Friend of Shedworking Chris Routledge has recently said farewell to the garden office he built. Here in a guest post, he discusses his feelings about saying goodbye after many years of faithful service.
In 2003 I decided to build a writing hut at the bottom of our garden in
Lancashire. Even though it took me all Summer and most of the Autumn,
resulted in a lot of hammer-thumb impacts, and made my hands go up a
glove size, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The motivation
was to provide a place away from the house to work, and to keep
work-related things there, but the actual act of building it was life
changing in a quiet sort of way. As I wrote at the time: "That first
week, listening to the rain pounding on the roof I made and not coming
in, I felt connected with something very old and very human."
For
a while the writing hut was shedfamous, featuring in the 2010 book
Shedworking, and being visited by curious local dignitaries, such as the
vicar and the postman, who, despite the extra legwork involved in traipsing
down the garden, seemed to accept it as a new address on his round. It
was always amusing, on a work call, when one of our chickens began to
celebrate laying an egg, and the question would come, inevitably:
"Where are you?" It was a question I never quite felt I could answer
convincingly: a shed, a writing hut, an office, an escape, a farmyard, a
cabin in a meadow; for one children's party it was a pirate ship,
the Blue Pig. Despite my over-specified collar ties and roof timbers the
hut was an imaginative space that somehow remained unfixed.
Over
the years my wife and I wrote many thousands of words there and several
books. For one memorable project I used it to interview distinguished
people around the world. Near midnight on one dark Lancashire night I
had to explain to a prominent Hollywood agent that the background noise
to our phone call was the sound of wind in the trees and heavy rain
beating on the roof. More recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic, it
became a teaching venue, where lectures on English Language were
delivered to students at the University of Liverpool.
But twenty
years after I laid down my hammer and saw, my writing hut is sold; we
threw in a free house to sweeten the deal. In all the days and weeks of
clearing out a large family house in order to downsize, clearing out
the shed was the hardest part for me and took far longer than it should
have. The house was where we raised a child, had friends round for
dinner and parties, Christmases and birthdays, and spent long lockdown
days together.
But the shed was something different; an achievement even
to build it, but somehow also a laying down of deeper roots. What went
on there was not just two decades of work, but a whole other phase of
life, of youth thickening into middle age. They have been two decades of
dreams and disappointments, of struggle and breakthrough; two decades
that seemed to stretch ahead in the building and now, in the leaving, seem short.
What
will I miss about the shed I built all those years ago now it is no
longer mine? I'll miss it as a mental reference point in the geography
of our lives; I'll miss the writing and reading that went on there, the
cocktails on the stoop on a warm evening, and watching the seasons pass
in our unruly garden. But most of all I'll miss leaving the house with
my shed key and my laptop at the beginning of a promising day.
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