Two and a half years ago, I wrote a column about how I’d started sleeping in my garden office. No, not because Caroline had kicked me out of the master bedroom, but because we were having the house rewired and the builders needed us to vacate our room at seven o’clock every morning. The move was supposed to be temporary, but I liked the arrangement so much it became permanent. Unfortunately it’s causing a few tensions in the marriage.
Most wives who have had to put with their husband’s snoring for more than twenty years would welcome this set-up, but Caroline is a bit nonplussed. She doesn’t miss the nightly tug-of-war over the duvet, or me trying to sneak in without waking her after a night on the tiles (imagine a hippopotamus in a furniture showroom). Rather, she doesn’t like the idea of me not being in the house in case we suffer a home invasion in the night. Which is a legitimate concern in Acton. A couple of dodgy customers tried to break into my neighbor’s house a few years ago at 3 a.m. and he chased them down the street with a golf club. He was naked and barefoot at the time, but they decided not to tackle him, which was a wise choice.
I pointed out to Caroline that I’m half the man my neighbor is and would be about as much use as a toothless guard dog. Hang on, she said. It isn’t just burglars she’s worried about, but foxes too. Again, a reasonable concern in our neck of the woods. Last year, Caroline was woken in the middle of the night when Mali, our three-year-old cavapoochon, started barking and frantically clawing at the bedroom door. She got up to see what all the fuss was about and found herself eye-to-eye with a fox at the top of the stairs. She screamed and ran into my daughter’s room, who woke up and started screaming too. Eventually Caroline recovered her wits and ventured out on to the landing, by which time Reynard had been chased off by Mali. She searched the house, couldn’t find any trace of him and assumed he must have left the same way he came in.
But when Caroline came down to the kitchen the following morning, the fox reappeared — and judging from the feces covering the floor, he’d been there all night. Mali went crazy again and the fox vanished behind the dresser. At this point, I was summoned from my man cave and ordered to deal with the situation. With considerable effort, I managed to coax Reynard from his hiding place and shoo him into the garden.
In spite of Caroline’s fears, I have stubbornly remained in my lean-to. That’s partly because I just love spending time there. I’ve added insulation and an oil-filled radiator so it’s warmer than the house, and I’ve set up a projector and a screen, turning it into my own private cinema. I have a secret drawer filled with unhealthy snacks that I can munch on while bingeing on box sets.
But the main reason I want to sleep there is because I keep different hours to the rest of my family, often working till three or four in the morning and rarely getting up before 10 a.m. This is the “essay crisis” mentality I acquired at university and haven’t been able to shake since. Unfortunately, with four teenage children, three of whom are still at school, the house turns into a kind of stage farce from about 7:30 a.m., with slamming bedroom doors, screaming rows and the cast running around in a panic trying to find items of clothing discarded the night before. Even with industrial-grade earplugs, it’s impossible not to be woken up, whereas at the bottom of the garden I can sleep uninterrupted for six or seven hours.
The last time Caroline complained that I’d abandoned her to the predators of Acton, I suggested she join me in the shed — “It has a good, strong lock” — but that didn’t wash. “Are you kidding?” she replied. “It’s like a spider convention down there.” Incidentally, arachnids are another thing I’m failing to protect her from. Many a time I’ve been woken in the morning to be told there’s a spider the size of a dinner plate in the bathroom, only to discover some microscopic insect on the windowsill.
Until now, I’ve been sleeping on an expensive inflatable mattress, but I’m on my second one, having punctured the first, and this one has sprung a leak too. I’ve decided to invest in an actual bed, but Caroline isn’t happy about that because it makes the move seem more permanent. I think the solution is a sofa bed so I can pretend it’s a piece of office furniture that’s only occasionally used for another purpose. Either that, or I’ll have to man up. So if anyone can recommend a good sofa bed, email me on toby-young@mac.com.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
