I don´t know how long Catriona had been asking me to clear all the crap out of the loft. It was obviously a job that needed doing but, largely out of laziness, I slipped into the old “out of sight out of mind” mindset and kicked the idea into the long grass.

You wouldn´t believe just how much crap we´re talking about. This stuff is the accumulated detritus from the two decades of family living in this house. There were children´s boots up there that used to be worn on little feet that now belong to twenty-somethings and whose owners are currently using them to traipse the streets of Taiwan and Hong Kong. There were broken exercise machines up there. There were remnants of the various fads that came and went: roller skating, horse riding, electric guitars, model railways. And then there are ornaments that are surplus to needs, ancient electrical appliances, old photos, videos, books and on and on and on.

So much stuff was up there in the loft there that it was not possible to walk, let alone crawl, from one end to the other. Maneuvering, even over a short distance, was like playing a game of Twister. Progress all comes down to balance and contortionism. 

Catriona is very smart and she understood that, in a battle between her reason and persistence and my inherent lethargy, there was only likely to be one winner. So she changed tack just a few weeks ago and, in a stroke of genius, planted a shiny new thought in my palaeolithic brain. She suggested that the loft, instead of a garbage heap, was a space that was just crying out to be converted into a man cave: a place to tie flies, to listen to music, avoid chores, to paint watercolours of fish, to have the odd drop of liquor on the sly, or to simply sit and read.

Man cave! Yeah!!

So I dragged a half a tonne of assorted detritus out of the loft and we jointly examined it and decided what we could part company with. That which was to be kept would be boxed up and pushed into the recesses.

It is now a few weeks on and my cave is shaping up nicely. I fixed up some lights and found a nice big table to help me to resurrect my interest in painting. On another little compact table there is a vice for tying flies. And there is comfy chair for reading. I am sitting on that chair right now as I type these words. In the background, from a bluetooth speaker on my fly tying desk, John Hiatt is singing Adios to California.

What´s not to like?

Man cave! Yeah!!