Pallet Inadequacy Disorder

the decline and fail of a DIY Man

Saturday, Summer solstice, 2025.

So this is what it’s come to.

I was, until two hours ago, the owner of a sturdy, rough-timber pallet. The sort you see stacked high on flat-bed trucks heading towards unknown destinations on any motorway..

My latest, and probably final, garden shed had arrived on the pallet a month ago, vertically flat-packed. I’d already installed a perfectly level flagstone base - in charcoal grey. I’d like to say I built the simple 3’x3’ storage box in less than a day but it’s more accurate to say I fastened seven component panels together and attached the door. An hour or so later and the wood had been painted—also in charcoal grey, we’re so coordinated these days—the roof covered in new felt and a hasp & staple lock fitted.

OK, so it isn’t the spacious, double-windowed, wide-doored state-room of my earlier man-cave, with its integrated sound system, disco lighting and genuine African wood carvings on the walls adding a certain je ne sais quoi to the work bench and tool storage racks. That proper shed had taken up far too much ground space in our small-but-perfectly-formed cottage garden and it had had to go - to a new home where it will be happy and loved, of course.

But at least it’s a shed, of sorts, even though you’d be hard-pressed to step inside, let alone stand up in it. And having a shed in your garden, a space that is your exclusive territory no matter how small, is fundamental to being a bloke who can comfortably stand around with other blokes and, well, be a bloke.

The now redundant pallet was left leaning (untidily, she said) against the garden wall, awaiting its fate. What to do with a pallet? Far too big to be taken away in our (very) small car. I no longer have anywhere to accommodate much timber in that form and the mini-shed is too small behind which to stack anything more than a couple of pieces of decking offcuts.

In days of yore, I would’ve kept the pallet anyway, possibly in its entirety or I’d have taken it apart using the sort of crowbar I no longer possess. Those planks of wood, rough-sawn though they may be, could undoubtedly come in useful for some project or other. But there is no prospective construction work for which it might be reasonably be kept.

I eschew all use of AI, of course, as a writer, but as a desperate redundant pallet owner, I had little choice. I queried Google. “What can I do with a secondhand pallet“. (Yes, I have finally conquered the urge to add question marks to my search queries.) Its AI responded in less than 0.025 seconds suggesting, along with photographs: I could make “this lovely rustic coffee table“. In reality, however, I know that rustic coffee tables do not fit with the minimalist style favoured by her both inside and outside our home.

I thought of painting it in subtle stripes of blue and grey, a visual pun on Don McLean’s “Vincent”. (“Starry starry night… paint your palette etc…”) . I’d done this years ago with another pallet, but nobody got the joke at the time. At least that pallet had gone on to be incorporated in the various raised planters I’d made - back then, before the pandemic, when I was just a crazy 65-year old kid with a crazy dream.

As I stood looking at the problem, my next door neighbour came walking by, carrying a large power tool under one arm. He has just converted what was a derelict old house into something quite spectacular involving considerable DIY building work. I asked him if he had any use for the pallet.

“No, not really,“ was his answer but he would take it anyway in case “something comes up“.

I struggled to move the heavy pallet to the gate, sliding it over the gravel. He picked it up easily under his spare arm and walked off. I couldn’t detect any expression of pity, just a friendly fellow man smile. I felt we may have bonded a little and mumbled some face-saving excuse as to what I’d have done with the wood when I was younger…

And there you have it.

That’s what it means to be a real man: someone who keeps hold of redundant pallets in case something comes up. For me, those days have gone and I accept that I have “PID” (Pallet Inadequacy Disorder)—a significant, age-related condition oddly overlooked in the DSM IV.

For a fleeting second, old feelings of inadequacy and outsiderishness knocked on the door of my consciousness, reminders of uncomfortable boyhood moments in a barber’s chair, fumbling for the half a crown to pay the man with the clippers as he continued with other man-customers his conversations whose meaning I was not yet privy to.

Quickly dismissed though; I am content to be this that I am. Sans pallet.

And I begin to grasp, dimly, how the misogyny, patriarchy and elitist evil that is so characteristic of our social order creates such shame in some of us mere “humen” beings that we cover it by joining in, because not belonging to the men’s club is so very lonely.

But more of that next week. If we’re still here. At least I haven’t bombed anyone today.