Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Edward O’Shanahan did what he always did before he went to sleep: he held a slice of extra mature cheddar cheese between his lips and he meditated.   Sometimes he would spend ten minutes listening to sad country music on his headphones, having discovered relatively recently that the right sad country song can set a real fire beneath a dream.   But today was Sunday and he resolved never to listen to any sad songs on a Sunday.    Isla O’Shanahan was sitting at the kitchen table.   She’d always worked later than her husband and he was an early riser.   They’d been friends and work colleagues for four years before he kissed her for the first time, and the first time it was just below her right ear.   The chemistry had been there from the start, but the romance was given voice in a small private nook of an old pub at a works Christmas party.   He’d never met anyone who’d looked at him as calmly as she did.   She had eyes that darted in joyful wa...

  And then you smiled and my heart leapt so high I thought it would come out of a nostril.   If you can make me laugh within the next ten seconds , you said, sitting cross-legged on the picnic blanket, I’ll kiss you .   Under normal circumstances, I would have dozens of one-liners ready to go, but the way you looked at me made my mind go blank and something in me regressed to a billion year-old fish state and I starting making bubble noises.   You know, the kind you make in front of a fish tank and want to get some dialogue going.   I needed something else, a more silly-surrealistic one-two because two funny things done together is much funnier than the sum of two funny things done separately.   So I did a roly-poly off the picnic blanket and down the hill, but the hill was rather hillier than expected.   On this mild, autumnal day, the roly-poly snowballed.   I was a tumbling seasonal anachronism.   Gravity became persuasive: one roly-poly t...

Samsa was now a human.  He’d recently become a human after his architect decided to put a human heart in him and give him feelings.  The five litres of blood that now pumped around his body warmed him up.  It made for incredible nose bleeds, spasms, cramps and bruising, to name o nly a small fraction of the symptoms, but his architect assured him that it would all be worth it and that he'd feel normal very soon.  He didn't know what normal was, but he knew it wasn't puking and shitting and bleeding all over the place for the first two months and then just feeling terrible for several weeks after that.  Human life is agony, he thought, but he trusted the process.  One day, a little over twelve weeks after the operation, he woke up from his first good night's sleep and was able to open the curtains without the light splitting his skull in two.  Samsa had known Shabeezi before she became a human woman.   All they had done was fight.   Samsa es...

  I’m torn between saying ‘Hell, I’m not getting anything done’ and ‘Today has started slowly.’  But I did run four miles this morning and driven into Chipping Norton so it's not all that bad.  And and and: I did read another excellent P.G. Wodehouse story called Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo and it was just as dazzling as The Spot of Art.  This one’s about a ‘very young and extremely pale’ curate called Augustine, and to add to that description, a rather sickly and meek curate at that.  His superior, the Reverend Stanley Brandon, is a tempestuous former boxer and a big personality. Augustine happens to be in love with his daughter and the feeling’s mutual.  That’s the set up and the story doesn’t let the reader down.  The Bishop, whom the Reverend has known since school, is due to visit to give his former classmate a dressing down over the excessive embroidery on his cloak.  Stanley Brandon is gearing up for a terrific argument with his superior.  ...

 I've almost finished FUNNY HA HA.  I'm at W for Wodehouse.  I read one of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books years ago and it didn't make a huge impression on me.  I can't even remember which one it was.  Sometimes comedy classics misfire when it's not quite your humour and I thought it would be the case for this one.  I thought I'd plough through it anyway.  Page 568: The Spot of Art.  It really is a masterpiece.  I was so, so impressed with it.  It's simple, it's exceptionally well-paced.  Some of the best stories just feel right and I eased into this one like I was sliding into a warm bath.  And the dialogue.  My Lord, the dialogue really zings.  I didn't want it to end and I'm a restless reader at the best of times.   Here's an extract to give you an idea of the quality.   A bit of backstory: Wooster has set his sights on Miss Pendlebury, an artist who has just painted his portrait. ...

Francesca Finch opened a tin of clear wood varnish with the end of an old spoon. She looked over to her daughter. She was lying on her front on the living room carpet looking through old photograph albums. Francesca expected questions but didn't receive any. She'd returned to work two days after her Dad had died. The news had got to her boss and she sent her home with three weeks of compassionate leave on full pay. 'Take more if you need to,' her boss had said. 'You've more than earnt it.' Bunny sat up and watched her Mum varnishing a stick back chair in the middle of the kitchen. She had her curly blonde hair in a ponytail and had changed into what she called her hobbyshop dungarees. She was always pulling things out of skips. The bike Bunny rode came from a skip, the desk in her bedroom came from a skip. 'I'm not having four perfectly good chairs go to the tip,' her Mum said. 'It's elm wood. Made before a disease killed most ...

I met your folks at a church in St Albans.  Moon warned me they'd be quirky.   'Quirky how?' I asked.   'They're theatre people,' he replied.  He winked, gave me the church address and his business card and sent me on my way.   I'd loaded the van the day before.  Headstone, concrete shoe, sack truck, wheelbarrow, fixing kit.  Double-checked for things that are easy to forget.  Everything secured.  Okay, good to go. Your Granddad's grave was near the east end of the church.  It was marked with a little plaque and I set the wheelbarrow down next to it and began unloading the spades.   There was chatter and the squeaking of chairs and the blowing of instruments from inside the church.  Then all of a sudden, after a brief silence, the interior erupted with music.  A brass band flew into a rendition of Abba's Take a Chance on Me.  The bottom of the stained glass window was about a foot higher than eye level so I ...

My boss provided the introduction. He asked me whether I'd read any of Saki's short stories after he’d read a very short story of mine about a talking ostrich called Belinda who lays garlic dips.  It was one of those crazy little dream-stories I've always really liked writing.  I wrote it with craziness and surrealism in mind.  I wanted to be a bit weird for weird’s sake.  Weird doesn’t take itself too seriously and this leads to a sense of freedom.  This gives them a bit more snap, crackle and pop than if I was writing something a bit more serious.   What I’ve learnt over the course of this year is that people like weird.  Or at least the sort of people I like like weird.  When I'd showed my boss that story, I was worried that he’d be a little bamboozled by it.  But regular readers don’t get bamboozled easily and my boss is a regular reader.  What actually happened was that he found it quite normal – normal within the construction...

It was that first scream that came to pierce the water, snapping away the beauty of his crime.  A second later, wading legs jostled fruitlessly in twos, shouts mere muffles from beneath.  The figure, anchored still, had been looking up from his lagoon bed, his body relaxed as the pump and valves worked so delicately to a stop, his breathing set to a bubbling whisper.  He shared a polite word with the bright blue above: a promise, perhaps.                                                                                           ...