I get impatient with writers who aren’t practical. If this needs to be written and it needs to be written now, you write it now. I’m conscious that this may all be a failure of imagination on my part, that I could be a hack in the worst sense of that, but I do not write better for having sat on my arse until the last second.

Nor would I have said that it matters to me in the slightest where I am when I write. Certainly I don’t need peace and quiet, and certainly I will write in a newsroom as readily as a library.

Only, you know there’s a but coming. I didn’t, though. I would not have seen this but, not have considered this but.

Last Sunday, I was shut out of my office for hours. Overnight a tall Ikea Billy bookcase collapsed in there, falling sideways so that on the thinking positive side of things, it didn’t send very heavy books crashing out onto my equipment. But as glad as I am about that, the shelf unfortunately collapsed sideways — toward the office door. It barricaded that door.

With every ounce of girth I could manage, and that is regrettably quite a lot more than it should be, I could not get the door open more than a fraction of a centimetre.

This was around 3am and there’s a limit to the wailing you can do if you don’t want to wake the neighbours. So I went back to bed and I plotted.

Since I have a security camera in the office, I was able to see on my iPad what it was like in there. Thank goodness for that iPad which I’d left in our living room. Because what I could also see was that my iPhone, my office Mac, my MacBook Pro and a digital recorder I was supposed to be taking out to an interview, were all on the wrong side of the barricade.

Okay. Now 4am and I am not sleeping, I am pondering just the right drill pattern to make in a door panel so that I could then hammer through to get a hand in and start trying to move some books.

The hammer is in the office.

The drill is in the office.

So instead it takes me two hours on my knees, scraping the skin off my hands, as I get a fingertip through that sub-centimetre gap and manage to make it a centimetre, then two, then three. I got it to a stage where instead of having to try flicking a book away into the office, I could just about lift it up — and drop it again, lift it again, drop it — until I could get it up to the top of the door and pull it through there.

Two hours of that. And it took perhaps the first hour for me to have any sense of progress at all. I carried on solely because I didn’t have any other ideas.

But around the two hour mark, I got that door open enough that I could get my head through, then using the wall for leverage I pushed the door enough that my body could get in — before the door snapped back, pressed again by books and shelves I hadn’t been able to reach.

I think I sat at my office desk for easily ten minutes, though, just being there. Seeing the debris field, sure, but also just being conscious of how for all my pragmatism and write-anywhere approach, I had been scared when I was shut off from this space.

I’ve been writing in this room for twenty years. It’s at least a couple of million words now — in the last six months alone I know I wrote half a million — and I cannot imagine how many hours thinking. There was one night when it was so late and it was so dark outside that my office window was more like a mirror and I saw the late Alan Plater reflected in there. “It’s only a book,” he told me as I fretted about something.

I’ve had some bad times in there. I have literally bled over the keyboard — though that felt like a badge of honour somehow — and some of the toughest moments in my writing career were in this room. But of course so were some of the best. And if the journey of a thousand miles ends with 2,112,000 steps, the journey has been the best.

Doubtlessly there are other spaces where I could’ve been writing, but I was writing in this one, it was taken away from me, and then I got it back through harder physical labour than I ever signed up for.

It occurs to me that I’m just saying you don’t miss something until it’s gone. But I missed this. And it’s back.

Mind you, I also missed a joke about it and will now forever envy writer Peter Anghelides, who said to me on Facebook: “You have only your shelf to blame.”