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Like thousands of British men, I have a shed in my garden. It’s where I keep my tools, some books, and where I retreat from time to time if I need some solitude. I’m very proud of it, because I built it myself. A man needs a shed, in other words. But there are sheds and there are sheds. Take Kevin Kicks from Oxfordshire, in central England. On Sunday he went to his shed, like tens of thousands of other British men enjoying a day off in the last days of summer. The difference is he then drove it at 88 miles an hour along a disused airfield runway. Kevin, whose shed is an impressive wooden-planked affair with double-glazed windows and a proper A-framed roof, mounted it on a van chassis and joined a few dozen other people with frankly weird tastes. Whilst Kevin was muscling his way down the runway – he didn’t quite break the record, as far as I can tell – another fellow-eccentric mounted a jet-propelled shopping trolley and blasted his way to a world record of 61.18 miles an hour, literally astride a jet turbine engine and strapped to a shopping cart. Matt McKeown, you’re a very brave man. Daft as a brush, of course. If there’s one quality Britons prize above anything else, it’s eccentricity. I should know, I come from a long line of eccentrics. My maternal grandfather, for example, was a large, bombastic former chief of police and a bona fide war hero from World War I, who’d been a boxer in his youth. Not what you would call a subtle man. | 
