Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

I think it’s safe to say that I’m not as excited by this year’s Oscars as I have been in previous years.  I can’t help deriving a certain apathy from the short list   I haven’t had this feeling since The Hurt Locker won Best Film in 2010 (it denied Avatar its Oscar, so perhaps it was the lesser of two evils). My two main gripes: all the Best Supporting Actor nominees have all won before, and the presence of Silver Linings Playbook, a film of such abundant mediocrity that I felt guilty for convincing my brother to watch it with me over Seven Psychopaths. Do I care that Ben Affleck was snubbed his Best Director nod?  Do I care that the Best Actress Nominees contain the youngest and oldest actresses ever nominated?  Do I care that Daniel Day-Lewis could make history and win his third Best Actor Oscar?  The answer to the last one is ‘probably a little bit’, but the others?  Well, not so much.  To be honest, I'm most intere...

Do it and I will see to it that your species  gets it. 

Distracted, I open a new tab, go to Google, type in your name,  click Search just to see it there as a title  at the top, and go back  to whatever it was I was doing.  

Hungry Person: I could eat a horse. Findus: Really? Hungry Person:  Oh yeah.  100%. Findus: Okay.

Following on from a poem I wrote recently entitled The Gift of Shower Gel - Christmas Eve 1997  in which I explore what my eleven year old self considered as successful and, er, less successful presents, I'd like to expand further on its last line:        "would kiss two cheeks twice for a calculator watch." Of course, by 1997 my wrist already sported a calculator watch, as was the fashion of the day.  But there was an upgrade.  Always an upgrade.  I prayed that Santa knew his Casio from his Seiko and had what Bill Bailey calls "The Laminated Book of Dreams" in his reference library, otherwise known as the Argos catalogue.         During the first or second year of Secondary School, my beloved Casio Calculator Watch went missing.  When I say went missing, I mean a substitute P.E Teacher stole it.  It went into his sports bag before a lesson one day and - like the teacher - was never seen again.   ...