There’s always room for improvement in this game. You’ve probably got more chance of finding the Holy Grail next to the tinned tuna flakes in your local Spar as you have of achieving golfing perfection.

As the great Bobby Jones said, “no one will ever have golf under his thumb.” The redoubtable Jones was always full of pearls of wisdom. “Some emotions cannot be endured with a golf club in your hands,” was another of his nuggets. Given the emotions and frustrations that were stoked up in Craig Lee when he lost his European Tour card at the end of 2016, the Stirling man could have taken any club out of his bag and started bashing down walls. Which was quite handy because Lee has been doing just that over the last few months. “Demolition is right up my street,” said the 39-year-old, whose major renovations on his house have helped take his mind off the toils and troubles of professional golf. “Knocking down walls and ripping out fireplaces suits me fine. Along with my brother and a few helpers, we’ve done the whole shebang; stripped the walls, re-wired, plastered, put in new ceilings. It was good fun. It was very therapeutic and extremely rewarding. You sit back at the end of the day and see the evidence of what you’ve done. Golf is the opposite some times. You put all the hours in, go to a tournament, shoot level-par and miss the cut. There are not many rewards to be taken from that.”

Whether these home improvements lead to improvements in Lee’s golfing career remain to be seen and his trip to Kenya next week, for the start of the Challenge Tour season, will go a long way to deciding if he wants to keep going with the do-it-yourself lifestyle of a touring pro.

After five unbroken years on the main European Tour, Lee lost his full card by just a single place on the final order of merit and the prospect of hauling himself back up again through the stripped-back, cut-and-thrust of the second-tier Challenge Tour is hardly filling him with drooling anticipation.

“I was quite excited a few weeks ago when I thought I might have got into the two main tour events in South Africa but that didn’t happen,” he said. “I was geared up and ready but when I didn’t go, I slipped back into the old way of thinking. I’ve got myself back into it again but whether the heart is in it, I don’t know. I’ll only find out next week. It’s been so long since I was in a tournament situation that I don’t know what to expect. I’m hoping when I’m out there I will slip back into it. I’ve not played competitively since the qualifying school in November and this is probably the longest stretch I’ve been out for. The scary thing is I haven’t missed it. It’s been a strange period. All my colleagues have been playing in events that I would normally have been at but I’m now the European Tour outsider. In years gone by I may have been hungrier to get back into it. Perhaps now I’ve got to stage that it’s just a job. In previous years the drive to succeed and the passion was greater. Maybe that’s age as well?”

The fluctuating fortunes of this great game can often lead to the kind of stormy, love, hate relationship that would make Fatal Attraction look like Steptoe & Son. If he opens with a 65 in Kenya, of course, then the competitive juices will get pumping again. A trying 77, on the other hand, probably doesn’t bear thinking about.

“Competing on the main tour is hard to beat and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to do that,” added Lee, who finished a career-high of 59th on the money list in 2013 during a campaign in which he lost in a play-off to Thomas Bjorn in the European Masters. “Do I still have the energy to put into the Challenge Tour and get back up there? Over the last couple of months I’ve spent a lot of time with my daughter, my family and my friends. Those are things I’ve not been able to do for a long, long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if I got back out on the Challenge Tour and said ‘you know what, it’s not for me anymore’. I’m hoping the passion comes back, though.”