Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Repeat after me. "Repea – " Not yet, stupid.   Repeat after me: I solemnly swear.  "I solemnly mother f***ing swear." - "I solemnly swear." That from this day forwards. " That from this day forwards." I will watch every Quentin Tarantino film at the cinema. "Excluding Deathproof." What?  "Excluding Death Proof.  I thought it'd be rubbish.  And I didn't want to watch the other one .   Okay.  Repeat after me: I will watch every Quentin Tarantino film apart from Death Proof at the cinema as long as I shall live.  "| do." Repeat.  "I will watch every Quentin Tarantino film apart from Death Proof - because I thought it was going to be a bit rubbish and I read in a review that Planet Terror was shit - as long as I shall live."  Till Death Proof and Planet Terror do part.  "Till Death Proof and Planet Terror do part."  You may now kill the bride. "Thank yo...

As a kid, I knew all-too well its weight, its shape, my welling disappointment.  It's ushered into my hands by aunt; uncle typically backgrounded, nodding with false involvement. It’s a football!  someone shouts, No! It’s an upright piano. I play along, guessing Ladder , feel my blood vessels pinching at the sides of my mouth.  All is not lost.  I shake it - it could still be a G-con 45.  If I squint hard enough, I can imagine the utopia of Destruction Derby 2. I begin to open the lifeless, unholy trinity of Shower Gel, Body Spray, Post Shave Balm.  Give me anything .  Give me the anonymous metal hexagon of Quality Streets, or ironic socks, or last year’s Now 35 - would kiss two cheeks twice for a calculator watch.

In the car it crept up on                             me smarted  like the pang of mortality.   Did Granddad leave                 a note?     I wanted to ask. But I could taste the pause bitter  rolled it around on my tongue                                waited as long as that ferry                                crossing                                    at 15 from the Hook of Holland  to Harwich.

Yesterday I needed a bike in order to ride around my nan's house.  The parents had "bought" nan a new mattress, which is to say that they'd bought themselves a new mattress and were "kindly" giving her their old one.   I needed to go around nan's to be there when "it was delivered", which, again, was shorthand for the only person we knew with a white van, namely our uncle, who would take the role as the delivery driver.  So I needed to get around her house, which is under a quarter of a mile away.  Not a problem, but I needed transportation.  Dad brought out a little girl's bike.  It looked like a 1:4 scale model of my normal bike, which was at my house.  It was the sort of bike that pink handlebar tassels were made for.  All I can say is: I'm glad it was dark.    I have been on this earth for 26 years and it was only yesterday that I discovered the term "Shanks' Pony".   "You can either ride that bike,...

We left the theatre in high spirits,  passed the bars that hold the town in surrender of its daytime elegance. We were guided around the reds of a crime scene - pocked, curtsy-fresh. I pull my scarf tight around me, fix  my coat, turn to my uncle and say, 'Britain is awash with contradictions,' our eyes immunised to the drunken  hoards as we pass. We tell each other what we know of his trial.  'Much simpler,' I said, 'if it had been Queensberry Rules.' We moved through the revellers in silent contempt, nod past the police officer, turned left onto the High Street at the beggar on the corner.   

Sports Personality of the Year. The short list is chock-full of future Sirs and Dames. For the winner of this prestigious award, it will round off an exceptional year of sporting achievement amid an unprecedented number of British success stories. I think I know the surname of the athlete who will win. As humble and as self-deprecating as I am, the odds speak for themselves: the bookies are now calling it evens. So who will win? Bradley Wiggins, who won Le Tour de France and won an Olympic Gold in one year, or Tom Wiggins, who, earlier today, managed to run the two miles back to his parents' house in under twenty minutes without stopping. Wiggins and team mate Mark Cavendish, himself a recipient of the SPotY award in 2011.   Wiggins after his time trial at the London Olympics.  None of his opponents could dethrone him. Me, Tom Wiggins, having been crowned overall winner of  Hillview Primary  School Sports Day in 1997.  

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 was almost sick when I saw the Christmas decorations down my parents' local.  Beginning of November it was.  Straight after Halloween.  It was a straight swap: goblin for Santa.  I'm not one of those - you know - those who drone on about things just to fill a silence.  I try to remain open-minded about modern Britain and its hankering for Christmas in early Autumn.  I don't even mind the commercialisation of it all.  If you want to blow your savings on crap, you might as well do it with good intentions.  It all funds the economy.  But it's the by product of a Christmas mindset in November that gets me.  People who wish you Merry Christmas before Advent are as dead to me as the people who take the tabloid's view as the gospel.  Like it was some sort of daily forty pence-a-hit scripture, with a brief respite from The Absolute Truth for a copaloadofthosedave on page 3, because Lucy, 23 is absolutely not a slut, even t...

