uk.rec.sheds was created shortly after May 8th 96 (when the vote passed). It all started some time ago when some threads on the subject of shedding in soc.culture.british led The Master JD to post a "faquette" and, later, Dave Budd to post a joke RFD for the newsgroup. This was picked up by The Guardian's Jackdaw column, and that recognition spurred Dave Budd on to do a real RFD and a subsequent CFV. Eventually the vote came in at 60 for, 25 against, and 1 abstention.
This newsgroup is about sheds: those usually small and usually wooden structures usually found in the garden which usually house a cornucopia of usually useless items and various related structures and spaces, usually. It's not about houses for railway engines, pop groups with silly names, or slang uses of 'shed' which include a derogatory term for vehicles, excessive boozing, and something sexual which we prefer not to enquire into.
The true secret of happiness was to be busy with unimportant things. This is a quote from J B Priestly (probably)
This is the rationale that was posted with the proposed charter in the CFV:
The shed, with its contents and use, is a major archetype within the male psyche; the exigencies of modern life are, however, gradually eroding the typical male's knowledge of the joys of shedding. This may well be contributing to the breakdown of modern society that we see around us every day. Heretofore there has been no suitable forum on Usenet where shedders can gather to pursue the furtherance of shedding. This newsgroup provides such a place, and will hopefully attract many of the unshedded into the hobby.
One keyword here is "whimsy" — not Whimsey, who's a character in a book, or mimsy, which is a state borogroves get into. A dash of surrealism adds a little je ne sais quoi, and you may also detect a hint of gentle nostalgia for the days when brown ale was still widely popular and a piece of 2x4 wasn't actually 50x100mm.
Q: What is a shed?
A: A slight or temporary erection built to shelter something; an out-building. (Ref: The "King's English" Dictionary. Pg 795. Published 1942 by Books of Dignity and Service Ltd.) This esteemed tome shall be deemed to be the official reference for all matters shedish.
Q: How do I know if I am a sheddy person ?
A: If you are, you will know. If much of your life has been spent with the uneasy feeling that you are not quite like other people and if you are inclined to hoarding useless and broken items, coupled with an inexplicable urge to find shelter for these items, you could be sheddy.
Q: Several people have asked if a Nissen hut is a shed.
A: Special conditions apply in this case. Slick, professionally built jobs: no. Tack-ups from materials at hand: yes.
Q: "What is a Mk V-c?" asked Spence.
A: Well, only the most coveted of all sheds, that's all. Muir has one with provenance that implicates Kitchener in its construction. The Mk V-c is the archetypal shed with such features as: a knurled door handle for ease of operation when you have slime on your hands; a very small window with pre-installed grime to reduce light ingress to a minimum; extra 4" nails on the studs to improve hanging capacity; downwardly adjustable headroom to ensure that no owner shall be able to stand fully upright.
Q: Does a tree-house count ?
A: Only inasmuch as they can be seen as a precursor to true shedness and are generally the outward manifestation of a young lad's desire to eventually become fully ensheded.
Q: What materials should I use ?
A: It is generally considered good form to select only those materials known to be esculent to a wide range of insects and fungi. Used has preference over new.
Q: What exterior decoration might I undertake ?
A: None. Dilapidation is the hallmark of fine sheds. Decorative sedulousness is undesirable. Paint, finials, fretwork and the like, are to be included in the nomenclature of contents and one should never consider using them as embellishments. The judicious application of runes is acceptable.
Q: What can I put in my shed ?
A: The key to this is uselessness. If there is a possibility that the item could have a future use, it should not be consigned to the shed the shelter of which must only be offered to the shoddy, worthless, rejected and unusable items in your possession.
