You’ll be familiar with a special kind of obsession mentioned here before, that of making stuff: the intoxicating possibilities inherent in new tools and the unintended consequences of embarking willy-nilly on projects without adequate forward planning.

For this amateur craftsperson, it’s is a long-term thing: from the early days at Hillside Nursery School, Bulawayo, where kids had access to off-cuts of pine, hammers and nails, and could – unsupervised – create pretty much whatever they pleased. History doesn’t record how many purple thumbs and crucified fingers resulted, but it certainly gave me and my mates a good start.

We moved on to more sophisticated things and started accumulating tools. My uncle Charlie gave me one of those mini-hacksaws – a really thoughtful gift. Its solid cast metal handle painted eye-catching red, chrome frame and chunky knurled tensioning wheel, made it satisfyingly tactile to use. It was applied to wood, plastic, rubber and whatever else piqued its owner’s wild creative ambitions, performing with distinction. I wish I still had it.

Similarly, my best friend John, who shared the making-stuff urge, received a spokeshave from a relative. It was a compelling bit of kit: twin curved handles housing a super-sharp blade with its bright nickel adjustment wheels. We didn’t know what exactly it was for, but wandered around the garden looking for things to shave. I don’t think it stayed sharp for long; it didn’t help much with treehouse and foxhole-building, but it was always at hand in case.

For a long time, my particular making-stuff obsession was boats. I’d buy an offcut of pine, envisaging a fully-rounded, super-detailed model sailing boat with a mast, sails, tiny fittings and features, and the ability to sail unaided on the choppy waters of the swimming pool. But a boat is a very complex three-dimensional object, and apart from my lack of the necessary skills, the essential tools to make a go of it were totally absent.

Most of all, there was nowhere to clamp my chunk of wood nice and tight so I could approach it with tool in hand and execute my vision without the bloody thing moving about, leading to imprecise cuts and unsatisfactory surfaces. The preferred technique was to kneel on the plank with a bit overhanging the veranda step and use bodyweight to try keeping it immobile while simultaneously sawing away. OK with long planks; decidedly dicy with short ones.

There was the memorable occasion when, trying to create a slot in a piece of cedar with a half-inch chisel, I clamped it between my two bare feet in a buddha-like pose, and succeeded only in driving the blade with unerring precision between two toes on my right foot. The gaping wound bled profusely, but even worse, I never got to carve that slot and whatever project that was died there and then.

What was really needed, of course, was a nice solid workbench with a vice. But for whatever reason, no such luxury was forthcoming. You can bet that when famous carpenters like St Joseph and Harrison Ford set to with saw and chisel, they had a good, solid bench to do it at. Noah himself must have created all those very large mortise-and-tenon joints at some kind of outsized bench, and all those medieval cathedrals weren’t built without an army of carpenters labouring away at their vices.

So, as it will, time passed and a long exodus took place: to Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, where I built a hi-fi stand out of two-by-four offcuts using a swiss army knife; to Hackney, East London, where I built bicycles and customised guitars on the living-room floor; to Singapore, where obsessive stuff-making all but ceased for ten blissfully domesticated years.

But here we are in Braidwood, where there is much to be done in the handyman line. The old toolbox has been filling up nicely, but the same issue has resurfaced: how to work hands-free and with precision – with the added middle-aged consideration of a creaky lower back. Plus, space is precious and there isn’t any to house a full-sized, weighty bench with the essential screw-tightened jaws of a vice.

But there is something I should have thought of years ago. For a paltry sum rendered to Messrs Amazon and Co, this week I received a well-wrapped bundle of parts from our postie. On the box, in the spirit of IKEA, a large and forbidding label read ‘some assembly required’. But, you know: tools, nuts, bolts, a pile of parts – what could be more compelling?

And so it was that the parts became a compact, folding workbench with all manner of adjustments and – joy of joys – a vice-like clamping function! As I stood, contemplating my purchase and relishing the visions of all the finely-crafted creations it’ll nurture, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was John – he of the spokeshave – calling for a chat. And it transpired that he, too, has reached that point in life where a workbench is on the cards – and not just any bench either: it’s one he’s building himself. One that has the mass and stability for vigorous sawing and planning, but which can be taken apart in minutes and stowed away.

So, sort of like mine, but bigger and more organic, being made of wood. It’s called a Moroubo — a hybrid of a Moravian workbench and a Roubo. Yes, that Roubo, the 18th-Century French carpenter whose split-top bench designs survive to this day – as if you didn’t know!

One thing I neglected to ask him, though: what do you use for the cutting and chiselling that goes into building a Moroubo in the first place? It’s like the classic chicken-and-egg conundrum; it smacks a little of Catch-22. I just hope he has a nice veranda step to crouch on while he works those chunky timbers – or a nice flatpack folder like mine.