Netball And More About Sheds

Netball! Of all the extra sports she might have taken up, it’s Netball. Sarah now spends all Saturday afternoon in a school gym in Rye being bellowed at by big sweaty women and bouncing balls around. I expected her to set off wearing giant navy blue pants and a pleated skirt but no, these days apparently one can wear cool sports gear even for netball. So – boxing, yoga, circuit training, route marching, and now netball. There must be a word for husbands who are widowers to fitness.

And another one for husbands whose sheds continue to be over-run. You will remember the Law of Sheds – the maths were explained here in this very blog on the 22^nd December 2011. It goes roughly like this. If X is the volume of a shed, Y is the amount of stuff you need to put in it, Z is the amount of stuff you don’t yet own, and A is the amount of time it takes to build a shed, then A+1 = X(Y + Z) – in other words, it’s full a day after completion with stuff you didn’t know you had and the stuff you needed to build it for which exactly matches the volume of the shed. As I explained then I have – or had – 16 sheds. I’ve now got 18. Of the new ones – very smart brick and timber and tile sheds – one has all my Y (stuff) that has been dislodged from the barn in order to accommodate Sarah’s growing empire of Y (white goods needed for glamping). The other has all of Sarah’s Z. Where that came from I don’t know. Meanwhile, the barn – formerly all mine, and a while ago,reorganised to accommodate a couple of Sarah’s ‘things’ – now has an entire laundry, cold store and kitchen in it.

I am now building a side extension to one of the tractor sheds so that I can get some perfectly normal farm related Y (in this case hay) under cover. If we get any hay of course. As we all know, since it has been headline news since Christmas, it has rained all year. This means that no-one has got any hay cut, and the chances of ever getting it done are vanishingly small. I know summer arrived for the whole of last week, but that’s not enough. So you never know – I might just be building a shed in anticipation of a lot of Y which doesn’t materialise, at which point I confidently expect a load of Z to arrive. Probably Sarah’s private sports hall.