One gig to rule them all, one gig to find them,  One gig to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Chock-full of indie youth it was, but there will come a day far, far in the future when last night's Foals gig will be a half-forgotten memory to all who attended.  Facts about the event will blend with folklore.  Some half-truths will creep in, others will creep out; events will be spun more than Alistair Campbell at a clay pot-making class.   I once heard that in the eighties, a late friend of my dad's busted Bono in the chops right up on stage.  Admittedly, the details were hazy and lacked the necessary corroboration for me to take his claim to fame seriously.  He was a drunk with a Napoleon complex so he may have just clobbered an Irishman with long hair, sunglasses and the ego the size of Kent.  The point I'm trying to make is this: spin and subjectivity is everywhere. However, spin and subjectivity can take a walk on this occa...

Something tells me that I have yet to fully enter into the Christmas spirit.  The rest of the crossword was fine, but I seemed to really struggle with 3 Down.   

My brother was told today that he's secured an interview to study Postgraduate Medicine at Newcastle University.  Out of a thousand entrants, only two hundred were accepted for interviews.  I don't want to jinx it, but it's some very good news after he worked so hard on his personal statement.  Here's how I congratulated him over text:      A response poem or a silly game of word association?  The half rhyme of Grove/Cole was a  happy coincidence.

without mum, our cousins in Westcliff-On-Sea would just be dad’s sister’s boys; though seen in photographs, nothing more than a passing reference when somebody mentioned Essex. Instead - and because of mum’s influence – our lives were intertwined, a join at the hip  from birth that still stretches  the length of the  M4 corridor. The only difference is that we’ve become  closer:  a reunion proves again the glow,  the warmth – the whatever; the kind of calm familiarity that comes from having grown up together. (the final two lines were taken from Gail Tsukiyama’s The Samurai’s Garden) 18 July 1992: the four cousins together. From left to right: Steven, Paul, James (my brother) and me.

On the fourth day of Christmas,  the Guildhall will give to me, One Jack Bevan, One Jimmy Smith, One Walter Gervers, One Edwin Congreave, and a Yannis Philippakis. For the uninitiated, these five chaps make up Foals, NME Award Winners and floppy-haired indie rock extraordinaires.  Only the great Laura Marling can claim to have crooned more frequently in my Peugeot 206.  To come second only to the great Marling should be celebrated; such is my obsession with female singer-songwriters that if Foals' second album, Total Life Forever hadn't been so damn good, my Top Five Most Played would consist entirely of the fairer sex.  So when I found out that Foals were playing Gloucester Guildhall - a venue that is less than a mile away from where I live - I almost fell over.  My excitement was by no means an isolated incident; the county went berserk when word got around.  When tickets went on sale at the Guildhall box office, they sold out...

The Savile Row tailors knew it,  the Martini drinkers knew it,  the Aston Martin Owners Club knew it,  MI5 secretly knew it,  Her Majesty knew it,  her corgis, cocking their heads, knew it,  He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named knew it,  the femme fatales knew it,  001, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 knew it,  Q knew it,  M knew,  even J and K from Men in Black knew it,  Ian Fleming most certainly knew it,  Sir Connery and Sir Moore knew it,  in fact, every incarnation knew it,    heck, even David Niven knew it,  while all those who had every crossed him knew it, and all the women who had ever loved him knew it.

Council Chairman: All those in favour of passing a motion to commission the design and build of a giant public storage cabinet intended for permanent placement in the centre of town, say I.   - Council Chairman: This microphone must be faulty.  I said, all those– Council Board Member: Derek, we heard you the first time.  And you've never had a microphone.  

One or two posts ago,  you may have read as this flag-waving patriot waxed lyrical over how Britain was restored to its natural Britishness in 2012.  The Queen's Diamond Jubilee and The London Games ticked all the right boxes in terms of what the events had set out to achieve.  The year 2012 silenced even the most pessimistic of pessimists.  The glass-fully-empty types had to concede that they enjoyed 2012 as much as the rest of us.  If they said they didn't, then they're lying.     I had watched highlights from the opening ceremony of the London Olympics from a hotel room in Miyajima, Japan.  I returned to  England on the Tuesday following the opening ceremony, so I hadn't really missed very much.  London Heathrow was buzzing with the salutations of track-suited volunteers.  Helpfulness was projecting out of mouths like pea soup from Linda Blair.  Everyone was falling over themselves - possessed, should we say - to hel...