Suzanne Harrington: Pretending I am an actual hermit — the menopausal woman's dream

Suzanne Harrington: "The idea of fox cubs in the garden is making me more excited than grandchildren."

Great news that the Government has decided you won’t need planning permission to put a posh shed in your garden in which to stash your adult children/granny. 

I’ve been living in mine for more than a year now, and every day is Virginia Woolf day — not only a room of one’s own, but living in a posh shed in the garden means I get to pretend I am an actual hermit — the number-one fantasy of all menopausal women.

Obviously, putting a posh shed in your garden is not a solution to the housing crisis. 

Houses are the solution: building them, filling the empty ones, capping rent, and reframing housing as a basic human right rather than a fetishised tradeable commodity. Also, not everyone has a garden.

Having said that, shed life is heaven. Initially my daughter’s affordable housing solution, when she and the dog moved away, I put my desk in there. Then rugs, lamps, a bookshelf. Then a bed. I was hooked. 

The simplicity of less stuff, the nearness of nature — since the dog moved out, wildlife has moved in.

I’m like a superannuated Snow White, my birdfeeder bringing all the birds to the yard, the hedge by my desk thick with a colony of sparrows who fight like the cast of Eastenders over Lidl birdseed. 

An angry robin. Vicar-like wood pigeons, pecking with dignity at the seeds dropped by the fighty sparrows. Giant seagulls swoop to splash in the washing-up-bowl of water I put out as a bird bath.

Birdwatching out the shed window, instead of working, now takes up most of my day

Lately, a fox moved in. I say in — I mean under. As in, a fox has made a home for herself under my shed. 

Initially, hearing loud unexplained scrabbling at 3am, I called the police, thinking someone was trying to break in. 

'We’re very busy, madam', they said. 'Call back if someone is actually breaking in'.

So I googled ‘do foxes live under sheds’ — and lo, they do. Rather than bothering the police again, I have familiarised myself with the fox lifestyle. 

It’s currently fox romance season, so the fox is out trying to get knocked up, screeching her head off, before doing the loud scrabbling thing under the shed in the middle of the night.

It’s like parenting teenagers — you know you’re going to get woken up at 3am by a rumpus and a kerfuffle, and then everything settles down again. 

Foxes have their cubs in March. The idea of fox cubs in the garden is making me more excited than grandchildren.

Downsizing is a menopause dream. Shedding material stuff... going from a house to a shed, from a dog to a fox. From feeding children to feeding birds.

In the olden days middle-aged lady hermits were burned as witches for refusing to make anyone’s sandwiches anymore, but these days we get to live in posh sheds in the garden and give zero fox about meeting anyone’s needs but our own. 

It is glorious. It is the simple life.