Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Before the snow came the smell of cinnamon. I wanted to track it all the way back to its source, to see who gave it flight. I imagine a woman, seventy-five, making herself a cappuccino next to an open window. The air is cold and sharp but she needs a quick blast of late autumn’s best before she gets out with the whippet. Wisp is looking at her from her basket, scanning for indications from mum that her walk is coming. Don’t worry, Wisp: walkies is imminent - but then a song comes on the radio that she hasn’t heard in fifty years. The Serge Gainsbourg ballad throws her into a deep dream-state, a reverie that takes her all the way back to Paris. She walks to the cupboard to find the cinnamon shaker, brushing shoulders with actors and actresses who’d worked with Godard and Truffaut and Antonioni. She remembers the time she once saw Jane Birkin at a party and witnessed first-hand the effect her beauty had on all the men in the room. I was two miles away from home, running at an easy, stead...

It was a few weeks into autumn and I hadn’t had a hair cut since before the summer solstice.  My beard, long and straggly and in desperate need of trimming, was a week away from having birds nest in it.  I unpolished my boots and wore some old jeans that were ripped at the knees and dirty from digging a deep hole on a particularly wet day in Highgate Cemetery.  Hanging loosely over the top of those was a baggy grey jumper I spilt half a bottle of bleach over about three years ago.  I looked a bit of a state, but there was a method to my madness.  Today was the day I was going to ask Moon for a pay rise and I wanted to look as if I’d been trod on. On the morning I was due to ask him, my bike got a puncture not twenty yards down the road from my house. It wasn’t a polite slow puncture so that I might finish my journey on a squidgy but rideable front tyre; the thorn tore through that poor inner tube like a javelin through jelly and it had me riding on a stee...

It was six o’clock on Friday evening, which meant the village library was open.  I was in the early stages of designing a coat of arms and I had The Complete Book of Heraldry to collect.  It took two or three minutes to cycle there from the workshop. ‘We’ve just had a Lego day,’ the librarian said. ‘It was absolute bloomin’ chaos.’ The librarian’s name was Anna.   She was in her late thirties, had kind eyes and she wore the sort of clothes I’d wear if I was a woman.   Today she was wearing a pair of green corduroy dungarees and orange boots and a colourful beaded necklace made with brown twine.   She had a hint of a Welsh accent that always made me feel closer to home.   ‘I need ideas for Moon’s obituary,’ I said. ‘No!   Moon died?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is he sick?’ ‘He seems perfectly fine to me.   I’m just thinking ahead.   I want to make sure I get it right and get his approval in case he does, you know, croak it.’ ‘How old is he?’ ‘Fort...

The main job of the day was a double fix in Fareham.   We went via central Oxford as Moon had a meeting about a big gargoyle project at New College.   We parked up on Mansfield Road.   The parking was £5.70 per hour.   Moon looked at the ticket machine, raised his eyebrows, puffed out his cheeks and said he’d try to get the meeting wrapped up in fifty-five minutes.   He disappeared into one of the buildings and I walked into town.   I’d heard lots of good things about J.L Carr’s A Month in the Country so my mini mission that morning was to go and buy a copy before Moon had finished his meeting.   The book is set in 1920, in the fictional northern village of Oxgodby.   It’s about a young man, still suffering from the aftereffects of serving in the First World War, who’s been given the job of restoring a huge medieval wall-painting in the village church.   I had to buy it - it sounded right up my street. It was about 9:40 when I got to Blackwel...

I cannot - for reasons that will soon become clear - tell you exactly where we were working.   What I can say is that it was an Arts & Crafts church somewhere in the south of England.  Given the number of non-Arts & Crafts churches across the country, this detail narrows it down tremendously.  I will also say that it’s one of the finest examples of a church built in response to that movement that exists today.  I would like to say I shed a small tear of joy when I first saw it, but I didn’t.  I probably said to Moon ‘Blimey O’Reilly, that’s a bit nice, ennit?’, or words to that effect as we walked through the lychgate. I also wouldn’t like to tell you the poem we were carving in the churchyard for fear of narrowing down the possible churches even further.   Suffice it to say, it was a lovely poem, and more than worthy of being carved beside one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen in my life.   The poem and the experience of carv...

Moon had just started work on some lettering at St Stephen’s, a private school in South London.   The school’s reception building had recently been completed and Moon had been commissioned to carve the school name into the front of it.   The scaffold platform was about five feet from the ground so it didn’t take us long after we arrived to get everything Moon needed up on that level in order for him to begin work.   A few minutes after he started, a small, red-trousered man in a check shirt skipped past and threw a hand towards Moon. ‘Don’t jump!  Your wife just called and said she loves you!’ We both laughed as honestly as we could.   Me on the ground, Moon five feet up.   The man’s enthusiasm made it mildly amusing.   We would soon start calling him Mr Red Trousers for reasons that should be obvious.      To the credit of Mr Red Trousers, the comment was slightly more original than the churchyard jokester’s perennial favourite ‘you’v...

