Living In A Garden Shed

For most of my adult life I’ve lived in places where it’s not legally allowed to reside. I’ll write about a couple of them – they’re full-on extreme. The reason I’ve chosen these places is because they’re inexpensive to rent and I can paint pictures in them, noting the need to paint big pictures.

I’ve never lived in a garden shed before, but like you I’ve seen them driving past. They’re better-known name is “cabins”. Usually you see them beside highways in quite ugly precincts known as caravan parks. It’s the Aussie “trailer trash” scenario.

Calling this particular one, and this “park”, anything referencing a garden, however, is blatantly wrong on my part. But it does describe the construction in a quick hit. It’s a garden shed with lining. Sure, add a sink, toilet and shower – but the determining elements are that it’s a one-room little building completely vulnerable to the elements.

As a consequence it’s freezing in winter, literally. I can’t use my hands to do anything unless I sink them in a saucepan of heated water. But the killer, literally, is summer. These things are heat stroke incubators. It’s hotter inside this garden shed on a hot day than it is outside in the sun. That’s a very dangerous thing to experience. Any hot day does it, but during a heat wave when warnings are made public to get out of the direct sun and into shade – and if you’re in the direct sunlight you feel your skin start to burn immediately – then when you do as advised and get into the shade of this garden shed IT’S HOTTER! Yes, you feel the huge increase in heat.

That’s because the thin tin, without insulation, emits the heat through and into the cabin. Then the heat can’t get out. Tiny little windows in the construction are utterly useless. Sometimes it’s physically hard to breathe.

We’re effectively coming into summer now. It’s a hot Spring already.

Makes one shudder. But not from the cold.

This isn’t where I am. Same thing, though.. Lovely, aren’t they?

See those little windows? The wind doesn’t remove the heat because the wind is hot, and heat builds up due to their cheapskate construction faster than any wind can replace it, noting that very little inside air is replaced at all.

As temperatures rise, I wonder how many people will die in them. Will I? And I wonder how many have dies in these death traps since they were allowed to become residential.

Where I am the roads are dirt. So they’re filthy, too. And forget privacy unless you stay hidden in the box.

These things are dehumanizing. And they’re legal, along with jamming them together.

So it is, I live in Gulag B C Block Cell 58.