Alex proud gives his views over at the Timesonline and says how he got a shed for the sheddie in his life.
One day, the man gives up and retreats into his shed, which is his last refuge, a kind of man preserve. Even then, his wife won’t leave it alone, and will constantly make suggestions for its “improvement†(my wife tells me there’s a trend for wallpapering one’s shed — what?). It’s like a Brazilian soya-bean farmer eyeing up the last scrap of rainforest.
I’ve managed to turn the tables, though. Having lived in several flats that soon came to resemble inhabited car-boot sales, when my wife and I built our own house I was determined to control the clutter from the outset. So, I bought my wife a shed. Not just any shed, but the double-glazed, heated, supersized Rolls-Royce of sheds. Making it expensive was key — the cost meant I was not denigrating her knick-knacks. By going posh, I’m not merely offering a storage solution, but a place where my beautiful wife can express her creativity. It’s not a perfect solution: soft cushions still litter my B&B Italia sofa like so much flyblown trash, and ornaments still sprout like mushrooms on unwatched surfaces. So I have to be vigilant, but, by and large, my nice modernist house does not resemble a live-in eBay. As for the shed, I’ve been in there only once. It took me a week in a sauna retreat to recover, and the sight of multicoloured macramé still makes me sweat.
but as we all know sheddies, both his and her sheds are great and provide the retreat for him or her.
