Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Dad went on a rant last night while we were watching the rain. ‘You know what I’d like someone to invent.’ I smiled.   ‘Go on.’   ‘A live counter that shows you the exact number of clothes hanging on washing lines in every county in England.   When it spots with rain, I’d watch the counter going down slowly as clothes are slowly unpegged and returned indoors.   When it pitter-patters, I’d watch the counter go down a little faster.   I’d compare drizzle to a light shower in the rate at which the counter goes down.   Everyone knows that drizzle is the real wet stuff and is likely to get you soaked rather than just really wet, because to my mind ‘drizzle’ and ‘a light shower’ are two completely different states of rain and therefore two completely different states of wetness.   Don’t tell me it’s impossible to invent because I won’t have it.   If we can put a man on the moon, we can easily invent something that counts the number of clothes hanging on washing lines.   It can be done.

Training to be a stonemason offers several lessons in disappointment.  I’ve kept telling myself that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially at this early stage.  There’s no way around it.  Mistakes must be made – it’s part of the process.  If it were easy, everyone would be chipping away at their perfect bit of stone and building lovely houses for themselves.  A stone mason’s skill is a slow learn.  But like all slow learns, the pay off will be all the sweeter for it. “Don’t you get bored just chipping away at one bit of stone?” my dad asked a few weeks ago. “No,” I replied.  The confidence in the immediate aftermath of my answer seemed to reverberate back through me.  I wonder whether dad caught a sense of that. It occurred to me in that instance that this is exactly what I wanted to do. I make it sound as if stone masonry has been some sort of divine calling.  The thought didn’t strike me like some thunderbolt.  I don’t want to make a Hollywood script out of it.  This so-call