Since the original threads and newsgroup got going, we have a few new terms:
tqt (pronounced 'tat', obviously): top quality tat, ie the sort worthy of storage in your shed. Also some derived acronyms such as lgt (low grade tat), lqt (low quality tat), mqt (medium quality tat), and so on.
pshed (pronounced 'shed'): a pseudo-shed, or proto-shed, or even para-shed. Something that isn't a True Shed but has many shed like attributes.
shedoid While a pshed doesn't look like a shed (from the outside) but has shedlike attributes, the shedoid looks like one but isn't.
sheditation The preferred in-shed activity. Often involves entomology, non-linear ratiocination, brunellobibendation, and other things too worrying to mention in this family newsgroup. sheddily available: more accurate then 'readily available' for most sheds.
molish, mantle (as in "I'm going outside Dear to mantle my shed") and teriorate have started being used to mean the construction and erection of sheds and sheddy artifacts.
The collective noun for a number of sheds is currently undecided: 'a dave of sheds' has been put forward, due to the surprisingly high percentage of Daves involved in this newsgroup. Another suggestion was 'an allotment of sheds'but it's thought it may be unwise to overload the word allotment. Other ideas include 'decrepitude' , 'huddle' and similar words.
koans are very popular on some newsgroups. So far we have one:
Is a chain that has rusted to the point of homogeneous rigidity still a "chain" ?
We also have a proverb:
"Oh what a tangled web we weave when a nail snags the wool on your cardigan sleave."
ROT13: Certain words are anathema to shedders. Where it's necessary to use them we tend to use the ROT13 encoding system, which gives rise to: arj (new) jbex and its phonetic version jaybecks, as this one is really nasty (work) obhtug (bought) Some words are just nicer when ROT13's - eg snegvat
The Special Theory Of Shed Space : Details how all True Sheds are linked via a singularity in spacetime. Amongst other things, this theory explains why you can never find that No8 masonry bit (or only when you don't need it). One of its important corollaries deals with that tennis ball that's in the corner of every garage you've ever been in. Also there's some discussion about how shedness spreads beyond the actual shed itself - this may become a General Theory of Shed Space. As physicists deal with the weak and strong nuclear forces, so the master sheddists handle the weak and strong unclear forces and the concepts of the knothole, the knorhole, and the knandhole. Some researchers are now working on a theory of the particles that mediate the weak unclear force, the tuits. The round tuit has been known even to the layman for some time, but there appear to be other 'flavours': the up, down, in, on, right, round, go, and charm. The first 6 of these form the 'get' family, and there's a pattern tuit. Quantum shedding has arrived, and Schroedinger has no idea what state Wayne's cat is in (though Wayne says "It'll be reet").
Our patron saint is Jack Hargreaves, who used to introduce the tv show 'Out Of Town' from an amazing shed full of obscure tools which may come in useful one day. A close second to sainthood is Adam Hart-Davies who is the narrator, pink helmeted cyclist and demonstrator of that other fine TV series "Local heroes". He once said: "There's no doubt that a barrel of gunpowder does serious damage to a garden shed".
Bob Flowerdew has a very sheddy approach to gardening and has been given the title of Lord. One of his mentors, Trevor Bayliss (who invented the clockwork radio) is up for a title but it's not yet finally decided. If you want one of the saints the rest of the world knows about, then Jill Russell reminds me that we more-or-less settled some time ago on St.Jude: Judas Thaddaeus was one of Christ's Apostles and later became known as St Jude. For the next eighteen centuries, however, he was completely ignored. While other saints were invoked daily, hardly a prayer was offered in St Jude's direction.
Ronald Hawke was to be a benefactor from the group after his shed had been stolen from his allotment in Hertford. The group had managed to raise the replacement cost in pledges only to find out that a replacement had already been donated some weeks earlier. In true shed style we never did get a round tuit.
There are some very sheddy books about. One in particular is Stephen Pile's "Book of Heroic Failures", and then there's anything by Tim Hunkin.
There have been several nominations for Official Shed Day. None are entirely satisfactory, but there's always the anniversary of the day the newsgroup was created.
