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...

“I’m worried about the cows,” Mother said. Father looked up from his newspaper.    “ The cows? ”   “Yes, the fate of the cows.”   Father folded up his newspaper, removed his reading glasses and took a sweet out of his jacket pocket.   He unwrapped it slowly.   It was a Sherbet lemon.   It was bright yellow even in the half-dark.   “Indeed, the cows,” Father said.   “The fate of the cows.” He placed the sweet in his mouth and closed his eyes.   We knew not to disturb Father while he was sucking a sweet.   I continued spinning a brass button on the floor.   Mother was looking at the fire.   Her mind was in the cowshed.   In the silence I could hear a moving and a not-moving.   It was seven or eight minutes before Father finished his sweet, at which point he opened his eyes. “The cows will come with us.” “Thank the Lord,” Mother said. “And so too the house.” “The house?” “Yes,” said Father....

It was no secret that You-Know-Who was renting a cottage in the Cotswolds during the London leg of her UK stadium tour.  You know a couple who moved in those circles and it’s time to cash in a massive favour.  You send them a message and do the washing up.  A little birdy tells me she’s heading into Chipping Norton for coffee.  The café in the new cinema.  In between screenings so it’s quiet.        You think about the dream you had.   The one where you’re a cop in the New York City Police Department.   Word gets around that Elvis is in the café across the road.   You walk through the open plan office and a colleague shouts Say hi to The King for me.   You walk across the street and go in the café and see Elvis sitting at a table at the back.   You nod to Elvis and Elvis nods back.   Then someone hands you a microphone because when you entered the café, you turned into Barry White.   Although you’re...

I’ve called him Mr Pebble Pockets because if I don’t make a joke out of it I’ll cry.  It was about 10:30pm, I’d just got back to the boat from a late shift and I was waiting for my Deliveroo.  He was standing a little further down the towpath and staring at the water.  The night was clear and crisp and there was enough moonlight to see the shape of him: he was tall, late twenties and had a powerful sporty look to him.  He wasn’t crying, but he was shaking and he stood crooked.    Well, it doesn’t take a genius, does it?  I only came out to wait for a bloody curry.  Mother Florence bloody Teresa Nightingale springing into action, hungry and as tired as fuck and now having to stop this guy from jumping into the canal with an anchor for a coat.     I know now that the best thing to do was offer him a cigarette.   I don’t know why I didn’t.   I had the packet and the lighter in my hand. ‘Excuse me,’ I said.   ‘Ar...

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...

What happened to all the beers? Did you look in the fridge? Yes.   It’s empty.   It might be that we drank them all.   That’s disappointing.   We can’t go through the rest of this summer without any beers.   Whose turn is it to buy them? I’m certain it’s your turn.   I’ve never been more certain about anything in my life. Didn’t I buy you some for your birthday? Yeah, you did.   But then I bought some for your birthday a week later.   Are you sure? Absolutely sure.   *** It looks like we’re out of beer.   Again? Do you think we drink too much? Personally, I don’t think I drink enough.   Whose turn is it to buy the beers? Yours. Mine?   Again? Don’t you remember?   I bought a huge case at Christmas.   They had to deliver it on a pallet. I don’t remember that.   I remember it like it was yesterday.   I think you even said ‘thank you for the beers that arrived on the pallet...

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...