Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Dad!  Dad!...I can't work it!...I've read the manual...It has loads of foreign words...I am reading the English section!...Words like "Mains Charger" and "Socket"...It sounds unreasonable to me...Wait for what?...Power?...Honestly, dad.  You aren't making any sense...How on earth can they expect me to wait?...And what are these dangly white things?...Ear what?...You are joking, right?...There is no way I am putting those  in there ...And this is something granddad did for fun?...I'm just saying it's unprincipled...All I'm saying is that perhaps that fruit company should have stuck to making fruit.           

Today's cryptic crossword in today's Citizen went better than expected.  This is usually slightly more difficult than The Sun's cryptic, and I'm usually left struggling after half a dozen clues.  But today I managed to do half of it: 12/24.  I sat in the garden while I did it, so perhaps it was a combination of sunny weather (rather restorative after such a long winter!) and St. George's Day - a dragon of a puzzle, albeit half-slayed.  A few clues in particular made me chuckle: 23a: Right in the middle of the cemetery (4,6) Answer: Dead Centre As far as cryptic clues go, this was quite a straightforward one.  Easy to work out but a nice little pay off.   16d: Forty five and not yet married? (6) Answer: Single As you can see from my scribbling at the bottom, numbers within clues usually suggests that roman numerals should be used, so I wrote "XLV" to see how that would fit into the answer. Then it dawned on me that a 45 is a r...

I had always hoped that there would come a time when a beautiful and articulate young woman who, upon graduating from university, would return home to live with her parents while she set about planning the next stage of her remarkable life.  If I was ever lucky enough to meet her, I had always wondered what drink she might order if she had accepted this man’s invitation of coffee.  It was a particularly fresh Sunday morning in February.  We had agreed to meet at 11 o’clock.  I had cycled in spite of the cold.  It didn’t snow, but the air was manufacturing something close to it.  The atmosphere was sharp with ice, found its way through my gloves, drying out the base of my fingers.  I arrived forty minutes early.  Seagulls circled over an ugly, concrete sea.  I muttered a curse to each and every one of them.  A man was cleaning the frontage of the jeweller’s shop next door while his son secured the ladder at the bottom.  I cou...

He considered his  breathing for a second  and replied, Everything, over  time, becomes  beautiful. 

Why is the sky blue Why is it called boxing day Why is the sea salty Why is loft insulation needed Who is the secret footballer Who is banksy Who is the stig Who is gossip girl Where is chuck norris Where is death in paradise filmed Where is bora bora Where is downton abbey What is my IP What is the harlem shake What is love What is my IP address

I think it’s safe to say that I’m not as excited by this year’s Oscars as I have been in previous years.  I can’t help deriving a certain apathy from the short list   I haven’t had this feeling since The Hurt Locker won Best Film in 2010 (it denied Avatar its Oscar, so perhaps it was the lesser of two evils). My two main gripes: all the Best Supporting Actor nominees have all won before, and the presence of Silver Linings Playbook, a film of such abundant mediocrity that I felt guilty for convincing my brother to watch it with me over Seven Psychopaths. Do I care that Ben Affleck was snubbed his Best Director nod?  Do I care that the Best Actress Nominees contain the youngest and oldest actresses ever nominated?  Do I care that Daniel Day-Lewis could make history and win his third Best Actor Oscar?  The answer to the last one is ‘probably a little bit’, but the others?  Well, not so much.  To be honest, I'm most intere...

Do it and I will see to it that your species  gets it. 

Distracted, I open a new tab, go to Google, type in your name,  click Search just to see it there as a title  at the top, and go back  to whatever it was I was doing.  

Hungry Person: I could eat a horse. Findus: Really? Hungry Person:  Oh yeah.  100%. Findus: Okay.

Following on from a poem I wrote recently entitled The Gift of Shower Gel - Christmas Eve 1997  in which I explore what my eleven year old self considered as successful and, er, less successful presents, I'd like to expand further on its last line:        "would kiss two cheeks twice for a calculator watch." Of course, by 1997 my wrist already sported a calculator watch, as was the fashion of the day.  But there was an upgrade.  Always an upgrade.  I prayed that Santa knew his Casio from his Seiko and had what Bill Bailey calls "The Laminated Book of Dreams" in his reference library, otherwise known as the Argos catalogue.         During the first or second year of Secondary School, my beloved Casio Calculator Watch went missing.  When I say went missing, I mean a substitute P.E Teacher stole it.  It went into his sports bag before a lesson one day and - like the teacher - was never seen again.   ...

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...