Tom Cox

21st-Century Yokel explores the way we can be tied inescapably to landscape, whether we like it or not, often through our family and our past. It's not quite a nature book, not quite a humour book, not quite a family memoir, not quite folklore, not quite social history, not quite a collection of essays, but a bit of all six. It contains owls, badgers, ponies, beavers, otters, bats, bees, scarecrows, dogs, ghosts, Tom's loud and excitable dad and, yes, even a few cats. It's full of Devon's local folklore - the ancient kind, and the everyday kind - and provincial places and small things. But what emerges from this focus on the small are themes that are broader and bigger and more definitive. The book's language is colloquial and easy and its eleven chapters are discursive and wide-ranging, rambling even. The feel of the book has a lot in common with the country walks Tom Cox was on when he composed much of it: it's bewitched by fresh air, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless, sometimes foolish, and prone to a few detours... but it always reaches its intended destination. The book is illustrated with Tom's own landscape photographs and linocuts by his mother.

21st Century Yokel

Laura Dobie

He had ideas above his station, which again was very unlike Ted, who if he had developed an idea above his station would no doubt have asked around to see if anyone more middle class than him would like to use it.

A recurring line of my dad's is that his dad was dozy and happy-go-lucky and his mum was intelligent and neurotic, and he drew the short straw by ending up dozy and neurotic. I’M GLAD YOU GOT YOUR MUM's PERSONALITY, NOT MINE,' he has told me. He's being unfair to himself here and not wholly accurate, but I can see another combination of Ted and Joyce in him: a thundering lust for life combined with the ability to create obstacles out of nothing in a future that doesn’t exist, an exhausting ego combined with a generosity that on occasions has run to the self-damaging, a negative outlook underpinned by an essential softness and good nature. No human is just one thing.

21st Century Yokel quotes

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