Time to get out of the outhouse: what is it with men and their sheds?

Deke Duncan, an amateur DJ who has spent 44 years broadcasting to an audience of one from his Hertfordshire shed, has been offered a slot on BBC local radio. “I’m speechless,” he is reported to have said, which doesn’t bode well. To my mind, the clear hero here is Duncan’s wife Teresa (AKA the audience), listening on a speaker inside the house. But there’s an even more interesting player here: the shed. What is it with men and their sheds?

The fetishisation of the shed has been going on a while. Battling creative frustration, George RR Martin has holed up in one to complete his long overdue novel, The Winds of Winter, which is more eagerly anticipated than Michelle Obama unveiling a clean energy plan at the next World Cup. Meanwhile, after the Brexit referendum, David Cameron resigned his premiership to live in a shed – another great omen. Cameron’s is the most notorious roofed garden structure of recent time; it is equipped with a caviar bar, dry-slope ski-wing and an internal garden containing a smaller shed, for when he needs to incept his way out of the black shame that dogs his every second thought.

It’s always a man in his shed, isn’t it? (Or in Cameron’s, a luxury shepherd’s hut.) Indulging the rugged-curious, timorous dream of semi-cabin life. A shed screams, “Come and get me when dinner’s ready.” The idea of a man cave is bad enough – implying men are prehistoric creatures who must be allowed to defecate in the corner of a basement. But at least it’s in the house. Sheds – the privilege of the landowning – are supposed to house lawnmowers and paint, not men’s thwarted dreams. Is this the highest aim of modern masculinity? Coddled, crackpot hobbyism and absconding from domestic duty? If you’re really on a deadline, it would be more confining, and more practical, to retreat to the toilet. Now there’s a room that produces results under pressure.