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| Four wounded soldiers and a garden shed | |
| Written by arablethecrocket | ||||||||||||||||
| 12 May 2007 | ||||||||||||||||
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I must be a walking calamity because beleive it or not this story is true Four Wounded Soldiers and a Garden Shed by Alan Crook I am certain that my former English teacher used to stay awake at night and think of ridiculous subjects on which we were to be required to write an essay. He was a strange all powerful man the likes of whom we as mere fourteen year olds shrunk back into the depths of our shells in order to avoid conflict, so when he ordered us to write about our garden shed I rebelled and wrote as much in my essay. What can I write about a garden shed? It’s eight foot long six foot wide and six foot six tall with a window in one side. That’s it, what more can I say? Oh I nearly forgot, the really stimulating conversation stopper is that it is painted green. That is definitely it, I mean it’s not even in an interesting position in the garden. It isn’t at the bottom, nor at the top. It sort of lumbers around midway down one side of the fence. It’s a bit like the song from Kermit the frog’s nephew in the Muppets….. Half way down the stairs is the stair were I sit. There isn’t any other stair quite like it. It’s not at the bottom it’s not at the top, But this is the stair were I always stop. That’s it I can’t think of anything more to say about it, it’s eight foot long six foot wide six foot six tall with a window in one side, it’s painted green and it lives in the nether regions of my garden. Let’s face it Mr. English teacher you’ve really dug the pits with this subject. I suppose at a long shot I could talk about the way we came to be the proud owners of this great monolith. The fact is it was going cheap. (More to the point it was free to who ever chose to take it down). The chances of our finances stretching to the heady heights of owning two properties were pretty slim ordinarily. Snotty Mr. Walsh up the road wasted no time in knocking on our door to inform us of his getting a new shed, “Oh it’s sixteen feet by twelve, I need it for my office you know?” stuck up twit. What he really wanted to know was if us lesser mortals could make use of his cast offs. Of course he didn’t put it like that, but that’s what it boiled down to. My dad being gullible, green and lets face it a tiny bit greedy, grabbed the chance with open arms, and arranged life so that we could do the honours on Saturday. Saturday is a cruel day, invented for dads to inflict his offspring with ridiculous tasks like cleaning the bikes or digging the garden or doing home work or any other task that normally completes itself by magic during the weekdays. Saturday should be for climbing trees and playing about in the fields. It should be for falling into rivers, or burying ourselves in haystacks. It definitely is not for moving sheds. On the fateful morning in question, we assembled as an army of three, my brother my dad and sorely missing my cricket I propped up the rear. Being the smallest and lightest I was tossed on the roof complete with Stanley knife and told to cut the roofing felt down the middle so that we could take the roof off in two stages. All went well until I sliced my finger, but that was no call for respite. This shed was free and you don’t bottle out when things are going free. I had to sit on the roof with blood pouring from the cut whilst dad did his first aid thing with some masking tape. Apart from the odd use of the English language that was the only incident to mar an otherwise smooth move and the ever benevolent Mr.Walsh was duly impressed. Had he wandered down the road, he would have heard a different song. Chaos struck in the form of the fact that we didn’t have a floor for the great event, but this minor detail didn’t stop the great constructor. We trundled of to the builders merchant and dad scrounged a whole heap of old pallets. Not being car owners, the first three of these had to be man handled down the road as a unit but from there on dad bashed them apart whilst my brother and I rolled the other four back home. In between time dad had managed to bash seven bells out of his thumb and was sporting a great padding of masking tape. Forgive my cynicism but at this stage my only thought was two down one to go. The shed put up quite a fight and even pounced on my dad leaving a great scratch on his bald head, which was duly treated again with masking tape. After a major miracle, akin to that of the creation, the shed was complete. We were busy standing back admiring with pride the equivalent of Buckingham Palace, when my brother, who was still sitting on the roof, decided to swing down to the ground. Except it wasn’t the ground it was the side window. More blood, but this time serious blood, followed by serious masking tape, and a very pale mum driving us to the hospital in a borrowed car. We made for quite a family outing. Me with two stitches in my finger, dad with four stitches in his head and a great big bandage on his hand, my brother staying in the hospital for the night. Almost as if to round off the day, my mother tripped over some old goat who was busy laughing at us. She fell and caught her finger in the wheel of a trolley and swelled the ranks of the walking wounded with her hand in plaster. Undaunted my dad replaced the glass with ply and we settled for the night. Now that is definitely it. There is not much you can write about a garden shed. I suppose no one would be interested in the fact that I locked the cat in there. He often went walk about so no-one thought to look for him and what with there being no glass in the shed it was only when I opened the door and he shot out that I realised he had been lodging there all the time. Mind you when I went in the shed the message was all too clear. He’d done a woopsie on every soft and delicate item he could find. What with that and the heat, the shed was aromatically out of bounds for all but the strong of stomach. There is only so much suffering a family can endure and we reached the final limit when we woke to find the shed had actually burnt down during the night. Only the night before we were celebrating the fact that despite the endless flow of injuries and the awesome sight of its appearance it was at least complete. In our house we grab any excuse for a party and so we and half the neighbours minus snotty Mr. Jones, revelled until the small hours complete with bar-be-que entrée. That was the big mistake, when we put the bar-be-que away it wasn’t quite out and in the morning our shed wasn’t quite out either. Following that I suppose it is not quite fair to say we have a garden shed it’s more a black patch where the shed used to be. Still you can’t win them all.
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