Ben Machell rolls up his sleeves for some serious den building

My son has recently entered the den-building phase of his personal development.

He is three years old and loves dens. Any kind of den. Dens made of cushions. Dens made of sticks. Dens made of nothing but figments of his infant imagination. Dens, dens, dens. What does he want? Dens! When does he want them? Dens! Basically, at the risk of stating the obvious, much of my life currently involves the planning, execution and maintenance of dens.

This is absolutely brilliant, because — plot twist! — I love dens. I love them even more than he does. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m pretty sure that I forced him down this path, tearing him away from the book he was probably teaching himself to read and dragging him into a bedsheet-covered clothes horse like a brown bear bringing its kill back to the cave. Anyway, point is, we’re doing lots of den-making. Proper father-son stuff. Like something out of a washing detergent advert.

For the most part, we’ve been keeping it local, constructing small, neolithic shelters in and around Hackney. We made a particularly decent effort using stones, rotten logs and sticks right by London Fields, which Foxtons would have priced at half a mil no problem. Okay, there was no roof, but then there’s always going to be compromises if you want to be that central. One day we came back to our little den-building patch only to find that two big boys — aged six and eight — had taken it over and had brought actual tools. They were a pair of Homo sapiens to our Neanderthals. We quietly sloped off.

I started to worry that perhaps London wasn’t the best place for den-lovers. Is there really enough room for all of us? So when I saw that Sadiq Khan had, last week, promised £2 million worth of ‘green space’ investment in London’s parks, I was delighted. Another den man, I thought. Great stuff. And anyway, my son and I eventually roved up to Highgate Wood, a proper den mecca. We brought string and a knife, plus my girlfriend and mother-in-law for extra help. I almost lost an eye to a rogue stick but, three hours later, we’d made the finest den I’d ever been involved with. A true prince among dens. I bet it’s still standing now. If the Mayor ever needs a Dens Tsar, he knows where to find me.