There’s a small room in my garden, bookmarked away between a wall and a tree, where nobody goes. Actually, that is wrong on two counts. First, the room isn’t small – it is veritably tiny. The previous owners probably built it for their bachelor rabbit, and then discovered that the rabbit couldn’t even swing a cat in it. And thank goodness for that because that would have been the weirdest looking thing on animal planet after the platypus.

And secondly, the room isn’t that lonely. It’s a hangout for the three cats – every morning they gather there for reconnaissance before proceeding to explore the furthest regions of the garden where no cat has purred before.

Every Saturday, I join them. No, not for exploring, but to spend my morning there. An audience would call these couple of hours a waste of time – I call it tinkering, both to give it added value and because, well, that’s what it is. Do I have something to show for these meddling mornings? To be honest, no, except for one broken nail and a finger which, following a close encounter with a hammer, is so swollen that it has a personality of its own.

But that is the whole point of tinkering. The etymology of tinkering (in Maltese, we use that beautiful word, “iċċekċek”) is clothed in the romantic rags of nostalgia and originally referred to a travelling tradesman who, on his way to somewhere else, would stop at some off-the-grid village to mend household utensils. Fast forward to today and the word still has those vagrant qualities – of a quick stop for some thinking dunked in a motorway stop coffee, while on the way to somewhere else.

Let me give you a tour of my tinkering room. On one side there’s a workbench – in a previous life, it was a dining table for two, but nowadays, it acts as a punching bag for any hammer or nail that goes astray. The other wall is lined with all my manly tools – there is everything a budding DIY specialist would need. But I’m no DIY specialist and I mostly use the hammer. And sometimes the screwdriver, as a hammer.

Then there’s a chair where I usually doze off when the going gets tough and a couple of wooden crates where I store my glut of winter produce (potatoes mostly, which I don’t eat anyway). And a huge hole in the wall where I once thought installing a mini-fridge (or, one ambitious morning, a humidor) would be a good idea.

It’s a very masculine space, shabby without being chic, planned according to function rather than form. And rightly so, because tinkering is an essentially male pursuit. Men have a biological need to tinker – it’s part of their XY chromosome. They value tinkering for what it is – neither a hobby nor a bout of DIY, but shuffling on the margins of actually doing something. Women, on the other hand, are more practical. For men, life is all about the footnotes. For women, it’s the introduction and conclusion.

Of course, sometimes I do try and mend things, but on the way there, I usually either break them or change their use. Remember the electric kettle? Well, while changing its plug, I fell suddenly and hopelessly in love with the idea that the kettle would make for a great germination centre for my strawberry seeds. I spent two Saturdays hammering away – admittedly, it didn’t work, but I had fun arriving at that conclusion.