Educating Peter

A bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but with crisps...

'The best (and funniest) book about that land of lost discontent between 12 and 20 that you'll read this century'

Tom Cox's writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Observer, Mail on Sunday, Jack magazine, The Times and the Guardian, for which paper he was Pop Critic between 1999 and 2000. He is the author of two books: Nice Jumper, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Sporting Club Best Newcomer Award, and Educating Peter. He was born in 1975 and lives with his wife in Norfolk.

Peter's mum and dad are worried. Over the last twelve months they've noticed ferocious changes taking place in their son. It's not just the mumbling and the cloud of melancholy that seems to hover permanently over his ever-more-militant mop of curly hair. It's not even the oversized trousers or the numerous metal chains that hang off them. The problem is that Peter, who is fourteen, wants to be a musician - a rock star preferably, but anything else that involves a guitar, gets him bags of money and free CDs, and gives him access to unlimited scantily clad groupies will suffice (as long as it's not classical). Uncoincidentally, ever since the advent of this new ambition, Peter's grades at school have plummeted from very good to somewhere below mediocre. What is to be done? 
In the spirit of intellectual enquiry, Peter and music-critic, Tom Cox, set off in a Ford Focus on a journey to the dark heart of Britain's musical heritage, to get the inside track on whether being a musician really is a sensible career choice for a teenager. They hunt the streets of Cambridge for former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett and have numerous encounters with folkies in tights. They explore the wilder shores of prog rock and get up close and personal in a lift with Brian Wilson. Tom gives a masterclass in second-hand-record-shop etiquette and finds that Peter is something of a child prodigy. Most of all, they drive around, talk about stuff and Peter eats crisps. 
 
Part coming-of-age story and part urban travelogue, this brilliantly funny book is a must for anyone who has ever been baffled by a teenage boy.

Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

'Possibly the funniest book about golf ever written' - Guardian

Cox may not have much to boast about in the field of sporting achievement, but he has what many of his rivals palpably lack: an inner landscape, an imagination. These are terrible handicaps for a golfer, but pretty darn useful in a writer... A very, very good book

I'm not a golf fan myself, but Cox is such an enthusiastic writer that he's made me see the sport in a new light

Tom Cox writes brilliantly about golf. He knows the game inside-out: its potent allure, its absurd comedy and its mind-bending frustrations. If they had a handicap-system for golf-writers Tom Cox would be scratch

One of the funniest books on golf ever written

Razor-sharp insight and buckets of humour - I can't recommend this book highly enough

Tom Cox's writing has appeared in the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Observer, Mail on Sunday, Guardian and Golf International magazine. He has written several books on animals and sport, and is the author of Nice Jumper, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Sporting Club Best Newcomer Award, Educating Peter and The Lost Tribes of Pop, a collection of his columns for the Observer Music Monthly magazine. He is founder of The Society of Secret Golfers. He was born in 1975 and lives with his wife in Norfolk.

As a teenager, Cox dreamed of sporting immortality. For four years he devoted himself to the game of golf. And then, one day, he walked away. But as he got older, those dreams kept coming back. Perhaps it was turning thirty, perhaps it was having his first hole in one, but he decided it was time to start again, to live the dream for real. 
 
So he switched off his computer, grabbed his checked trouser and headed for the golf course. To turn pro. The Open Championship was only five of the best rounds of his life away, and given a few warm-up tournaments, how hard could it be?

Tom Cox

'Hilarious...Lashings of insight, sarcasm and slapstick. Fore!'

'As Frank Sinatra would sing, Nice Jumper goes "Straight down the middle". How can a book about teenage boys, golf and Nottingham in the eighties be this good?"

As a teenager in Nottingham, Tom Cox was possessed. Despite the best endeavours of his frankly rather groovy parents, nascent fashion sense and regular exposure to credible music from an early age, he was inexorably drawn into the bizarre, esoteric world that is golf, with its male-bonding rituals and strange trousers. And thus a strange hybrid was born -- from 1988 to 1995, Tom was Midlands golf's answer to Iggy Pop. 
 
Assisted by his fellow junior members at the local club, he cut a swathe through the golfing establishment, putting dead animals in his fellow golfers' shoes, setting fire to the club professional's shop, bringing Colin Montgomerie close to tears and repeatedly wearing the wrong colour of socks. On the golf course he felt simultaneously at home and somehow alienated. But Tom also wanted to be (and became) the best, taking five years out of normal adolescent existence to live, breathe, walk and talk nothing but the sport he loved. 
 
Nice Jumper is the story of how Tom tried to fit in, failed, got down to a handicap of two, tried to fit in again, got suspended from the club, got corrupted by rock and roll, then attempted to corrupt golf itself. Original, poignant and highly entertaining, it's a book about one teenager's obsessive attempts to attain sporting nirvana - despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fashion.

Tom Cox

Praise for Nice Jumper

'Hilarious...Lashings of insight, sarcasm and slapstick. Fore!'

'As Frank Sinatra would sing, Nice Jumper goes "Straight down the middle". How can a book about teenage boys, golf and Nottingham in the eighties be this good?"

Books by Tom Cox

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