble With Sheds’ and ‘Trout Without Emotion’, and shorter notes are loosely grouped under nominal headings. The author spends a lot of time wandering around rural areas of the UK, often accompanied by a girlfriend. I found the lack of continuity in this girlfriend’s name bewildering, until I remembered that Cox extracted the extracts from twelve years’ worth of notebooks, with a fine disregard for chronological order.

In his more philosophical moments, Cox writes perceptively about how challenging and confusing modern life can be. Also, in addition to its plethora of absurd humour, there are many gems of useful information in Notebook. For example, before reading Notebook I thought I knew Norwich well, but Cox writes about nooks and corners which I look forward to exploring.

It is endearing that some of the most entertaining sections of Notebook celebrate Cox’s correspondence with his parents. In particular, he gleefully records his father’s eccentricities, which are often relayed in text format and without any explanation. This is done with great affection. The two men seem to share the same sense of humour and take delight in teasing each other. I loved the description of Cox’s father’s reaction to seeing his own diving skills recorded on video.

I recommend Notebook for dipping into, when in search of distraction and a good laugh.

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Tom Cox has 75k followers on Twitter and 25k on Instagram for his Why My Cat Is Sad account. He is also the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Good, the Bad and the Furry. 21st-Century Yokel was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2018, and the titular story from Help the Witch won a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award.