A shed-load of plans to make the most of my inner sanctum
The Real Mackay by Dan Mackay
I’ve decided to make 2025 a year of pilgrimage. Everyday, regardless of the weather, I intend to walk to the bottom of my garden and unlock the door to my new shed. All 10ft by six feet of it.
Then I will enter my inner sanctum. A place where I can escape far from the madding crowd.
Yes, it’s still a work in progress but one I am quite excited about. I’ve bought the wood for a new workbench - replete with a lovely grained Far Eastern plywood work top. I’ve got big plans!
But, essentially, it’s a place of privacy. I can drink tea, mind my own business and quietly tell the rest of the world to do something similar!
I’m going to let loose my creative juices. And have already bought some resin moulds and intend to flood the market with medieval chess sets – the sort that was uncovered somewhere in Lewis and now sits pride of place in the National Museum.
Naturally I will claim to have made a similar discovery on Reiss beach after a storm. The high-quality silicone “artefacts” can easily be stained and varnished to give an antiquated patina.
It will put Caithness back on the map as folk from the south flood the county, much as the NC500 attracted travelling hordes. Only this time a new generation of relic detectorists will marvel at our newly discovered heritage.
I did consider, albeit briefly, training to be an athlete, having had a chance encounter the other day with the inspiring Bill MacDonald. Now an octogenarian I would guess, Bill regaled me with stories of his field and track days as a sprinter at Edinburgh’s Powderhall stadium. Now a greyhound racing venue the place has, literally, gone to the dogs.
But the thought of the bumbling New Yorker Fielding Mellish, a Woody Allen character who appears in court for using the word “thighs” in mixed company, somehow unleashed my inbuilt neurosis. You should see my legs! Or not. And that court room scene in the 1971 comedy film Bananas when Mellish (played by Allen) claimed “this trial is a travesty, a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery, of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham”. Or something like that. It would make good reading, though, in a Groat report from Wick Sheriff court…
And, in any case, I much prefer a more sedentary approach to life. So I will make that daily pilgrimage to my shed.
Where, among my other creative projects, I intend to immerse myself in Steampunk craftwork. This is where the true artistic liberal flights of fancy will abound! Albeit based on an inherent fakery in the creation of eccentric retro futuristic devices that, on the face of it, combines Victoriana with fantasy world – a sort of dystopian mind boggle!
I already have eyes on my grandson Harris’s Lego set which I will dip into (when he is not looking) and incorporate sections with vintage radio parts, old gear cogs, broken watches and electric circuit boards – some of it spray painted to give a metallic look – all to create alluring weird and wonderful gizmos. Win win, eh?
After all: Cometh the hour. Cometh the Shed Man.
