Excerpt
... Now, here we encounter one of those curious but universal bifurcations of the sexes: for the average woman, a shed is a purely functional edifice used for storing lawnmowers and sundry garden tools. Sheds are to be avoided if possible because they are dirty, dusty and almost certainly have splinters. Worse, they have spiders and moths – if not rats and mice. They are also viewed with deep suspicion because they provide a ready-made bolt-hole and an escape route through which husbands can swiftly go AWOL when unexpected visitors turn up or wives start chatting casually about redecorating. For men, a shed is something else … much more. Maybe it’s the old caveman thing – the territorial domain; it’s the frontiersman’s cabin; the commando’s operational base; the outlaw’s hideout. The shed is a masculine preserve where tobacco can be smoked, world conquest can be planned and a free-born Englishman can belch, fart and scratch his knackers without fear of reprimand or sanction.
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... During the long summer holidays, my sister and I would leave the house after breakfast and drift through the allotments. Sometimes we’d stop to see whether the model engineers were running their tiny scale-model steam locomotives on the circle of permanent track that was set up within a hedged space at the corner of Essenden Road and Welbeck Avenue. Like eager terriers, the locos, hissing and chuffing, would haul their boiler-suited, pipe-smoking creators around the circuit before they were halted for another eternity of tinkering. That hedged circuit is long-gone, replaced by the smart, affordable housing of the Essenden Road extension. Where did the patrons of Lilliput State Railways take those exquisite facsimiles in miniature after that? I wonder how many still remain under canvas in garden sheds or attics, dusted periodically by widows who could never understand why their men couldn’t summon the same energy, diligence and artistry for wall-papering the back bedroom that they could always find for their ‘toy trains’.
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... Now, it might seem by today’s standards that our meals were repetitive, their component parts unimaginative and our general food outlook desperately unadventurous; but we didn’t see it like that. If mum and dad were the war generation, then we were the children of the war generation and it was drummed into us from earliest days that we were lucky to have it, we had to eat it and we should be bloody grateful for it – whatever it happened to be. If there were things we didn’t like, we ate round them or tried to sneak them onto someone else’s plate. Mum wasn’t a bad cook; she was a typically post-war English housewife for whom vegetables required boiling to the point of pulp and salad was religiously constructed as a ‘lettuce-tomato-cucumber-and-half-a-hard-boiled-egg’ still-life on a plate. It wasn’t that she couldn’t be bothered to experiment, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to try. These were the days before food was a hobby and chefs were TV stars. With the exception of the fearsome Fanny Craddock, the first TV chef I remember seeing was Graham Kerr, the so-called Galloping Gourmet. By today’s standards his cooking was rather conservative but he had the charisma to go with the coriander and he drew in a huge TV audience. Even so, the nation saw him, I think, as a one-off eccentric rather than a prophet. Dad just saw him as a poof.