Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder!

While out attempting to get rid of some of my middle age spread I spotted this beaut ..... and as the saying goes beauty lies in the eye of the beholder! A battered and bent tin builders hut ...... a childhood dream! 

Old enough to belong to that generation of children that got chucked out after doing their homework, my ''gang'' and I headed off to the ''golfie'' (our local golf course) to build ''gang huts''. At this point I have to say that our idea of a gang was more Enid Blyton than The Krays, Peaky Blinders or the Crips and Bloods and our only involvement with crime was nabbing a couple of biscuits to munch in our makeshift huts. On the golfie, we hid in Whins and bushes and did our best to make shelters with sticks and twine, so this metal  hut with its shutters (and perhaps a door) would have been a vast improvement. I was a dab hand with sticks and twine having spent what seemed like years building ''a latrine'' at the girl Guides. To be honest, I didn’t know what a Latrine was and I don’t think our Guide Leader did either but we spent every Tuesday night with a pile of sticks and twine and although I now know what a Latrine is I fail to see how what we built could have been used as one! The Groundhog Latrine building however put an end to my Girl Guide career and I became a British Red Cross Cadet where we at least were taught how to use a bed pan. 

Reading Alfred Hitchcock's ''The Three Investigators'', with their hideout in a scrapyard made the desire to have a secret place to meet even worse, or live on a houseboat (there are a couple of great ones here on the Hunte!). Secret places were a fascination in childhood and even now, the stories this hut could tell might make your hair stand on end. Now it lies rusting and forgotten beside this pile of equally forgotten stone slabs, which provided me with a raised area to sit while sketching! After last summer’s insect attack which left my already ample behind double the size (I'm allergic) I'm always happy when I don’t have to sit on the ground. 

Beauty definitely lies in the eye of the beholder and to my 10 year old self, this would’ve been a corker!