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Have you ever heard of a ‘sod off shed’? No, I hadn’t either until two kindergarten friends from the UK turned up, one from the days of hand-knitted mohair cardigans and patent leather party shoes and the other from clandestine visits to the rocks on the Italian Riviera to hang out with the sons of Nervi fishermen.
“Your mother did not approve of Claudio” she said, as we studied the black and white photos of our Summer holiday all those years’ ago. In his skimpy togs, that left nothing to the imagination, and abs to die for, I could see why. “What a fab time we had. It was brill!”.
I smiled at the words ‘fab’ and ‘brill’, words I haven’t heard since I went to see the Beatles at Finsbury Park, they too in black and white, when I screamed solidly for 2 hours, in my faux leather skirt and my knee high socks on which I had embroidered “Paul” in green silk thread.
A photo of my other friend, from London in the 1970′s, cracked us up. Sitting in a tent at a Grateful Dead concert, her cheeks puffed out like a hamster and her eyes gazing into the beyond, an old Afghan coat keeping her warm and a joint the size of a pork sausage in her right hand, she looked more dead than alive. ”Cor blimey, you could roll half a dozen joints with one that size!” someone said.
I haven’t been to England since 1985 and then it was just to pick up a jar of Marmite and quickly get on a plane back to the US. I had forgotten how posh people from there sound, the precision in the pronounciation, the understatedness of the language, the inbuilt sang froid of the - “oh bother boots!” rather than the Kiwi ”fa-ah-ah-kung hell!”.
When my car fell into a ditch, on loan to friends who had celebrated Easter by drinking a bottle of whiskey and not paying attention, I told my friends that I was going to banish them to the garden shed to sober up. ”You’re sending them to the ‘sod off shed’” my friend said, in a Somerset accent. ”That there is the ‘sod off shed’” and she pointed to the garden shed.
We watched the antics of the drunken sods, in their shed, from a tiny window in a bathroom in the top floor of my house. If someone had taken a photo, it would show 3 older women, all wearing spectacles, creening their necks for a better look. ”Look!” one said “they’re stroking each others’ arms in some kind of martial art dance”. ”Yes, whiskey makes you do funny things” I said, remembering the first and last time I drank whiskey, finding myself sitting naked on my parent’s sofa between two other naked bods, and I still can’t remember what happened.
In ”The Hurt Locker” – the biggest ‘sod off shed’ of them all – the men drink whiskey and punch each other, so my friends and I became extra vigilant when the martial art stroking turned into wrestling and there were thuds emanating from the shed. One sod disappeared rather suddenly from view, felled to the ground not by speed and force of muscle, but by inibriation and the all-consuming desire to lie down no matter where.
I tiptoed to the ‘sod off shed’, and peeked around the door. I half expected a gruff voice – “sod off” – as I braced myself. I was quite used to the garden shed, but a ‘sod off shed’ has a meta identity, a bit like the ‘naughty step’ or the ‘time out room’.
“Is he alive?” one of my friends asked, when I returned to the house. A nice pot of tea had been made as is customary in alarming situations. “Well, I think so”, I replied “he seems to be breathing and someone has covered him with a quilt and put his head on a pillow, and there’s a bowl of oysters by his head and a mug of black coffee.”
There was a ‘sod off shed’ in the wonderful film “BOY”, where the man of the house hangs up his gang patch and is immune to the magic powers of his youngest son, Rocky. It is not only a place one gets sent to, it is also a place from where one can tell others to “sod off”, when they call you for dinner or to ask you to bring in the washing.
Some bloke made a fortune by writing a book about blokes and their sheds, with stunning colour photographs of men in shorts in front of garages or tumbledown wooden shacks they call their own. I am not sure if mention was made of the ‘sod off shed’, but just in case, I offer this photo for inclusion in any future edition.
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