Shed Aesthetics 2

The 'ice cream parlour' shed belongs to Keith, who is a lucky chap, as the allotment he shares with Chris as a co-worker actually backs onto Keith’s own garden. And the shed in question is called the ice cream shed because one of Keith’s allotment neighbours, Margaret, thought it looked like those ice cream kiosks you get on the seafront and made up the signs on the door which read Keith’s Amazing Architectural Ice Cream Parlour and a list saying Choc Ices, Knickerbocker Glories, Ice Cream Sundaes, Wafers and Ice Lollies and finally Ice Creams are offered free of charge but we hope you will consider standing on your head while you eat it!

Keith’s is an astonishingly tidy shed, unlike my own, which is the kind of shed Terry Pratchett talks about when he describes one as ‘the kind of place where, if you turned your back for a minute, the hosepipe would disentangle itself and tie the wheelbarrow to the bicycles’ or something of that nature.

I’d love to have a tidy shed, but it’s not in my nature. In fact it seems beyond me to have a shed that you can turn round it without knocking something over, and rather horribly, a mouse crawled into the footings in July and died (or maybe drowned!) so the whole place is permeated by the smell of decomposing mouse, liberally topped with copious libations of Jeyes Fluid to render the place a bit more nose-acceptable. It’s one of those things that happens from time to time, isn’t it - mouse decease – I mean, and you just have to either accept a rather rancid couple of weeks, or tear the shed down to the foundations to find the sad little corpse. Being a tough cookie, I splash the Jeyes Fluid around, telling myself it’s a fine disinfectant and wood preservative as well as an odour blocker, and get on with sorting my autumn bulbs.

Perhaps though, there’s another way - what would you do?

Labels: allotment-building, allotment-mouse, allotment-shed