I built a three-storey den so tall the local council made me take it down

01Lived

As a boy I was an only child, left to my own devices a lot. I filled the time by making things. Spaceships out of matchboxes and other odds and ends, glued together on the kitchen table. And in the garden, a den. Not a sheet over a washing line. A proper wooden build on stilts, three storeys of it, and it kept growing until it was tall enough that the council got involved and told me to take it down. The strange thing was who used it. I had the most diverse mix of friends you could imagine. The squeaky-clean ones, and a much rougher lot from the other end of things. Different worlds, and both of them in that den, sometimes at the same time. Nobody needed an invitation. I'd built it, and it belonged to whoever turned up. And I noticed something even then, though it took me decades to understand it. For me, the joy was in the building. Imagining the scenes, the scenarios, what the thing could be while it was still becoming. Once it was finished, I barely played in it. The spaceships were the same. Built with total absorption, then set aside.