Shed Quest

22nd January
Over the winter I have been looking for potting sheds; we need two similar garden sheds for the filming. One to put in the kitchen garden to film exteriors and a larger one that could accommodate lights, cameras and people for the interior shots.

I imagined there’d be plenty of ramshackle sheds knocking around in France that the owners would like to replace with a new one and I started asking around. Scary Eena told me that Mr Potato Head was planning to pull one down at the woodyard, so I went to see him. The shed in question was currently housing two large agricultural vehicles, from what I could tell by the prongs and blades sticking out through the piles of newspapers, rags, pallets and plastic bags.

I realised that although I’d registered that there were sheds in the area, the ones around here were quite particular to the region, some had at least one stone wall and many had tiled roofs.

It wasn’t looking good in France and I’m back in the UK for a visit. Someone has tipped us off about a disused allotment that is sited alongside a motorway and is to be built on. Enquiries were made and we have been given permission to take away as many sheds as we like.

A disused allotment is a melancholy sight, the weedy plots still in neat rows and next to each the lovingly customised shed of it’s former gardener. Most of the sheds on this patch had started off with the same basic form but have branched out as successive incumbents added porches, verandah’s and windows. Some of these places looked as though they’d been lived in and it wasn’t hard to imagine the community that must’ve existed here once, annoying each other with their barbeque parties and letting their lots grow too weedy or planting something invasive.

We found a pair of fairly plain ox-blood red sheds one the bigger brother to the other and made an arrangement to come back at a later date and dismantle them.

Mr Potato Head's Nudie Girls

3rd September
I'm going to our local woodyard a lot these days to get timber for the film sets. The yard rambles across several properties, involving about four houses, one of which is a burnt-out shell and used as storage. The whole estate is strewn with wood in every state, huge tree trunks some sliced into planks, pile upon pile of structural timbers and everywhere the flotsam of rotten pallets and bits of packaging. The establishment is run by a sweet-faced man who looks like a potato, and his father, an old man in shorts and a bandaged knee. The mother is short and fierce. If I turn up and neither of the men are to be seen she calls their attention by shrieking like a film heroine suddenly coming cross a horrid murder.

When I’ve selected my timber I have to wade through yapping dogs to get to a tiny office where I wait while the son laboriously writes out a bill in copperplate handwriting. The office is stuffed and the walls are completely stuck with bits of paper. The most prominent items are the girly calendars. There are about four of them, all a bit out of date. Only two pages are visible because they are hung in two sets and doubled up, one calendar over another. The girls have been changed each time I go in. Father and son seem to be continuously locked in combat and I wonder at what point, after years of arguing over which Honey is to be on view, they decided to have a girl each.