Day 1 and an Ode to Departed Friends

And so it begins. The live build. There were 27 of us during the summer school and that has now reduced to 11. I loved every single one of my summer school friends, and I actually found myself becoming closer to them in the three weeks that we were together than I did during my three years of stonemasonry training at Bath College. Leaving the office and retraining as a stonemason was a great decision on my part, even if I do say so myself, but the summer school was something else. It was a series of magnificent flashes of colour, setting itself aside from every other experience I’ve had up to this point. It was so unique and went by in such a blur that I was afraid that it might have been part of some elaborate hoax, a drug-induced coma or worse: a dream. When Christian and I got back to Dumfries House on Saturday evening after two weeks off, we were glad to find that everything we had remembered was still here. Gradually, as our newest friends began to arrive over the course of the weekend, the dream steadily restored itself to reality. These people were real, and it was also a relief to find that they shared a similar fondness for those who have now returned to their normal lives. The people I’d written about had not been imagined. They were were real and so the strength I gained from getting to know them was real. Future posts will be more focused on the live build, but this post is an ode to them.

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Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

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