What do to with husbands…

Some people think that husbands should be kept in sheds at the bottom of their gardens. One of my sons remarked that a shed was probably their preferred option to being in the house. I think that depends on the wife. However…

The fact remains that men like their own bit of space, their bit of the world where they can leave a mess, or organise in a way that makes no sense whatsoever to women who would really, really like to just go in and sort the whole area out so it looks nice. My husband has one of these spaces. He calls it his Man Cave. You get to it through the sitting room which opens up onto a conservatory [the old-fashioned plant growing kind with a quarry-tiled floor, not the modern wicker-furniture and coffee table view-of-the- garden kind]. At the end is a locked wooden door. It is always kept locked, and in it is all his tool-stuff, his gadgets, and precious rope.

He soon notices if I have been in there and moved stuff. He puts it back, sometimes silently, sometimes he can’t resist a bit of ‘who has been in my shed?’ Yesterday I left his Stanley knife on the kitchen surfaces. The point is, as he so eloquently puts it, what would happen if you needed a Stanley knife and couldn’t find it because it hadn’t been put back in its right place? I cannot argue with this, but in my defence, I would have put it back eventually.

I have added to the stuff he keeps in his Man Cave. We bought a tent. Not a frame tent – we can’t manage to put those up now we are old. It’s a 4 man thing with a bedroom each end and a communal space in the middle. He has the East wing, and I have the West wing. We are going camping this weekend to try it out. Yes, the wet weekend when there will be nothing but rain all day Sunday. He will be in his element rooting about in his Man Cave, getting his rope and his mallet, his spare tent pegs and such.

And in the tent – he can still have a temporary version of the Man Cave experience, uncluttered by wifey things, like novels and packets of biscuits. He will have enough space to throw his dirty socks in a pile without being moaned at, and his penknife will remain untouched in exactly the right place by the side of the air bed without being moved to a safer area by his wife – I will just zip myself in my section and read…