Shed loads of controversy: Roald Dahl's writing hut - £500,000 or your nearest offer. Photograph: Guardian/Eamonn McCabe
It has become increasingly clear, as today has trundled on its merry way, that I wasn't the only person listening to the radio this morning to feel profoundly bemused by the item on the Today programme in which Sophie Dahl apparently asked the public to help raise £500,000 to move her grandfather's famous writing hut from the Dahls' back garden, where it is gently rotting, into the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.
I'm not quibbling over the significance of the shed itself, nor even the half-a-million-quid price tag: never having personally attempted to move and/or archive the contents of a garden shed, after all, who am I to argue? No: the real question, posed by countless listeners on Twitter, Andrew M Brown blogging over at the Telegraph and about 98% of the commenters on his article, is why, given the extensive wealth the Dahl family has presumably accrued off the back of the sales of his books (not to mention all the related merchandising, film rights and so forth), can its members not fork out for the shed move themselves?
Such was the avalanche of irritated emails received by the Today producers in the wake of the item, that they had to haul Amelia Foster, director of the Dahl Museum, on to the programme to explain what was going on. As well as flannelling on about the importance of Dahl in general, the shed in particular, and reading, across the board (none of which, as far as I was aware, was under dispute) she mounted a mild defence of the Dahl family, who have apparently "given significantly to this project already" and said that the Museum wasn't asking the public for the cash, per se; rather, it was approaching the far less emotive "trusts and foundations".
