The journey is complete, and at last I have reached Shed Nirvana.

It has taken me the best part of 57 years to get here, and the proof, actually, may be in my garage, rather than literally in a shed, but I have made it, nonetheless.

I arrived last week, after a massive effort to tidy up the said garage.

It hasn’t had a car in it on this side of the new millennium, but it does contain something so valuable that you could even say it is priceless, and it is certainly irreplaceable.

Not that any would-be burglar would think so, and if he decided to nick it, it would take him all day.

It’s my massive collection of screws, nails and various other things that could also be filed under C for ‘Could come in handy one day’.

I have been building it up for my entire life, and it keeps growing because it is completely against my nature to throw anything away - not while there is so much as a 0.0001 per cent chance of it being needed for some job or other, sometime in the future.

In more recent times, I have even gone out of my way to add more to the collection.

For instance, I love a trip to Ikea for many reasons, and even better than the meatballs is the section that you will find near the tills, which is a kind of pick ’n’ mix for bits and bobs.

Here, in exchange for just £1, shed enthusiasts like me are invited to fill a plastic bag with leftovers from from flat-packed furniture: bolts, brackets, sticks and knobs, as well as screws.

This is heaven for men of all ages, but especially my age, even if you are married to an unreasonable woman who rolls her eyes and complains that ten minutes should be more than enough time to fill your bag, and “You are only going to fill one bag, aren’t you?”

And if I didn’t already have enough, I have been fortunate to inherit collections amassed by three different men in the family.

All of them were Swindon railwaymen, so were very handy, and all of them had the same philosophy that if they ever had to go to a shop to find the raw materials for a job, instead of their sheds, then that was a pretty poor show.

Their wonderful legacies of useful things have mostly been handed down to me in old tobacco tins, and such has been the job of consolidating it all that it wasn’t until last week that I finally entered Shed Nirvana.

This is when you realise that even if you live to be a hundred, you will probably never need to buy a screw or a nail, ever again, and the same goes for a host of other different things, such as hooks, hinges and rawlplugs.

I already knew I had everything I needed, but it is only after completing the big sort-out that I now also know exactly what I’ve got and where I can lay my hands on it.

But alas, not everything is well in Shed Nirvana.

That’s because behind every man with the perfect shed you will find a woman with a long list of jobs around the house that she wants doing, and sometimes I wonder whether the female of the species will ever understand the true magic of sheds.

I may have the materials and the tools to do any of those jobs around the house that she has lined up for me, but I wasn’t necessarily offering to do them.