Official drink is brown ale — once widely popular, referred to as BA
Official shed diva is comedienne Jenny Eclair, since her C4 programme "If I Were Prime Minister" in which she said she would make it mandatory: "One man, one shed" [minimum]. What an election winning slogan!
Some have claimed that there's a link between sheds and masculinity. Others point out the similarities between sheds and wombs (low light, separation from the world, a supply of comforts, etc) and, with Freud, believe sheds to be essentially feminine: a retreat to a shed is an exteriorisation of the unconscious desire to return to the womb.
Official euphemism for death is: "his shed door was finally closed"
Official shed clothing: A cardy with holes is nice. One of those brown warehouse coats cuts a dash. Overalls can be very flattering.You can't go far wrong with something that has lots of pockets, especially if some of them are unusually shaped and/or have holes in them.
Official shed food: pork pie (optional pickled cabbage side dish), with (of course) brown ale.
Official shed attitude is slightly grumpy, like Uncle Mort in Peter Tinniswood's books, or your late grandfather (the one in the corner with the pipe and waistcoat).
Official shed units are undecided - and probably undecidable - :
There is the "opened out fag packet" representing a thickness of about 0.025" or 4 stroke petrol engine plug gap (CB ignition); fold in two for 2 stroke or CD ignition, and that favorite of TV science programs; the "one bar electric fire" or 1kW.
The furlong/firkin/fortnight system isn't bad: it has the microfortnight (about 1.2sec) and the millifortnight (about 20min). The mass unit is a firkin of water, which I think works out to 90 lbs.
In this system the speed of light is 1.79*10^12furlongs/fortnight and the national speed limit (A roads) is 161280f/f.
According to Malcolm Farmer and Frank Erskine, atomic physics has a unit called the "barn", equal to 10^-15m^2. Wouldn't like to try hitting the door of that one!
The Hubble-barn is a gallon, given a median value of the Hubble constant. This means that drinking a gallon of beer is like emptying a bottle the length of the universe with the cross-sectional area of a medium-sized nucleus. And you thought it was a long way to the Gents.
An appropriate unit of jbex is the barn-yard-atmosphere (9.3*10^-24Joules)
There's also a furlong/farad,Faraday/fortnight system, but its unit of mass, the (Faraday^2*fortnight)/(farad*furlong^2) is impracticably small at about 2.3 atto kg.
Mathematics are best done in 7ths which lends nicely to 3 & 1/7 equalling pork pi.
Any others out there?
Of course, for anything threaded, Whitworth is preferred.
The cobbler's last is an item beloved of all sheddists. It's believed that the 3 armed type actually has a 4th arm orthogonal to the other 3 which extends into hyperspace and is not visible in our 3 dimensional world.
A copy of Exchange & Mart, preferably at least a year old, takes pride of place in many a shed.
Those outside the UK must, of course, make do with their nearest local equivalent. In emergencies it's possible to substitute items such as the 1985 What Camera? Buyer's Guide. Actually any out-of-date catalogue will do, though the more obscure items it has in it, the better.
Various containers partly full of various liquids greatly enhance any shed. The most obvious choices are part used paint cans, but so poorly labelled that in fact you'll never find the right one for that bit of touching up on the dining room wainscoting, or if you do it'll be full of rust.
Most of the real shed experts will have some Hammerite around somewhere. And it's obvious, I hope, that one cannot survive past the age of 30 without owning a can of WD40 or one of the close equivalents, although it's normal to lose the plastic straw.
A collection of tobacco tins full of partially sorted screws, nails, bolts, etc is a must: though some prefer to have the tins and the stuff that ought to fill them, but never quite get around to getting the two together …..
For special storage needs, it's been suggested that a Klein bottle could be made by sewing together two Moebius bands, along their single edge.
C++ is something of a sheddy language: full of bits you don't really need but which might come in useful one day, not easy to get into, and anything you do want will be impossible to find as it will be buried under several layers of inherited classes in an include file called from another include file …..
Frank Sidebottom apparently records his records and radio shows in a shed in his mum's garden.