Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

I've tried really hard to get into Arctic Monkeys since your recommendation.  I like the lyrics (I think) but I've never really liked Alex Turner's voice.  It's a shame because alongside the likes of fellow Mercury Prize winners Alt-J, they're one of the UK's most popular indie bands. But while i think Arctic Monkeys are deserving of the hype (at their best, they're brilliant storytellers:   this performance   of Fluorescent Adolescent is one of my all-time favourites), I don't think Alt-J are.  Their lyrics are, quite frankly, stupid and the band have been deeply overhyped.    I've been listening to a lot of songs by The National recently.  They've always been on my radar but it was only recently that I discovered songs like Don't Swallow the Cap and Bloodbuzz Ohio.  I don't highly rate them as songwriters; their songs lack coherence, but if you like taking lines on an individual basis, as I sometimes do, then they're definitely ...

"I still owe money to the money to the money I owe, I never thought about love when I thought about home."

"When they ask what do I see,  I see a bright white beautiful heaven hanging over me."

1.  Laura Marling - Crawled Out of the Sea (1:17) 2.  Neutral Milk Hotel - The Communist's Daughter (1:58) 3.  Joanna Newsom - On a Good Day (1:48) 4.  Iron & Wine - Die (1:08) 5.  Michael Johnston - Love Will Find You in the End (1:52)

The offside rule, Fireworks observed from above,  The personality shift in Phineas Gage,  El Nino,  Life after death,  Her internal dialogue.

Whoever first referred to them as the fairer sex was wrong -  this summer is going to be very very very very long.  

1.  Make a Plan to Love Me by Bright Eyes I've obsessed over Lua by Bright Eyes for years, and admit that I'd listened to that song (particularly the version he does with Gillian Welch that appears on the wonderful compilation 'Dark Was The Night') more than all of his other songs put together.  But when I stumbled upon Cassadaga at a charity shop, I thought I'd try and branch out.  I doubt Make a Plan to Love Me will be placed alongside the likes of Lua and Bright Eyes' other great songs, but it does have charm and I lose myself in it every time.  I played it while my dad was in the room last week.  He thought I was playing it just to annoy him.  I guess I'm just hooked on the sentiment.   2.  How It Felt To Kiss You by Mara Carlyle I bought Mara Carlyle's album from a car boot sale only last week.  I haven't had much time to digest it fully, but this instrumental track has quickly asserted itself as an early favourite. ...

I drop you off on the college road with traffic queuing the other way and the drivers sit in rank of thankfulness  with their windows down and lets say it was my prayer among a million others that caused the weather to develop a consciousness among other things and stay  hot  for your birthday  and before you make your way through the park to meet the girls for evening coffee you thank me for this and this and this and with both palms upturned a pause and a catch in the throat I say that I am doing nothing more than what a good woman deserves and it is only after we part and you disappear through the fold of green that I notice the two hyphens  in  matter-of-fact had served as footholds as I said it and it is is only when  I negotiate my way back down  to car level that I can use my feet to pull away.

I never heard  a welder laugh before noon  until   I dropped an apple at 0700  and it rolled  towards  him. Ha       ha            ha, You dropped               your apple.  I can show you  so much life,  I told her Life more honest  than the blush of a laugh from a rolling apple.

In the 6am warm up,  shrug off the injustice of failing to recall the first of the dreams you'll have about her,  and meet the road. Make it want to feel the tapestry that exists in the kingdom within your chest, and run it in,  until the earth itself amends the terms of its inheritance. 

It was the fight that was going to hand Carl Froch the glue that would seal his boxing legacy.  A domestic fight against a man eleven years his junior.  George Groves had never fought for a world title, while this was Froch's eleventh consecutive world title fight.  Froch: lightening-fast, hard as nails, granite-chinned with bombs in both hands.  Our best pound-for-pound fighter who can count himself among only a handful of British boxers who went to America and won.  And George Groves.  Who'd lost Adam Booth, his trainer, a few weeks earlier because he was more interested in training David Haye, his now-retired stablemate.  Groves.  Unbeaten, but only so up to commonwealth level.  A chin largely untested.  Mortal enemy of James Degale, who thinks he's ugly, but whom Groves had beaten as an amateur and as a professional.  But Degale is no Froch.  Froch came second in a super middleweight contest to end all others: The Super Si...

