LADY Gaga, great writers, and their sheds: how I taught them all they know...A Blogbrary special!Two hot news items have appeared of late in the exciting world of Libraries...
1) A colleague has just taken up ownership of his first shed (always a significant moment in a young chap's moral & spiritual development)
AND...
2) My old pal
Lady Gaga has - this very week - announced that
"I live halfway between reality and fantasy at all times...in that way I am a Librarian". Splendid girl, I tutored her in the finer arts of cataloguing and fashion, you know...
Regular followers of the Blogbrary will know that, along with my admiration for the work of this popular American
chanteuse, I am also something of a 'shed buff', and - in my own modest way - I like to think that I have, in days gone by, helped to nurture the careers of some of the world's finest shed-based writers...
Well, as my old pal
Virginia Woolf confided to me back in in 1929 "
a busy household full of visitors, children, and other distractions is simply no place for a writer"...So, off she tootled to her writing shed, her "
Room of one's own" as I described it at the time.
Naturally, being a shed-dweller himself, the Blogbrarian has always been keen to promote the delights of outdoor writing to other fellow pen-men (and dear, dear Virginia). Indeed, I like to imagine that I was, in no small measure, responsible for my old pal
Charles Dickens' late burst of creative endeavour once he'd moved into his 'Swiss-style chalet' down the road at Gad's Hill. (Do you know, dear readers, you can still see it on view today in Rochester High Street...it's what we in the trade call a "wooden whopper", and - I confess - made me a tad envious).
George Bernard Shaw had a beauty, a wonderful wooden octagonal summerhouse in his grounds..."
Why not build a revolving version, Bernie old pip?" said I one time "
then it could follow the passing track of the sun"."Capital idea, Bloggers old boy" he said
"it shall be done!"Old
Roald Dahl's garden hut was a little small for my liking (and, if truth be told, somewhat spartan), but it seemed to do the trick.
Dear
Dylan Thomas, of course, had his
'wordsplashed hut' (what times we had there!!!)...His boathouse, was originally built I seem to recall, in the early 1920s to house a rather splendid old Wolseley motor automobile.
Poop poop!
Mark Twain (sound fellow) had his sister build a shed for him to write in, and soon his 'cosy nest' was alive with the sound of quill pen scraping parchment.
And dear, dear old
Henry Thoreau - and his Walden - was widely considered by us in the know as the shed writer's writer
par excellence.Sound chaps, all...Not forgetting poor Virginia, of course. And my old pal, Lady Gaga.
Well, right-ho! That's it. (Do let me know if you have any comments, of course). It's off to work for me now, and on with my exquisitely cut
meat-jacket and tie.
"Uh ra, uh ra ra!" as we so often say in the
Senior Librarians Common Room.
Toodlepip.
