Age 55 and this summer, I finally fulfilled a lifetime ambition as Queenie and I built our first shed. All 6ft by 4ft of imported wood, gritty roof felt and @wickes essentials, it’s the perfect potter base, a space to call our own as I get to reconnect with a certain slice of childhood nostalgia, the smell of compost, paint tins and odd sods dragging me back to those Essex days.

My dad and I are complicated, my parents’ divorce, my queerness and our possible shared neurodivergent wiring a barrier to a normal family life. But those shed days back in those childhood days are cherished moments of what I believed back then family should be. Bonding over our shared desires for pottering in peace, the garden tools hanging on the wall, our ironmongery in order, an escape pod from maternal reality as we hunkered down with the bits and the bobs as we hoped these Saturday afternoons would last forever. Of course, he will probably not remember it like that, things are always different through the eyes of a then-undiagnosed autistic child but the joy I feel when I’m just able to sit, to be, in the shed me and Queenie built is one I know will see me through some of life’s darker days.

Yeah, it’s just a shed and right now it smells of elderly geraniums and rooting compound and those onions we never got round to planting but it’s ours. The shed for the family I now know is how it should be. Queenie and me.

Thanks to our neighbours for the understanding, Wickes for the proper fittings, @1btnradio for the building tunes, @midland for the pottering soundtrack and @djqueenjosephine for the grit we needed to get it done.

#shedlife#lesbians#wildbloodandqueenie#brighton