I think you should start with a countdown.  Why?  Everyone loves a countdown. There’s a promise in a countdown. Maybe you know what’s expected to happen, maybe you don’t. But nobody knows for sure what’s actually going to happen. The expectation is only part of what makes a countdown so much fun. You become a part of something when you join a group of people in a countdown. It’s a social event of collective anticipation. It’s a singalong of decreasing numbers. An increase in excitement as the numbers decrease. Whatever you are counting down, something is going to happen when it gets to zero, even if nothing happens. Even nothing happening counts as something happening when you had expected something to happen. It is a wonderland of what-ifs that gets answered at zero - exactly the moment you want it to be answered. What if it doesn’t happen? What’s going to happen then? What if someone important needs the toilet? If a Big Red Button has to be pushed, who’s going...

  After an unbelievably enjoyable weekend of reservoir swimming, of parkrunning, of central Edinburgh drink-fuelled tourism, of dog, walking, fish and chip-eating, film-watching and gin drinking, we found ourselves waking up to a new week. Me and my cousin Paul joined my brother James in his morning commute to work. We had a coffee near Edinburgh College of Art until James left for work. Paul left at around ten to board a bus for the airport where he was Stansted-bound.   I spent the morning reading and writing in the College of Art’s cafe, observing the artistic youth of the day. I read an extraordinary short story by A.L. Kennedy called AM SONTAG. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve read before. It really gets into the head of a mentally-ill/psychiatric patient in an open ward. Or at least that’s what I think it’s about. After a quick lunch with James, I caught a bus to the hotel. Having checked in, I had an incredible run around Murrayfield Stadium and down the Water of Leith, ...

I read Kevin Maher's review of Celine Song's Past Lives in The Times at the departure gate at Birmingham Airport.  I was about to fly to Edinburgh to visit my brother and I thought I'd treat myself to a good old-fashioned newspaper.  The review did what I attempted to do yesterday.  It began brilliantly:  Sometimes in cinema a director emerges with a first film and just, well, nails it.   Yes they do.  Like Sofia.   After noting that theatre-turned-film directors often have a lot of success with their debut feature (Sam Mendes for American Beauty, David Mamet for House of Games and Orson Welles for Citizen Kane), he goes on to write brief synopsis of the film and draws a comparison with Brooklyn, a 2015 film starring Saoirse Ronan.  It's a very valid comparison: while the origin country and the time period is different, the two themes are remarkably similar.  I saw Brooklyn for the first time only three or four weeks ago and I'm ama...

Sofia Coppola loves Past Lives.   That’s really all I needed to know.   I was thoroughly on board with the premise of Past Lives anyway, but the Coppola seal of approval elevates it to an absolute essential watch.   It’s probably got strong Lost in Translation vibes, and the parallels don’t stop there.   Past Lives is director Celine Song’s debut feature, as was Lost in Translation for Coppola in 2003.   I’ve been thinking a little bit about Lost in Translation recently because it was the topic of discussion on this week’s episode of the The Rewatchables podcast.   I listened to it straight away.   I didn’t see it at the cinema when it was released but I bought it on DVD and I fell for it hard.   I was obsessed with this film in my late teens and early twenties.   Maybe I outgrew it or overwatched it, but I haven’t watched it in ten or twelve years.   Now that its twentieth anniversary has rolled around, maybe the studio will release a...

I saw Greta Gerwig's Barbie on the last Saturday of July.   I went with some friends whose nine year-old girl went wearing a pink dress.   I looked like the single uncle they invited out of pity.   I liked the film, but I wasn’t gushing with praise when I came out.   I gave it a six out of ten.   Maybe a seven at a stretch.   But what I did love was what it’ll do for Greta Gerwig and female film directors as a whole.   It’s a certified billion dollar movie.   The film has grossed $1.3 billion so far, and it’s still doing good business.    The film that is now inextricably linked with it is Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan film about the creation of the atomic bomb.   The publicity that the “Barbenheimer” pairing created was extraordinary.   I don’t know whether the studios pedalled the idea from the outset or whether it was simply a fan-made viral sensation.   Either way, it worked.   Who could have predicted that t...

Another trip to Chipping Norton.   I went in a bit later today because I wanted to do a bit of cleaning around the cabin.   Also, I had to wash out the wheelie bin because it was crawling with maggots.   On Monday I foolishly used it to dispose of a dead rabbit whose entire top half had been eaten by either man, wild beast or spritely but ferocious lickle miniature dachshund we call Juno.   Juno, bad dachshund!   We’re mad-not-mad.   Here, have a treat!  Oh, you're full up?  I wonder why!    Poor rabbit.  It'll be teased to high heaven by all his dead rabbit friends if it turns out that Fluffy was ripped to shreds by a dog some ladies carry around in their handbags.   I picked it up by the foot – a rabbit’s foot is meant to be lucky.   I’ve never really thought about it, but it’s only lucky for the human in possession of it.   Like a blood diamond, a rabbit either died or forever hobbled in the making of this lucky ...