We've always tried to bash the world into a shape that suits us, so the hammer was the world's first tool. There's at least one to this day in every home and it remains among the commonest murder weapons. When a maker of early horror films sought a name for his studio he took one look in the garage and found the answer.
The desk I sacrificed to the twins is the one I've sat at every working day for the best part of two decades. At it I've knocked out some 1600 columns and half a dozen books, a couple of million published words. And it took half an hour to demolish.
Many years ago I ran a fundraising fair for a school. The two most profitable stalls were both founded on destruction. One was a china-smashing venture. We placed old crockery on a table and rented out cricket balls to throw at it. Men and boys flocked and whooped. The prettier the crockery, the more we charged.
The other stall was an old car. Punters paid to attack it with a sledgehammer. There was a premium on glass. We auctioned off the right to the windscreen for some preposterous sum. But most were happy just to swing blows into the body work, to stand on the car's roof and bellow like Thor.
The previous owner of this house had cobbled the desk together out of second-hand oddments - a military filing cabinet, some cheap drawers and a sheet of chipboard. But typically he over-engineered the thing. He screwed timber battens to three walls of this narrow study and attached the desk to them with nails and screws and glue.
I swung the first blow up from below, where my knees had been for all those years. I felt an immediate hint of give. Another blow and there was a gap sufficient to poke the crow's beak into.
Archimedes said that if you gave him a long enough lever and somewhere to stand he'd move the world. His lever was effectively a crowbar. Its virtue is the way it multiplies a force. Both the crowbar and the hammer magnify our capacity to destroy which is why they've survived so long.
There are few noises as pleasing as a nail being wrenched from wood. It screams. The desktop began to separate from the wall. With the crowbar I eased out all the nails and screws, and broke the glue's bond. Then a single blow from below with the sledgehammer sent the desktop spinning.
I could have saved the drawers and their wooden housing but by now my blood was up. I pried them from the wall, then swapped tools. Three blows and all was kindling.
The filing cabinet was metal. I wheeled it out on a trolley and came back into my study to gawp at a stretch of brown carpet that I'd never seen before. Two mice lay dead, their corpses weightless with age. Whole tribes of spiders had lived back there and spun their webs and died. I took the vacuum cleaner to them and it clogged.
The new space pleases me. I have come back time and again to stare at the emptiness I've made, the land that I've cleared, the consequences of my demolition. There is pleasure in unbuilding, in razing, in wiping the slate.
Blow up a building and you'll always draw a crowd. We like to see things fall. We like to fell them. We have the tools. It has been good destructive work.
