JUST because I once, for a split second, believed my Dad when he told me there are two Mersey tunnels because the builders started on both river banks and failed to meet in the middle does not make me entirely gullible.

I was very young at the time, well younger anyway, and it was too good a story not to accept it, even if only for a moment.

Nor does my discomfort around antlers make me gullible, despite it stemming from being told, at the age of five, that if I touched a particular antler, that just happened to be in the middle of the room we were in at the time, that I would die.

My classmate who related the legend of the cursed crooked stick in dramatically hushed tones was so convincing that I had nightmares for weeks.

And besides, I wasn’t the only one to fall for her tall tales. She even conned the grown-ups – once serving dog biscuits as canapes to her parents’ friends. She was six at the time.

We lost touch when her family moved to Cambridge but I expect she’s either a spy or a hustler.

A little bit of gullibility is a good thing, I think – helps to keep a bit of magic alive when you’re too old to believe in the tooth fairy without concrete evidence.

It helps you suspend your disbelief when watching Avatar, or Doctor Who or Gail and Joe kissing on Coronation Street just long enough to enjoy the experience (well not watching Gail and Joe kissing on Coronation Street).

Often it’s the more outlandish details that are easier to believe – you can accept Jack Bauer fits several months’ worth of anti-terrorist activity into a single 24-hour period, but not that he never needs the toilet.

Is this why I almost find it easier to believe miniature artist Willard Wigan creates his remarkable sculptures through magical powers rather than immense control of his own body and an inordinate amount of patience?

He explained the process to me in an interview for this newspaper – how he slows down his pulse and sculpts between each heartbeat so he isn’t too heavy handed to work.

He carves microscopic pieces of material into art works too small for the human eye to perceive, using a fragment of diamond as a blade and the hair from the back of a dead fly as a paintbrush.

It’s seems crazy that anyone would ever believe it possible, yet, there they are, a row of exquisite sculptures of rugby player Johnny Wilkinson, Little Miss Muffet being frightened by a spider, Betty Boop and many more, only visible through a microscope.

You have to see them to believe them and, I have to admit, I made myself dizzy tipping my head upside down to check whether there was something painted on the microscope’s lens. There wasn’t.

You have to accept that the sculptures are genuine, even though believing that goes against all your instincts.

As art works they’re fascinating, for the way they’re made and they’re size, but what is arguably more intriguing is the way they force you to distrust yourself.

You can’t quite accept what you’re seeing, as if it’s a PT Barnum trick of epic proportions.

But they are there, in front of your eyes, mocking your senses.

Wigan loves the idea that some people are sceptical about his creations – seeing it as proof of his own unusual talent.

But, when he says to me over the phone that he will shrink me down to fit into the eye of a needle –“look at me, I’m tiny,” he jokes in a high-pitched voice – I find myself asking him politely not to.

FIND more of Laura Davis’ columns at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk /lauradavis

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