Down the shed

Whenever I sit down to write this column, I always try to be a little bit funny. It doesn’t always work, because my sense of humour is a bit odd, but I do try.

This one will not be and thus I beg you to forgive me for indulging myself. I have been feeling a bit maudlin lately.

You see, my father was into model railways in a big way. He had other hobbies, of course, but his main love in life (after my mother, my brother and myself) was his model rail layout.

It was a magnificent construction, housed in an equally magnificent Shed. Yes, that’s capitalised, because that’s what we called it. If you needed him for something, it was the first place you’d look. “Where’s your father?” visitors to our home would ask. “Down the Shed.”

When he died in 2001, the Shed and the layout passed into my care, as I stayed in the house whilst my mother and brother moved out. Two years later, my partner and I moved into our own home, and my grandparents moved into my childhood home and the layout then fell under my grandfather’s care.