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Slow Life

Alex James

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Second-hand heaven

The tent had been a big hit over the summer. They called it a tent, but it was big enough for elephants and tightropes: a big top as big as a ballroom and just as plush, lined and interlined like a lush pair of curtains, certainly ridiculous, but pretty and practical. Our friends from LA had been back here for summer. They pitched it in their garden in June and didn’t strike it until September, more or less living in it on rugs and cushions for the whole time they were here, in the garden but out of the rain. We’d been to two parties in it, parties where everyone agreed it was a brilliant tent, and wanted one, especially when we found out how much they’d paid for it. It seemed a remarkable bargain — less to buy than to hire.

They left a couple of weeks ago — back to LA to boss impossible actresses around. Then last week we had an email saying that the tent was ours for 500 quid. They were worried it wouldn’t survive the winter in their shed. ‘The pegs are in a big wooden box on the right,’ said the email. ‘The sides are in the Cambodian canoe with the poles. Roof is on the floor in plastic in front of the tractor.’ There was a fully comprehensive list of instructions, for finding the tent, retrieving the tent, how to get the number for the guys who come and put it up and take it down, two combination codes for gates, the code for the lock on the shed.

Having followed all the instructions carefully, I found myself standing in another man’s shed on Sunday morning. It had taken a bit of fiddling around with a cigarette lighter to find the lights, a friendly web of gimcrack wires snaking off in all directions, and even with the lights on it was quite dim and mysterious in there: a damp cave of brilliant curiosities. No, that couldn’t be a Cambodian canoe. It was almost certainly a punt. I lifted some tarpaulin. Still no canoe, but instead a gleaming Land Rover, a miniature one. Wow, some shed, a whiff of the second world war about it, asbestos roof and sides, rickety doors and cute wooden windows, all neatly packed and jammed to the gunwales with treasure. It’s not normally possible to have a shed that isn’t full, and this one was no exception, full of every big boy’s toy imaginable: at least two perfectly parked ride-on lawnmowers, a gleaming mini tractor and topper attachment, what looked like a couple of Harleys under dust covers at the far end.

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