Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Last year I set myself the goal of running under 20 minutes for 5km.  It thought it'd be a nice thing to aim for - and it was.  It really was.  But it's the setting of the goal that's 'nice'.  'Nice' describes the way you tell your friends and family that you've got this goal.  'Nice' describes a hope, a desire.  'Nice' describes the pre-action.  'Nice' describes the theory.  'Nice' fails to describes the way you have to put that desire to work.  It's too easy an adjective to take with you on the cold, wet winter runs.   My first 5km park run was on the 19th of January .  I ran 23:50 with my brother in Coventry.  My personal best in February came at the Gloucester North park run and I ran 23:34 - and that was on grass.  Then a great leap forward came at the end of March .  I ran 21:52 at Gloucester North again.  In April I ran 19 times - the most I've ever run in one month.  The training paid off...

It's 10:49pm and I'm led in bed with a hot water bottle stuffed down the front of my dressing gown.  It's cold and wet outside and I'm sick of the mud.  Storm Ciara made its way through Oxfordshire on Saturday night, tearing the guttering off the front of the cabin as it did so.  Thank you very much.  You're welcome.  I'm sending Storm Dennis over next week.   Delightful.  Tell him that the guttering around the back still requires removal.  And while he's at it, he might as well take the roof off.    The wind turned bitter when we saw the back of Ciara.  The sort of bitterness that gets into your bones and stays there.  There's nothing worse than rain and a bitter wind.  They're troublemakers together and they're troublemakers apart.  This is the time I yearn for signs of blossom amid long and unfriendly spells of gunmetal grey.  I dream of Spring doing the Haka against the quivering cold squelchy mess of Wi...

I was introduced to Slow Club near the end of 2014 while training as a stonemason at Bath College.  I liked them, but it wasn't love at first listen.  I remember watching  Gareth from The Office star in one of their music videos  and being as underwhelmed by it as he was by his ride on the Ferris wheel.  ‘Giving up on Love’ is early Slow Club and I sort of liked it, but at the time it sounded like a song I'd hear on an advert containing twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers as they got ready for a night out.  It was a song I'd enjoy while the advert lasted but one that I would fail to look up.  But I stuck with them because the friend who provided the introduction also liked Joanna Newsom - and us Newsom fans have to stick together. The song featured on ‘Yeah So’, Slow Club’s 2009 debut album, but a cutesy advert-friendly band they were not.   They weren’t about to let the end of the decade swallow them up.   They were in the proc...

An extremely handsome and well-dressed man is stood outside HMV in Gloucester.  It’s mid-December.  He looks and listens as the shoppers walk by.  The hum of Christmas. ‘I’m going into Superdrug to get some eyelashes, then I’ll meet you in Primark,’ one woman says to another as they pass.  He smiles.  He notices the accent more now.  It slides back onto the man’s tongue whenever he’s home.  He no longer lives in Gloucester, but is a stone’s throw from the Gloucestershire border.  He loves that border.  He’s proud that he didn’t need to go far to find his dream job.  The drive back into his home county is like sliding into a warm bath.  He refocuses, observes.  If you turned the scene upside down, ticked and unticked shopping lists would flutter down like snow.  Not just snow but Christmas snow.  Pillow-soft, whiter-than-white movie snow ...