When is a chair not a chair?

But these things are ephemeral. Once completed there is nothing to be done but sit back on your laurels and come up with another bucket list challenge.

I set myself the task of repairing, sanding and oiling a set of folding outdoor wooden chairs for the verandah in time for Christmas. This would help save the old-growth forests of Tasmania and Victoria, give my life purpose and set an example to my grandkids of achievement through hard work.

I now realise that deadline was a ridiculous fantasy and that in fact this project will take a lifetime and probably longer.

At first viewing, a chair is a chair — a three-dimensional object that occupies about half a cubic metre of space. But a garden chair is different. A garden chair sits in that quantum space of infinite surfaces that Stephen Hawking talked about when he described the inter-planetary effects of Euclidean geometry.

Let me explain. Make yourself comfortable with a tea and a nice dunking biscuit if you want.

My garden chairs have five horizontal seating slats and five upright back slats, two arms and four legs. These are all connected by four supports with slot-holes cut for the slats and two cross beams, which sit underneath the chair. Six screws hold the structure together.

I started sanding down my first garden chair at 11am. I used a small palm-sized sander, which had to be gripped like an armed grenade to stop it flying out of my hand if I bumped a corner too hard.

By lunchtime I had sanded two arms and two slats. By late afternoon, all the slats were done and I just had the legs and supports to go. Before I knocked off for the day I realised to my horror that all this sanding was just the visible surface. A whole other universe of surfaces existed underneath the chair and in between the slats. In fact, each piece of wood had four surfaces and it had taken me a whole day to sand one surface.

I thought maybe I should just sail around the world instead.

But because I am a gritty, iron-jawed marathon man I sanded on regardless.

The next day I completed the back and underneath surfaces and the next day I finished the in-between quantum space surfaces.

By now, my hands felt like they had strangled a horse, my nasal passages belonged to an explorer who had walked across the Simpson Desert in a sandstorm, and I couldn’t stand up straight because my back had locked at a 75-degree Euclidean angle.

I was a human folding chair and I hadn’t even started the staining.

And I had 11 more chairs to go.

All the surfaces had to be revisited during the staining process, which was faster than sanding but still left me with folding chair spine — now at 65 degrees.

My body was so punished I realised I would need a five-year recovery period before tackling another chair.

But I’m not giving up. I’m in this for the long haul and I’ll hand the garden chair project on to my grandchildren if I have to. They can sit on the verandah in superbly refurbished chairs and tell tales of good old hard-working Poppy and his crazy dream of saving the world one chair at a time.