Dear shedheads,

Here as promised is the FAQ mentioned article which appeared
in 'The Idler' Issue 9 May - June 1995. The author is a bloke
called Alan Hamilton (surely a forefather of this newsgroup 
even though his name isn't 'Dave') and the article was originally 
published in 'Lloyds Log magazine'. It was reproduced in 'The Idler',
'with the kind permission of Lloyd's of London'; and although I am
reproducing here without permission (I tried honest!) I hope
they don't mind too much. If you feel the need to print this
out or send it to anyone could you **please keep the 
attributions intact**. Text which appears in quotes (i.e. '')
was originally in italics and as I can't remember the net convention
for doing this in ASCII I've used quotes instead.

The article is called "Shed Heaven" and to set the scene there's
a nice big picture of some 'Slugits' (tm) with some cracked plant pots
to go along with the article.

Hope you like it. I did.

Cheers
Pete

Article follows.......................................................

                     'Shed Heaven'
                     =============

[ By Alan Hamilton. Published in 'The Idler' Issue 9 May - June 1995 ]
[ Originally published in 'Lloyds Log Magazine' and reproduced in    ]
[ 'The Idler' with the kind permission of Lloyd's of London.         ]

The world has never been quite the same since they stopped
advertising garden sheds on the back of the 'Radio Times'.

Every week without fail, the good shedmakers of Batley would
lay out their wares for the perusal of the nation in one of 
those wonderfully fussy and action-packed displays where the
layout artist appeared to be trying to cut up an entire
Dostoevsky novel and paste it, with pictures, into the confines
of an A3 page.

And why, you are entitled to wonder, did the manufacturers
of the stout cedar 'Suffolk' (with optional window) and the 
bombproof concrete 'Rutland' (erected in under a day) feel
it worth shelling out, week after week, for the most expensive
display spot in the entire media just to shift stocks of something
so prosaically mundane as a garden shed?

The answer is that garden sheds have to do with a great deal
more than gardening. In fact, they don't really have much to do
with gardening at all. What they have to do with is the raising to 
the status of a religion the fine art of doing nothing.             


The shed was the common man's Temple of Idleness, in which 
he could cast out the devils of Enthusiasm and worship at the 
feet of the gods Whittle, Footle, Doodle and Fiddle. Cocooned
in a womb of serenity, far from prying eyes that would have 
him mend dripping taps or bend his mind to booking next year's 
holiday, a man could achieve a state of transcendental inactivity
with the aid of nothing more complex than a cracked flowerpot 
and a tranny tuned into the cricket.

Many a garden shed bought from the back of 'Radio Times' was 
destined for an allotment. Allotments used to be sanctuaries where
the truly idle could meet like minds and wallow in the comforting
certainty of group inactivity. They were like naturist beaches;
you don't feel a fool in your nothings if every other Jack and Jill
around you has cast of the clouts ~ provided that the Great Dressed
Majority are kept at least binocular distance away. Oh yes, and 
allotments had their Peeping Toms too; as urchins we used to snigger
through gaps in the hawthorn hedge at old men in flat caps making
pipe smoke while their cabbages almost creaked with rampant growth.

Alas, the world has been overtaken by earnestness. Now it is Volvo
drivers who queue up at their local council office to inherit an 
allotment, not in search of a piece of hallowed ground for the
pursuit of catatonic idleness but to keep one step ahead of 
Sainsbury in their quest for the Utterly Untainted Aubergine.
Former havens of peace are being desecrated by Enthusiasm, by
people who have got into their head the distorted notion that
doing nothing is a waste of life.

Sheds have many virtues, of which two come to mind. First you cannot
jog or indulge in any other form of damaging gymnastics in a shed; any
properly run-in shed will be far too full of clutter to take more than
one and a half steps in without poking yourself in the eye with a six-foot
length of lavatory overflow pipe which might come in handy one day.

Secondly, there are now so many earnest Sunday newspapers of such immensity 
that unless you purchased the huge all-cedar 'Wensleydale' (stores garden 
tools, mowers, and has room for a workshop) there is no possibility of getting 
them all into a shed at once to read. These very newspapers are against the 
spirit of an idler age, with their po-faced view of the world in which 
everything seems to matter. Yet they exist in a curious paradox; 
by the time you have read their endless leisure supplements stuffed with ideas 
of what to do with your free time, there is no time left to do it.

We writers appreciate garden sheds, as our craft teaches us to snatch periods
of advanced pointlessness. Faced with a deadline and not a single idea, 
writers can become world-class footlers. Cleaning the typewriter keys is much
favoured; my own speciality, in the days of manual writing machines, was to 
polish the chrome-plated carriage return lever on my portable.

And always, in the end, after a good footle or doodle, the idea would come.
I never yet met a man who was pole-axed by a good idea while dressed in a 
bright green tracksuit pounding the guts out of his hip joints on a city
pavement. If James Watt had a kettle in his garden shed, that's where he would
have invented the steam engine.

When you see the very old interviewed on television on the occasion of their
105th birthday, does a single one of them ever look like the type who had 
spent so much as a day of their lives jogging or reading the 'Independent 
on Sunday'? Not a bit of it; they all look to me like people who had sheds.

                                             -- Alan Hamiltion.