Questions the Order gets asked

Absolutely not. The Order is, if anything, faintly suspicious of men who get paid for this. Membership is for the man who does it on a Saturday, for nothing, because the alternative was picking up the telephone.

None. Membership is lifetime and settled in the only currency the Order recognises: hours spent flat on your back underneath something, holding a light that is not quite bright enough.

There is a handshake on the crest and it is not remotely secret. It is firm, it is brief, and it is delivered with a hand that currently has one knuckle healing and a thumbnail going a colour nobody wants to discuss.

You may still join. The Order believes profoundly in knowing your limits. It asks only that you stand in the doorway with your arms folded, watch the entire job, and ask at least one question about the fitting they have chosen.

No. But you must have, at least once in your life, driven home with something protruding from the passenger window while holding it in place with your right hand and steering with your left.

Your wife is describing outcomes. The Order concerns itself with intent, with effort, and with total trips made to the hardware store in a single day — and on all three counts you are, frankly, overqualified.

The Creed holds that we do the work right. The Order holds that duct tape is right on a Sunday evening, when the store is shut and it only has to last until Tuesday. Both of these things are true and the Order has made peace with it.

For life. No renewal, no lapse, no annual message warning you that your standing is about to expire. Once your name is in the rolls it stays in the rolls, and the rolls are not audited.

Four things: a membership letter addressed to you by name, a certificate of membership bearing the crest, a weatherproof sticker for the toolbox, and bragging rights — formally conferred, and considerably more useful than they sound.

You may display it wherever you please. The Order recommends the garage, above the bench, where its meaning is understood without explanation and where you will see it every time you go looking for the 10mm socket.

Then you are precisely among your people. The Order has never once asked a man to produce a completed project. It has, on occasion, asked him what is under the tarp — and it has always accepted the answer without follow-up.

Nothing formal. No tribunal, no letter, no removal from the rolls. You will simply know, every time you walk past it. The Order has found this to be far more effective than anything it could impose.

The Order welcomes any man who reads the Creed and accepts it. If he is not yet a man, put him on the other end of the tape measure, let him hold the light, and give it time. That is how every member got here.