Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Having a friend who's a Romanian filmmaker has its perks.  For one thing, I can get her own perspective and opinion on the Romanian New Wave, which brought films such as 'The Death of Mr Lazarescu', '12:08 East of Bucharest' and 'If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle' to a worldwide audience.  Since then, we have seen this veritable wave move onto Iran and Greece with films such as the highly-acclaimed and Oscar-winning 'A Separation' and the twisted world of 'Dogtooth' riding the crest of their respective waves. '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' is arguably the best of Romanian wave riders, winning the prestigious Palm D'Or at Cannes in 2007.  Cat tells me its representation of Romania is a little off and the dialogue is a little clunky in its original form, but she also acknowledged the need for films seeking international recognition to economise with the reality of a Romania in the final years of communist dictatorship. I ...

I began writing regularly during my second year of Sixth Form.  By today's standards, 17¾ is quite a late age to start.  With a blossoming blog culture, anyone who has an interest nowadays invariably writes about it.  I know friends from my year at school who had kept online diaries right from their early teens, but these tended to be girls who started with Dear Diary, wrote in the sort of garish pink you had to highlight in order to read and who had no designs on a wide readership.  And while some of us had just discovered Bebo, which had been the early triangle ding of the social networking boom of Facebook and Twitter that would soon follow, we didn't know the capabilities of the Internet as we do now.  Back then, it was enough to be popular within your small clique.  But suddenly, popularity wasn't enough; people wanted to be famous.   Going back a bit further, I guess it was MSN Messenger that first got me into writing.  Everyone st...