Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

It will happen like this.   Christmas will come as it does every year and it will play out exactly like or something like or nothing at all like it did the year before or the year before that.  Preparations, arrangements, lists will be made.  Who will drive who, who will go where, who will get what.  Bags and bags and bags of stuff will be bought and wrapped because we are all good consumers and if we're not then we should be thank you very much god save the queen etc.  Everyone will buy their dead turkeys in good time, big fat dead turkeys who had a good life I'm sure, look it's smiling, lovely healthy free range turkey had a good life probably did loads of cool turkey stuff gobble gobble gobble.  Friends and neighbours will be invited in, hey Mrs Jones come and have a look at my christmas turkey I've called him boris not becker but johnson ha ha isn't that funny naming the turkey after boris johnson oh god it's actually happening anyway they will bo...

The year is 1994.  I am eight years old and I watch as Dad removes a videotape from its red and white rental case.  “Right then, Sonny Jim,” he says, wagging the cassette at me for emphasis.  “The first swear word I hear and you’re up to bed."  We had rented 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' from Movie Mart, our local video shop, and I was triumphant of my place on the settee.  The film was a 15 certificate and I knew I was pushing my luck by at least seven years by being there.  As a fan of the action and war genre, Dad was surprisingly tolerant of my watching scenes of violence.  Even obscenity within these types of films was largely overlooked.  At the time, my three favourites were ‘Labyrinth’, 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and - thanks to Dad - 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day'.  So the rules were suspended for films containing guns, explosions and cybernetic organisms, but there was something about swear...

Neil was very avant-garde, and too bohemian to write a card, and as a fan of the unorthodox, he wrote au revoir! on a cereal box. So when some worried friends stopped by, it was The Honey Monster who said goodbye. He booked a flight, but didn't pack – just left with a camera and the clothes on his back. No one will hear from him for years and years – until a beautiful book of photographs appears.

I like music. I like music and lyrics. I like music and lyrics that make me go wow-wee! I like music and lyrics that make me go wow-wee and cor blimey! I like music and lyrics that make me go wow-wee and cor blimey and here are ten examples that do just that. 1.   Best Kept Secret - Laura Veirs I never fail to be touched by these lyrics.  You can tell in Veirs' voice that it's real and beautifully, beautifully true. December, I was lost in a darkness I couldn't shake,  Called you in California and you answered right away,  You answered right away,  You picked up right away.  2.  Boyfriend - Marika Hackman  A line that's perfectly delivered.  Sound and meaning in perfect synchronicity.   You came to me for entropy and I gave you all I had.  3.  K. - Cigarettes After Sex A modern-day love song.  I'm always drawn to narratives in music and I love listening to a song with a str...

I qualified as a stonemason last July and completed an incredibly enjoyable and memorable stonemasonry apprenticeship with The Prince's Foundation for Building Community  in which I made so many friends and worked on so many historic buildings.  During that time, I had a two-week letter carving placement with Bernard Johnson , a very talented and friendly letter carver based in Oxfordshire.  It was with him that I picked up the bug for letter carving and realised that I didn't want to do anything else.  He didn't have an apprentice opportunities at that time, but pointed me in the direction of Fergus Wessel, another letter carver in Oxfordshire.  I went to visit  Fergus at his Stonecutters workshop and after a week's trial, he was able to offer me a four-year apprenticeship.  I am both incredibly lucky to have been given the chance of being his new apprentice, not least because he himself was trained at the prestigious Ki...

A baffled Celine Dion eventually found great harmony in jukeboxes. Karaoke lets many naturally-oppressed people question reality .  Sing through ugly visions with extraordinarily youthful zeal!    

Possibilities  — to dot four i's in one word is possibly why.

As I said in my last post, YouTube is an amazing place to discover poetry.  I feel very privileged to live in an age in which these online resources exist.  Playing a poetry reading on YouTube will never replace going to a live reading, but it does allow you to watch both historic readings and readings in other countries.  Plus, it does allow you to skip any boring bits or move onto another reading completely.  I've watched many readings by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, whose popularity prior and subsequent to that post speaks for itself.  In one of many engaging talks uploaded to YouTube, he says that when he's flicking through a book of poetry, he always reads the short poems first, just so he can get a flavour of what the book is like as a whole.  It seems right to do this, because trying to getting into the zone in a bookshop is hard thing to do.  To my mind, poetry is an ascension, then a descension -  or is it the other way ...

Now that my stonemasonry apprenticeship is over, I have time to focus on the element of the craft I can see myself making a career out of.  The two weeks I spent at a letter carving workshop in Oxfordshire was the very first of my placements.  All the other placements were all excellent in their own way, but there was something about letter carving - something about the huge expanse of creative possibilities that exists within it - that pulls me into that world.    For one, there's the meditative aspect of letter carving.  Before any letters are carved in stone, the traditional letter carver will first set out the letters onto paper.  Two horizontal ruled lines will be drawn according to the height of the letters, then these letters are drawn by hand.  And by hand I mean freehand.  No stencils, no rulers - no other tools apart from a pencil.  Just the hand and the eye.  It takes a lot of practice to accurately copy something as...

In an interview Jack Underwood did with Maurice Riordan and The Poetry Society, he said that there were probably only about ten really good poems.   He went on to say that there are a hundred or a thousand good ones, but the really good ones are hard to find. I admit that I have much more confidence in recognising a great song than I do in recognising a great poem, but that’s only because my musical journey has been much longer and more immersive than my relatively short poetry journey.   I’ve listened to thousands of good songs and thousands of bad songs over the years and in doing so, the difference between good and bad becomes plain as day, and the difference between good and great becomes just as obvious.   Similarly, in recognising the difference between good and bad poetry, the reader becomes more confident not just in his or her taste, but also in not having to justify that taste. A good ear for poetry leads to a state of what can only be described as a blis...