How Not to Sort The Shed – or The Tent Trapeze Triumph

I’m having ‘Just Fucking Sort It’ September. This month (or what’s left of it) is when I’m taking control of my life. This is a big task. Especially with my life. Some people have lives that are already sorted. They are the type of people whose CD collections are in alphabetical order, with the right CDs in the right boxes and not being used to prop wobbly tables, place toast upon or cover parts of the roof that are leaking.
They are the type of people who can open cupboards without the entire contents falling on the floor, breaking one’s foot, spilling over the room, sliding out the door, and engulfing the earth and a small asteroid that happens to be passing.
They are the type of people whose garden sheds contain space to swing a cat, do a small hula dance and put a not-broken lawnmower in.

So today I started with the shed. Which conveniently enough had already been mostly emptied into the al fresco shed. This is what happened:

I fought my way past the jungle and the outdoor shed contents and entered the shed. For a shed that had already been emptied it was quite full. Undaunted I examined the contents. What I notice first was that everything was covered in some sort of fabric. Images of Mrs Haversham’s abode crossed my mind. I wondered if perhaps a foresightful person had covered all my precious belongings in order to protect them from fading in the bright light or possibly getting dusty. But as it turned out not. It was the Lawyer’s tent. That she had taken camping a number of weeks, or possibly months, ago, and we had spread in order to allow it to dry and for a great deal of sand to work its way off.

Undaunted I begin to gather the tent. And fold it. Whist enjoying that satisfying scrunch of sand on wooden floor. When I was a child, or at least a person of lesser years than I am now, tents were tent shaped and thus could be folded into appealing rectangle shapes. Not this one. It refused in any way, shape, form or manner to be tidied. In fact it fought back with the vigour only a mysteriously shaped and highly recalcitrant tent could. Think alligators and blond Australians.

Undaunted I stuffed it bodily into a number of bin-bags and wondered how it had ever possibly emerged from the small zipped object that was its real home. ‘Ha!’ I exclaimed. ‘Fucking sorted.’

I then discovered that there was an empty cupboard in the shed. ‘Ha!’ I exclaimed and stuffed the bin bags containing the parts of tent into the cupboard. ‘Ha!’ I exclaimed. ‘Fucking sorted.’

I took a large marker pen and wrote on the cupboard ‘Big Tent’ in broad and significant letters.

There was still some room in the cupboard. I gazed around the three and a half million other objects in the shed to decide what should join the tent in it’s handy hidaway. My eye settled on a metal bar mostly wrapped in rope. The physicist’s trapeze. I stuffed it into the cupboard and wrote ‘Trapeze’ in broad and significant letters.

I gazed lovingly at the cupboard. ‘Ha!’ I exclaimed. ‘Fucking sorted’.

So satisfied was I at this that I decided to sort the rest of the three million other objects as well as the two and a half million exterior objects tomorrow.

Well, frankly, if one can so cunningly store a tent and a trapeze, and even label the tent and trapeze receptacle with broad and significant letters, it puts those CD alphabetisers to shame. Completely.