I’ve a confession to make to you, and I suspect I may not be the only one who needs to make it. I’m hoping I’m among friends here and that upon reading these next few paragraphs, you’ll find yourself nodding slowly with a wry grin as you recognise that we both share the same affliction. I’m prepared to concede it may be purely a male thing. Alternatively, it may be that I alone have this problem, and I’m just a tad weird. But I’ll let you be the judge.

Imagine the scene, if you will. You find yourself in need of an item of decent quality yet attractively priced furniture for your spare bedroom. You decide to pay a visit to a well-known Swedish meatball restaurant that happens to have a giant flat-pack furniture shop attached to it. You follow the in-store directions and walk the six-mile circuit that takes you past every item they have on sale. You already suspect that the staff use the doors within the room displays as shortcuts to get around the store. However, the potential embarrassment of having people watch as you try to open what might prove to be a fake door ensures you stick to the prescribed route. Eventually, you reach the bedroom department, and your eyes alight on the clean Nordic lines of a bedside table that goes by the name of Hendrik (or something similarly Swedish). You make a note of its location, then make your way to the basement where you pluck a freshly minted, unconstructed Hendrik from the shelf in aisle 37. On the way to the basement, you’ll have almost certainly also picked up a set of six wine glasses for a pound and possibly a framed Banksy print or maybe a London Bus poster for the spare bedroom/downstairs loo. It’s virtually impossible not to. And then, of course, you pay your dues, wonder whether you should try the meatballs, load up your car, and head off home. So far, so good, and nothing to declare, confession-wise.

But then things start to unravel. You take your flat-pack box up to the bedroom, open it up and take out its contents, leaning the bigger pieces up against a wall. Then you spy the small but heavy plastic bag full of screws, widgets, bits of doweling, and those curiously shaped round things that the widgets miraculously screw into and lock into place with a single twist of your screwdriver. You tip these items out onto the floor and sort them into piles. Immediately, you start to see how the whole thing must fit together. But, once bitten twice shy, you pick up the flimsy A4 instruction sheet just to make sure that you’re starting in the right place. You studiously ignore the first section that lists all the box contents and asks you to count and check that they’re all present before you start, and instead, you head straight for diagram 1. And sure enough, you were right on the money. Those widget things (A) do indeed screw into the curiously shaped round things (B). And so, wearing a slightly smug grin, you proceed to free-style Hendrik’s construction with your screwdriving accomplice.