What’s a beautiful, sunny April day for if not for the sheer nerdery of cleaning out your shed? All winter long I’ve been taking stuff out in a hurry, shoving stuff out of the way to get to it, using it, then just chucking it inside. And c’mon, admit it – so have you.

By the time April rolls round, I can’t even get inside the thing (not helped by it being on a hill which means I have to hoist myself up into it anyway). This year has been particularly hazardous as the shelves (made of finest chipboard) have sagged badly in the wet weather and the top one’s only held up by the old rubbish on the shelf underneath it.

I’ve been waiting for a day when I can be absolutely sure I’m not going to get all the stuff out only for the heavens to open and today was the day.

I started at 9.00am and finished around 3.30pm, though that did include several tea breaks, chat-breaks with neighbours and seed-sowing breaks when I found seed that needed to go in and obviously there was no time like the present.

First, everything came out, including some of the biggest spiders known to human kind and Greenwich’s entire allocation of ladybirds. A good stiff brush and a not very good soft brush did most of the job, though spiders’ webs and especially their little furry egg-nests are really, really sticky.

I then propped up, from the bottom, the shelves. The top one was so ridiculously bowed that, on a tip from my neighbour, Les, I turned the whole thing upside down. It now looks like a very dull rainbow.

I finished off with a couple of little ‘been meaning to do that’ jobs – tool racks, fixed not to the walls as I’d intended because there was no room, but instead to the ceiling for my autumn-leaf rakes, cup hooks for various stuff and the lucky horseshoe a girlfriend gave me, cough, 17 years ago. Heather – it’s now doing service, as it should be, over the door, smile-side up to catch all the good luck. It lives just underneath Gary the Gargoyle, rescued from a skip.

 

Okay that was probably the most boring post I’ll ever write. Sorry – I just really get a kick out of my once-a-year shed clean. I’m ready for anything now, not least the April showers – I now have somewhere to sit and read until the clouds roll by…