I’ve spent the entire year of the pandemic in my garden shed

With two of us in a one-bedroom flat, there’s little alternative if I want some privacy to do my job

(Julia Bell)

My garden shed has at various times been a writing studio, a summerhouse, and storage facility; but more than anything it’s a statement that this girl can put together a wooden building from a kit bought off the internet with scrappy instructions in Flemish, Dutch and English. "You’ll never use it," said the mean neighbour who came to the garden party I threw to celebrate it, and jealously spilt wine on the floor. But if I could build myself a shelter, I reasoned, I stood a chance of surviving an apocalypse.

Fast forward 10 years and the fascia board keeps falling off, the building lists a little on its foundations, and there are many spiders, but I now use this space almost daily. With two of us in a one-bedroom flat, there is little alternative if I want some privacy to do my job. From an embodiment of a room of one’s own, used in the spring and summer for my own writing practise, suddenly the shed-office is an outpost of the university, a very public space as well as a private one.

In those first weird weeks last year, it was hard to know what was happening. There was a palpable sense of disease, eerie in its intensity, of a flat-footed government caught out by the need to actually take care of its population. The school my garden backs on to was suddenly silent. Through the thin walls of the shed, I missed the punctuation of school break times, the kids tearing around, yelling, talking, playing, beefing with each other.

Meanwhile, my hair thinned, I slept badly, I stockpiled, started gardening furiously, growing vegetables again for the first time in years. I felt bad for anyone without access to outside space. Especially as the weather was – at least in April and May – glorious. We were OK in our bubble but underpinned by nagging anxiety. How much worse was this going to get?

I made sourdough, banana bread, hummus, I ordered stuff off the internet, at first tentatively, then in some kind of bored orgy of consumption, the recycling bin overflowing with packaging, aware that all around me a huge logistical change was accelerating. Key workers were suddenly revealed to be our delivery drivers, the staff in the supermarkets, the workers in the warehouses, alongside the staff in the NHS who were working with improvised protection and without adequate pay and support.

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To begin with, we knew no one who had it, but as the year dragged on, it was friends of friends, acquaintances on Facebook, then actual friends. Then the neighbours in the upstairs flat got it and for a few weeks it felt very close, especially when the London Ambulance Service left a note to say they had disinfected the hallway.

Being in the sunniest spot in the garden, the shed gets too hot in the afternoons and I spent the summer with the fan on, attending training courses and figuring out how to put my entire MA online. I edited a new draft of my book Radical Attention, although the publication was delayed from May to November. Everything felt slow and treacly, I missed so many things – the company of friends, the sea, swimming, travel, my family. I dusted off my old bike, cycled into an empty Central London amazed by the silence – I could hear birdsong echoing across the Thames.

Autumn was restive, aside from Black Lives Matter protests and the US election. Here in North London, some teenagers staged a protest in the local park, I could hear them chanting from the shed. BLM graffiti mingled with local gang tags and praise for the NHS.

Then came the winter, at which point the shed-office became positively Victorian, even with fingerless gloves and an improvised blanket tent over the heater it wouldn’t get above 12 degrees. It made me wish I’d insulated the shed in the summer, and envious of the better-appointed garden offices that Instagram kept trying to sell me. For a few weeks I gave up and my partner and I tag-teamed between the kitchen and the bedroom.

Now, it’s spring again and I’m back in the shed, I feel lucky to have it, and grateful to past me for bothering to build it. I can feel things easing up a little, as I could feel them closing down a year ago. At least now we have a better sense of what we’re facing, and the kids are back at school.

One of the most moving moments came on Friday, as the break-time noise was reaching a crescendo, a group of them spontaneously broke into "Bohemian Rhapsody", at first a few lines: "Mamaaa, life had just begun" and then rising across the playground as more and more of them joined in, "Mamaa, oooh" and "Sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all". They sounded both mournful and glad to be alive, and what more powerful a way to express this than in group song, belting out Freddie Mercury’s melodramatic hymn to fatalism. It caught me off guard for a second, and I found myself singing along with an unexpected lump in my throat. What a year.

Julia Bell is a writer and reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. Her new book, Radical Attention, is out now with Peninsula Press