for L.C You will try and play down what you think he thinks you mean to him, and it is true when you say that every man awaits his great shift in purpose. I have seen many of them stood dockside,  fixed, anachronistic and stowaway still, pleading stoic to be woven into The Sea. But he is not that man.  And this is not his adventure.  Plain sight tells from the tension that unwinds from around his eyes when he sees you   that one day he will find a ship  for the simple unnautical adventure  of telling you that she bears your name, and will go on to describe it to you in such detail  that you will dream he brings it home and will warn him when he sails it too close to the fire.  

You'll try and play down  what you think he thinks you mean to him, but you know he needs you,  as you him,  because you have watched him  when he didn't know you were watching and have have felt the tension unspool around him  when he sees you. Whoever you are, and wherever you were, and whatever it was  you did it with - the result is enough to shock a passerby  from the unmistakable, uncensored evidence of calmness in his eye.

You invariably chose to have it sent to your parents' address - safer, yes, but a way of convincing them that your social status lies somewhere  between F ailure and C onqueror  of Language . So when your mother calls to say, You've received a letter,  you'll know by the way she says Letter that she's not talking The AA or Boots Opticians. The address is handwritten, she'll whisper. Of course, she'll know  your next question  because  you've asked it before:  Does it look like my handwriting? She knows your handwriting.  She's probably kept the other  stamp-addressed envelopes that you'd opened when you still had light in your eyes. but she'll say I cannot say for sure . Don't get your hopes up. As a general rule of thumb, if you can still remember  your mother's first name,  it's much, much too soon.  

It took a while, but summer has well and truly arrived.  The pale-faced pessimists who said that summer would never come now languish, fan-swept, in the coolest room in their houses.  These are the same pessimists who never believed we would find ourselves with a British Wimbledon Champion come summer's end.  They will have to save their pent up mockery for another grand slam.  Unfortunately for them, and as an extension to celebrations of last year, this summer has been another flag waver's paradise.  Just when we thought we'd expelled enough patriotism for one decade after the Queen's Golden Jubilee and The London Games, along comes 2013, or (for the optimist among us): 2012+1, or simply: The Update.  It's as good as any Super Saturday.  So we find ourselves slap bang in the middle of music festival season.  This week is book-ended by two of my favourite festivals: 2000trees, which enjoyed wall-to-wall sunshine last weekend, and Latitude thi...

I offer my arm as a right angle, and in its taking, you learn, perhaps, through the calm  pulse  of our stroll, the way in which, or the sense of the way in which my hip is set. 

Imagine for a second that I am a cyclist on the final stage of The Vuelta a   Bolivia .  I have climbed to the summit of 4,496 metres above sea level, through the high plains of Altiplano, Lake Titicaca and finally   La Paz .  It is the highest and arguably the most challenging tour on the cycling calendar.  When I first arrived, the locals had told me in hand expressions and broken English that the summit climb would make my lungs scream.  This morning, I saw Padre Perez anoint every ambulance with holy water.  Such is its intensity, I’m told he does it every morning during the tour.  I know the task ahead, but knowing this did little to settle my nerves.  The apprehension mostly leaves me when I’m on the road.  All I can do now is focus on the game plan and the wheel of the man in front.  This is the final stage.  For all the pain a rider has to push through on a climb at altitude, we always hope the final ascent ...

When you frown, your face screws into a knot not dissimilar to that of a clove hitch, though to compare you to a knot as useful as this one would be to labour it with a comparison it doesn’t deserve.  There is beauty in seeing a well-groomed, happy, obedient horse tied neatly to a hitching post outside of a saloon. There is no beauty in your frown. In fact, I do not know a horse, rope or post in history that has been afflicted with the separate or collective ugliness  of your scowl. I am reasonably confident of this supposition and I will stand by it. However, I must distance myself from objectifying matters, because it is an overly simplistic device used to derive an element of humour from a place where there absolutely is none. And therein lies my problem.  Or rather, your problem. So for fear of comparing you to something marginally favourable, it is only fair that I compare you to yourself, because the only thing that comes close...