|
The story of The Shed door as
told by Andrew Brown.
"I was playing at a concert
in Yorkshire where, at the back of the
stage, there was a shed door with a strange and beautiful
object hung in its centre. The venue, a village hall, is called
'The Shed', which explained the presence of the door but its
ornament was a different matter altogether. If you can imagine
a silver bowl about two feet in diameter with the centre removed,
leaving a loop of metal three inches wide, you will have its
basic form. On it were hammered many circular depressions round
its entire circumference. It looked very old and early or pre-Christian
in design. Naturally I asked the organiser of the concert what
it was, what did it symbolize? This is what he told me:
The Shed's Sprung and Simmer
2010 Tickets on sale
now!
It was his custom, daily, to
walk his dog by the beck in the village of Brawby, just south
of the North Yorkshire Moors. He was born in the village some
thirty-five years ago, and so each slight rise and fall of the
low-lying landscape, each twist and turn in the beck and each
tree and hedge was intimately known to him - not much was going
to surprise him. On this particular morning he set out for his
regular walk; there was nothing especially notable about the
day, but it was a clear, bright and sunny morning, ripe to uplift
the spirit with common things - the lark's song or the blossoming
hedgerows. He reached a familiar turn in the beck's course when
the sun, being in just the right position, picked out something
metal shining on the beck's bed. He called his dog to heel and
looked a little closer at the glistening shape just below the
fast running water. The outline he could see seemed to him to
be that of a golden crown, half buried for centuries in the mud
and stones of the ancient beck. He rushed back home, fetched
his wellington boots, a spade and a bag, and returned immediately
to the same spot on the bank. The crown proved not at all difficult
to retrieve and he was soon back on the bank with his treasure.
It was undeniably beautiful, it was also undeniably an old car
wheel trim. He was about to throw it back in the river in disgust
but for some intangible reason he didn't, and home it came with
him. He cleaned it and hung it on his shed door.
When, much later, he opened a new arts venue he needed a name
and thought that 'The Shed' would be amusing, and the first concert
had, as a backdrop, his shed door with its resplendent crown.
Since that day many people have asked about the crown and all
have received exactly the same reply, although each person takes
away with them a different answer - their answer. I confess that
I too, like my host, was a little disappointed at first, but
it was so undeniably beautiful and pleasing to the mind and the
imagination that, looking back only a few weeks, I now don't
know if it really was an old wheel trim or in fact a golden crown
just disguised as such. How much of truth is like that?"
Andrew Brown 1996
(as told at the Norwich GA for
morning worship)
Andrew Brown is a musician and
journalist for BASSIST Magazine.
|