SOME men clear their sheds for the challenge, because they want to pit their wits against the force of nature that is The Shed. Others do it, as the Everest mountaineer George Mallory once said, "because the shed is there". And still others clear their sheds because their wives tell them to. I fall into the latter category.

Actually, there was another reason, too: I was planting some carrots and needed a garden fork to turn the soil. Unfortunately, the fork was somewhere in The Shed, which over the years had become an impenetrable mass of discarded domestic apparatuses and horticultural flotsam, a tangled mountain of deflated pool ponies, rusty beach seats, chicken wire, shears, gloves, garden stakes, three cupboards, two broken desks and several tonnes of fertiliser, all of it wreathed in dust and cobwebs and crawling, from base to windswept summit, with rats and cockroaches.

My job (at least according to my wife) was to go in there and clean it up; to conquer that towering K2 of Crap, and find, in the process, the lost garden fork.

I packed for the expedition the night before: energy drinks, iodine tablets, space blanket, personal rescue beacon and supplementary oxygen. I rose at dawn, told my wife that I loved her, kissed the kids goodbye and set off up the perilous east face. The sherpas who climb Everest say they can sometimes hear the mountain talking to them. Frankly, I couldn't hear a thing: I was too preoccupied with the threat of avalanche, being smothered by a wall of old wetsuits and empty seed trays. And then I saw it - my first corpse - wedged into a crevice, just below me. Good God, it was Chris, my neighbour! I hadn't seen him for months, ever since he'd ventured into The Shed to borrow my drill. He must have lost his footing, and now here he was, crushed under a 60-kilogram bag of mushroom compost.