Sheds, the sea, memories and meanderings…

Somehow I either missed them or they were there all along and I just didn’t get close enough to the edge. Anyway, I’ve seen them now, clinging to the cliff above the beach at Nefyn at the place where the mudslide washed away that car ten years or so ago. All safe now, the soil reinforced and stabilised with concrete, mesh and marram grass.

Summer houses or beach huts or sheds, it doesn’t matter – there they stand, three of them, facing the storms and the spray of the sea. Just look at that view, imagine the tranquillity on a sunny day, the excitement of a stormy night. Fireworks and barbecues and long cold drinks, paintings and coffee and bacon sandwiches. My envy knows no bounds

Now I know that the shed life isn’t to everybody’s taste. But give me a warm shed perched on a cliff overlooking the sea and the mountains and I will be a happy man, so happy I may never want to leave. Yes, give me a hut by the sea like the chap I met in Barbados who lived in a tin shack on the beach. No bathroom or kitchen, and the tap was at a standpipe across the way, but an open fire and freshly speared fish, coconuts, and the warm Caribbean to bathe in. No wonder his smile was a mile wide.

I sometimes dream that I live in an upturned boat on the beach like the Peggotty family in David Copperfield, and I often get the urge to get up and go to Derek Jarman’s shed cottage at Dungerness, wander his garden, examine his pebble patterns, his found things, and lose myself in my own memories and meanderings.

Sheds, the sea, memories and meanderings… what better combination?