I’ll start with a question: eh-hem: does anyone out there make a power drill with a petrol motor? If not, why not? Not that my old rechargeable electric is insufficient in any way, just that… just that… just that I like petrol engines. The smell, the noise, the mess, oil down my arms, petrol over my shoes, exhaust fumes in my face, trying to drill guide holes with something powered by a Mustang V8 block weighing more than the shed, I love it all. So I wondered.

Yet there’s one little problem I do have with my electric screwdriver which I share with Tesla owners. When the charge runs out, yer fucked. On Sunday, when ‘project shed’ started in earnest, I had to assemble all the panels. Screw them together. Then screw them some more. Then screw them to the floor, then screw something else to something else. And with 3 screws left, the fucker died. Just went into slooooow-w-w-w-w m—o—o—-o—-o—- and then it was over. Ok, I should have a spare battery, peutetre, but I’ve never needed one in the previous 15 years I’ve owned the tool. But you see, if it was petrol… ahhhhh. Yes, I KNOW that can run out too, yet I have a little ‘can’ made of special plastic and there’s always petrol in there.

So the shed is in mid-assemblage, as you will doubtless note and even more doubtless, be impressed. Yeah, right. The colour was (obviously) Mel’s idea. But I like it. And we stole it from Lila’s house, left over from when her shed was painted.

Yet its not all plain sailing. It’s an exercise in problem solving. And the problem is this: the shed is shit. Not total shit. Just… moderate. The panels don’t marry up ‘perfectly’, the heights of things vary, some bits are warped a bit this way and that. So today, one of my long… errrr… bits of wood, I’ll call it, turned out to be about 1/3rd of an inch too long. Grrrrrrrr. I could saw it, but that’s painful. I could plane it, but that’s worse. Or…

I could get out my circular saw. The world’s most vicious piece of equipment. It can remove an arm in 3 tenths of a second. Fingers wouldn’t even register. It’s old and dusty because I never use it. A builder left it here decades ago. But plug it in and holy shit its so brutal its almost spiritual. Took 1.8 milliseconds to remove the offending wood.

And now I’ve decided, finally, on my first tattoo. I’m going to have it across my chest, just above nipple level. Which is a bit lower than when I first decided on having a tattoo there, I grant you. It will proclaim: I FUCKING LOVE POWER TOOLS!!! In honour of the shed.

Jesus was a carpenter. Got ‘furloughed’ big time. Then unfurloughed himself. Then got furloughed again.

Happy almost penultimate shed-building day.

A xxxx