Thursday, July 01, 2010

Suddenly Sheds are cool

A bit of shed indulgent blogging here ( ranting resumed shortly ).

As I may have said sometime, a long time before, I came to Shed's and blogging via events. The Shed was due to being away from home one weekend on a business trip to the middle east when I suddenly realised I could hear myself think for the first time since being a single man ( and certainly before being a father ! ). I knew I had to do something about that !

The blogging was an attempt to try and understand why some of the IT press and magazines were going on about blogging. Sometimes with IT and software ideas you can't just read about them - you have to use them to fully understand. ( I was doubtful, but since blogger was free thought why not ? ). Initially I assume that any opinions would be met by a torrent of abuse, especially those from a right of centre perspective - though my first few posts were on software.

So now the Shed and the blog go together.

The Man in a Shed name was designed to be a hat tip to the idea of The Man on the Clapham Omnibus - anonymous by virtue of being an everyday type person as well as by design.

There is of course a song by Nick Drake ( video below ) which I found once I'd started blogging, (My Shed's fine thanks - so no holes in the roof and romance was taken care of years ago - that's why I need the Shed - haven't you been paying attention ? )



Anyway thanks in part I suspect to the works of Alex Johnson (Shedworking) and Uncle Wilco and perhaps a few board journalists ( it is the silly season coming up isn't it ?) Shed are suddenly cool.

Even the BBC has sat up and paid attention ( not that they are planning on downsizing into wooden outbuildlings.... ). And the launch of Alex's book Shedworking has lead to reviews such as this in the Independent ( note MiaS quote some way down in the article ). MiaS has his copy - much to the amusement of my kids as Alex has a mention of this humble wooden building in it. Surely a must buy for mid life crisis male friends who need a project in their lives ...

In Australia Shed's are even seen as the salvation of man kind !

Its national shed week coming up on 5th of July ( see Reader's Sheds for details ) and I suspect that this year Shed's have really gone mainstream. ( I see local garden centres offering more and more designs and range of stock).

But this is worrying. MiaS has never really been in fashion in my life.

PS I saw the twitter tag on replacing film place names with the word shed - but I've been running a three ring circus yesterday and could only smile rather than partake ...

4 comments:

John M Ward said...

Very interesting!

Right now, my local garden centre has a shedload of, er, a lot of sheds...

Chuckles said...

Sheds are cool. So you've opened the door or the window then?

Wyrdtimes said...

One of the best things I've ever done was to move my office from the house into the shed.

I got the idea here!

BTW Have you seen D.Miliband trying to (half-heartedly) get onto the English bandwagon? See the English Free Press http://blogs.englishparliament.net/

Man in a Shed said...

@Chuckles - I invested in a mobile air conditioner years ago. The Shed's the best place to be when its hot ! ( Only problem is I'm in the house waiting for the post today ! )

@Wrdtimes - glad to be of service. I'll have to look at Mr Miliband shortly - he's a very depressing type of professional politician.