Men and Sheds

Not just something that women say with a sigh, but a hardcover book, complete with black and white illustrations, by Gordon Thorburn.

According to the author, sheds were a product of the Dark Ages - ‘Scead' apparently, means partial darkness or comparative obscurity. These are fundamental concepts in understanding what makes a man into a Sheddist. The originator of the shed must have been a variant of the wise man, a hermit, an oracle. He may have been partially dark and comparatively obscure – in other words, rather dim – but he’d have suspected he was different, in a very special way that led to his discovery of his Sheddist nature.

While the book is light-hearted, there is no doubt that with a few notable exceptions, Virginia Woolf being one, most sheds are mostly inhabited by men. And until now it’s always been a bit of a mystery to the female sex exactly what they do in there. Okay, some men brew beer or wine, some have model railways, others do very strange things we won’t go into here, but Thorburn has managed to make clear the role of the Shed in British masculine life.

And what are those strange things? Well here’s one of them. Pranksters bolted Stephen Riley, from Lancashire, into his shed while he was using his computer at about four o'clock in the morning (why?) and because nobody heard his frantic cries for help - he sent a message to an Internet chat room (ah, that kind of 4 am web-surfing, we begin to understand!) asking that anyone out there call the Lancashire Police. His plea was picked up by an Internet user 5,000 miles away in the United States who called the police to release him.

Man and shed photograph by PhillipC, used under a creative commons attribution licence

© blueworldgardener.co.uk