Graham Carter - the voice of age and experience

ACCORDING to a new survey, men think about it as much as 200 times a day.

My wife says I have a one-track mind, and I have to admit I have been thinking about it a lot, just lately, but 200 seems a high figure, even for me.

And of course, it is even worse at this time of the year, as the famous old poem says: “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of his shed.”

Sheds - I don’t know what you thought I was talking about - are not just a young man’s fancy, of course. Far from it.

The older men get, the more passionate we become about our shed (or sheds), until you could say a lot of us become shed maniacs.

We all know they are the perfect retreat for the male of the species, and today they are big business too, with all kinds of designs available, plus Shed of the Year contests and programmes about Amazing Spaces on the telly.

Future generations of historians will probably call this the Shed Age.

Attitudes to sheds have certainly changed over the years, because whereas it would have been unusual, when I was a boy, for somebody to have more than one, nowadays it’s quite acceptable to have two, three or even four sheds in your garden.

Sheds are certainly dominating everything in our house at the moment because even my wife has been on about nothing else for the last year, and we are about to take delivery of shed number four.

But while the thought of a new shed makes my pulse quicken, her motivation is completely different.

For her it is a purely practical development, the new shed being an overflow for all the stuff we’ve accumulated that doesn’t fit in the other three.

I was supposed to build it last year, and would have, if I hadn’t got too busy with other things, so I have been reminded, every day for the last 12 months, that it really needs to be done this year.

Or else.

I am glad to say the project is now progressing nicely, with the shed design now officially chosen.

My wife is of the foolish opinion that a shed is a shed is a shed, but my vision was for a real feature of the garden, and for a long time I had it in mind to put up a mock shepherd’s hut, possibly on wheels.

But then we spotted a lovely Dutch barn-style shed at a garden centre, which we both thought would look nice at the bottom of the garden.

It will arrive shortly, and the Carter clans are being mobilised for the traditional family shed-building weekend, which me and my three brothers take it in turns to host.

If people’s wealth is measured by the amount of money they have in the bank, the Carters are no millionaires, but if it is measured in sheds, then we are the Rockefellers.

There is only one blot on the horizon.

Whenever we start work on a new shed, my wife immediately begins to make a mental list of all the other projects we could do around the house.

It’s bad enough that she doesn’t listen to my advice to concentrate on one job at a time.

But what she really needs to realise is that when a man has a new shed, it would be a crime against his manhood if you robbed him of any time that could be spent indulging in the joy of sheds, and asked him to do anything else.

Well, almost anything else.