Brian Dillon on retreating to the bottom of the garden
I'm writing this in my shed, and it has begun to rain loudly on the steel roof. Any minute now, when enough water has accumulated over my head, the clangour will subside to a low thrum, and I'll feel even more cosily cut off from the world outside.
I call it a shed because the alternatives are all more or less irritating and inaccurate. Office? Hardly. That would imply I'm on top of all those office-type tasks (invoices, invitations, tax returns) that I've consigned to a bureau in the corner. Study? It's more the sort of place you might once have gone to chastise a child or to off yourself in the dead of night with the old revolver you kept hidden in a drawer of said bureau. Studio, then? Even worse: it sounds as if I lounge about here, being "creative" all day.
No, it's a shed: a place where you could, say, disassemble your bicycle, amass a modest collection of pinhole cameras, breed silkworms or make bombs. It's a nerd's paradise, a geek's redoubt, the set of a reality-TV show with only one contestant and no viewers. What would the cameras spy? A colourless room, three metres by two, into which have been crammed two desks, an armchair, a filing cabinet and several sets of cheap bookshelves. There are perhaps 1,500 volumes, a good 100 of those stacked on the desk by the window. Also - between the notebooks, magazines, Post-its and unread press releases from galleries and publishers - enough paper to turn me, seated at the centre, into one of those grisly post-spontaneous-combustion photographs within about half an hour. Nothing left but a blackened foot. Fortunately, the little brass ashtray on the shelf to my left has gone unused since I moved in.
The shed has replaced a summer house inherited from the previous owners of the house at the other end of the garden. I wrote a book in it, sharing the space with countless spiders and some weird little centipedes that would suddenly appear on my desk, writhing. I tried heating the old summer house, but the thing was full of holes. Mid-December, some friends texted me from a beach in Australia. I was in the shed, and I couldn't feel my feet. I gave up last spring, the book finished, after I looked around one day to find a field mouse peering at me from behind the OED.
When I tell people that I work in a shed at the bottom of the garden their first question is whether it rotates to follow the sun, like George Bernard Shaw's. It doesn't. Nor does it look out, like Dylan Thomas's spartan hut at Laugharne, on an inspiring natural vista, unless you count the compost bins. It's not full of endearingly eccentric bric-a-brac, like the dilapidated sheds that Roald Dahl and Philip Pullman used to write in, and I don't ascend a picturesque turret in the mornings, like Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst. I am wholly immune to the romance of the writer's rural retreat. Nor do I respond too well to the one-man-and-his-shed jibes: I do not use my shed, in traditional suburban fashion, to get away from my perfectly lovely partner. And, no, I couldn't live in it if she threw me out of the house.
Still, in the six months since it arrived - a big green wooden box that resembles somewhat an old railway carriage - I have begun to wonder what fundamental fantasy of mine it is meant to fulfil. There is a venerable tradition of philosophical shed-dwelling. Pascal once said that most of the world's ills could be cured if we would just learn to sit quietly in a room. Descartes concocted his cogito while huddled alone in a tiny well-heated room. Heidegger built his wooden hut as a retreat from the supposed banality of urban life. A book has just arrived with photographs of him posing at his Black Forest hideaway in the late 1960s. What an old phoney: his study is spotless, and I don't believe a word of this stuff about things being more authentic in the heart of the heart of the country.
There's nothing Heideggerian about my shed. I prefer the formulation of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote that a hut was a dream house, a place of solitude that contained a cosmos. Writers' sheds have something in common with the perfectly enclosed dwellings and vehicles of classic science fiction: you can go anywhere in them and still stay at home. Think of the spacecraft and submarines in Jules Verne, HG Wells's time machine, Doctor Who's Tardis. They are all really luxury sheds, intimate spaces from which to explore or invent the universe: infinite riches in little rooms. And they're not so masculine: what is Virginia Woolf's "room of one's own" if not a machine for making more time?
Which thought brings me down to earth again. Aren't I actually just another atomised home worker: one of a growing population apparently happy to save our bosses millions by supplying our own office space, equipment and even tea bags? Aren't we all wasting away at the end of the garden, in the converted spare room, at the hastily cleared kitchen table? Shouldn't we get together? We could all turn up at a cafe in the middle of the day, looking like zombies: pallid and twitchy, and lacking certain social skills. I'd break out now, but it's warm and dry in here, and I've got a bit more pottering to do.
Brian Dillon is an editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture. His memoir, In the Dark Room, is out in paperback, and he is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives