'This was bread in the shed, luck in the muck, gold in the mould...'

Cavanman's Diary

I don’t know if this happens in the real world or just on television and in novels but, every now and then, you hear of someone landing an unexpected windfall that changes their lives forever.

It could be a long lost, hermetic bachelor grand-uncle – or some such relation – passing away after a lifetime in America or England and leaving them millions in stocks and shares. Or an old china plate that’s been lying in a drawer for decades turning out to be the sole missing piece from some valuable century-old collection.

I hope you know the sort of random happenstance event I mean. Well, it gives me great pleasure to report that I had just such an experience last week. This may well be my last Cavanman’s Diary, in fact – from here on in, I’ll probably just be too busy counting my money to file 1,000 words for this page. I know the editor will be reading this and I feel bad breaking the news to her this way but sometimes, things just change suddenly and we have to go where it takes us.

Let me explain. Being a handy type of bloke, on my day off I opted, as per the norm, to indulge in some DIY. The radiators needed bleeding and after a quick YouTube search, I decided I was qualified for the job. All I needed was a pair of vice grips and I knew I definitely had some somewhere.

Now, I should first clarify that my garden shed is not the tidiest. It’s a sort of Bermuda Triangle; something enters and soon it mysteriously drops off the radar forever. It is a maze of cobwebs and discarded cardboard boxes and polystyrene.

There’s the ubiquitous lawnmower, blocking half the doorway, and one whole corner is clogged with the remnants of various short-lived obsessions, most of which have featured in this column at some stage. In a small shed, I have a ping pong table, two kayaks, a set of golf clubs, a loose-stringed tennis racquet, a boxing bag (one gentleman owner, never punched – the bag that is) and a twice-cycled pushbike, the chain stiff with rust.

As a hoarder, you see, I find the very notion of throwing something out reprehensible. There is a bucket with a hole in it (melted by creosote in another successful operation), countless old runners, a moth-bitten Cavan flag and at least two dozen empty paint cans, piled in a Leaning Tower of Piza-type formation beside a large roll of some sort of black rubber stripping, the origin of which I just cannot fathom.

On a rickety shelf, there is a bag of old, dead handballs, which are completely worthless and of no use to anyone, for anything. Hanging crookedly from a nail on the wall, adding a little razzmatazz to this cluttered, dusty scene, is a framed picture of Elvis Presley, which I bought for a fiver at the car boot sale in Virginia. The frame is tattered and flaking; the King himself looks a little fusty, although, on closer inspection, that may be because the photo is from his Caesar’s Palace era and not necessarily a result of the damp.

Anyway, rooting in the shed for this implement, my foot banged against something under a bench. What was this now?

I pulled back the junk around it – an empty wooden crate, the cracked shaft of a yardbrush – and what did I discover only what looked like half a bag of fertiliser, left over from last summer.

In a feverish excitement, I tore back the plastic and there it was, a treasure chest! I couldn’t believe my eyes; a bag of these priceless granules of growth, a little soggy but more or less intact, which I immediately realised, given recent inflation rates, was going to propel my bank balance in a similar direction to the 10-10-20 logo emblazoned on the side.

And that’s not all. Beside it, there was a green plastic petrol can marked ‘STRIMME’ (I presumably ran out of space for the final R) which I shook and discovered was half-full. A double jackpot!

Before I go on, I should explain to readers who are not as racy of the soil as me that the price of fertiliser has rocketed in recent months – and even if you could afford it, which many farmers can’t, it’s very hard to obtain, with co-ops and hardware stores having resorted to rationing it out, like butter in the Emergency.

And as for fuel, well, we all know the score there. Personally, I have taken Eamon Ryan’s “drive slower” advice to a new level; I even free-wheel down hills in order to make it last.

Anyway, here I was, in my hovel of a garage, with a bounty of both. I found myself giddy with optimism; this must have been how the gold prospectors felt, I mused, when digging out a nugget in the Klondike, or the oil men when they struck a gusher in Texas. Or Crossmaglen.

You may be familiar with that TV show, ‘Cash in the Attic’. Well, this was bread in the shed, luck in the muck, gold in the mould. My mind raced with possibilities.

It reminded me of the scene in the Godfather when Vito Corleone was mulling over an offer from a rival gangster to get involved in the drug business. “What do you think, Santino?” he asks his eldest son.

“There’s a lot of money in that white powder, Pop,” comes the reply from ‘Sonny’. Those exact words were buzzing through my brain as I surveyed my new-found loot. Like the Corleones, Vegas, here we come!

The challenge then became how to translate this fortuitous find to hard lucre. I could set up as a wholesale fertiliser distributor, I reckoned, or maybe I could follow the drug kingpins’ model, handing out free samples in order to get the locals hopelessly hooked before ratcheting up the prices.

The next concern, I suppose, will be security. I have installed CCTV and have posted the dog on round-the-clock sentry duty as I plan my next move; if word gets out about all this fertiliser and two-stroke petrol, my shed is sure to be a target for burglars. None of this, though, comes cheap.

After that, I reckon, now that I have acquired, quite literally, what start-up, entrepreneurial types call ‘seed capital’, I will have to set up a meeting with the Enterprise Board. Then, there will be wealth management companies coming after me and of course, the tax man will want his cut.

And if the weather changes, maybe the demand for nitrogen and potassium and all that jazz will fall and if the government get their finger out, fuel prices just might too. I wonder… You spend all your life dreaming of striking it rich and when it happens, it’s a whole lot of hassle.

It turns out that the saying may well be true; the grass is always greener on the other side, fertilised or not.

The more I think about it, the more I feel I might just stick with this column for another while yet. You know what, I no longer want to be a ‘bag-stuff’ baron. The simple life is for me.

To any hard-pressed farmers reading this, I’ve changed my mind, unless one of you wants to buy some old handballs, runners or cracked yardbrush shafts, or to avail of a special offer on black rubber stripping, in which case, I’m all ears.

And to the editor, forget I mentioned it at all…