Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed,

TANYA GOLD

Homesick – Why I Live in a Shed Riverrun £16.99 Catrina Davies lives in a blue shed near Land’s End. She is vague about the exact location, possibly because she lives there illegally. Her home isn’t classed as a dwelling, a categorisation that baffles Davies, who is a student of real life: the kind where you eat the vegetables you grow and eat the fish you catch.

I think I can work out where it is because I moved to the far more urban Newlyn, ten miles to the east, two years ago. I work so hard to pay the mortgage on the house in Newlyn that I often see nothing of Cornwall beyond the computer screen; sometimes so much so that I might as well have stayed in London. I wonder if Davies would think me a fool for coming to west Cornwall, looking for exactly what she has, but with the prison of borrowed money I treat as something to be grateful for. Home can be a hearth – she is very interested in precise definitions, and pores over her immense dictionary – but it can also be a trap.

This is a wonderful book. You would think that a story about the renovation of a shed would appeal to the John Lewis shopping classes, and that is true. But Homesick is so much more. It’s a personal memoir that investigates how we fetishise the idea of home and, in doing so, misunderstand its meaning, and deny it to others. It’s a book about living; about hunger, and greed.

Davies opens with the shed being robbed: everything she made, torn from her. Next comes the story of her leaving a rented boxroom in Bristol for the shed in Polgigga; why work every hour for a home that isn’t a home? The shed was her father’s office in the 1980s. When he went bankrupt – he was an architect; he literally made homes – only the shed remained.