Family Fortunes: My father built sheds fit for Jesus

When I was growing up in Granagh, Co Limerick, the outdoors was always more important to my father than the indoors. This was reflected in his allergy to our home and his adoration of everything outside it.

Ten of us lived in a small, miserable cottage with an adjoining Taj Mahal of a shed. He always built nice, comfortable structures, one replacing another on the same site. He made big ones, small ones, open-ended ones, enclosed ones, galvanised ones, wooden one and concrete. ones. They were used to store turf, timber, dogs, hens, tractors, tools, furniture, bikes, photographs, letters, antiques and rubbish.

You could find hanging from their wooden beams onions, hammers, holy pictures and, once, a coffee table. The current shed has a gas cooker in one corner and a fully plumbed toilet in another, with a selection of newspapers for one’s perusal.

Had my father built the shed in which Jesus was born, he might never have moved on. He would have, quite happily, whiled away his days in Bethlehem, reading the paper, cooking fried onions on the hob and taking his Massey Ferguson 365 out for a jaunt.

My father never closed doors, internal or external. Like a crazed King Lear, he would flee from the kitchen into the wildness beyond, a multitude of doors flapping in his wake. It was my mother who originally and angrily coined the phrase “bringing the outdoors indoors”.

A constant cold wind blew through our house, and, barring the odd crick in one’s neck or the onset of early arthritis, all 10 of us may be the better for it.

We would love to have your family memories, anecdotes, traditions, mishaps and triumphs. Email 350 words and a relevant photograph if you have one to familyfortunes @irishtimes.com . A fee will be paid