" IF A SPOT OF home deconstruction tickles your fancy, you might throw a Tupperware party for the neighborhood anarchists, or perhaps invite your local chapter of Hell's Angels to drop in for a rave. Or you might get yourself a kitten.

Our three cats would long ago have been drawing their old-age pensions if this government had ever gotten its act together, and my wife Elizabeth and I had forgotten that one 10-ounce kitten packs a 10.6-kiloton dynamite equivalent of destructive potential.

Harnessed for godly purposes, this amount of furball energy could power six CAT scanners, a couple of factories stuffing ex-horses into pet food cans and four catnip plants, with enough juice left over for a nice cup of tea.

As a less beneficent force, it could probably bring a medium-sized third-world dictatorship to its knees. (None of this, incidentally, was known to Napoleon Bonaparte when he was tin-potting just such a ship of state, called France. Boney hated cats, and you see what that brought him to.)

Anyway, as I say, our feline old fogies Teddy Bear, Ali Magraw and Currant Bun are aged 19, 17 and 14 years, respectively, and their combined energy output on any given day could just about power a very small flashlight bulb to a rather dim, yellowish glow. For us, kittens were a distant memory.

Then came the quite unexpected arrival on our cottage doorstep this week of Mollie Melinda Webb - Miss Mollie, for short. The name is longer than she is from nose to tail tip.

Mollie is a six-week-old tabby kitten with a soft, rich dark gray coat, a face and eyes that would bring smiles to the granite faces on Mt. Rushmore, and claws that an acupuncturist would die for.

Elizabeth and I don't actually go looking for cats, or even kittens. It has long been our philosophy that they tend to find us whenever they are homeless or otherwise unwanted. It works.

Ali Magraw, for instance, was rescued from a garbage can in a London suburb where she had been dumped as a kitten. Currant Bun was saved from a boozy old bat whose attention to the gin bottle forced him to dine on potato peels from a waste can. Bear was found wandering the streets, unwanted and unloved.

There's no predicting these things. Elizabeth certainly did not expect, when she drove 70 miles down to London to meet friends last Thursday, that she would get a frantic phone call from me to the effect of: "Oh, by the by, nip by Annabelle's and pick up this kitten who's coming home with you."

Annabelle is Elizabeth's goddaughter who had been given the kitten as a surprise but who could not afford to keep it. Annabelle's mother, Pat, phoned us with her plight - it was either the animal welfare people or us.

Would that all dilemmas could be so easily resolved.

When my wife and cat carrier arrived home, the first and most important task, of course, was to find a proper name. Thus began the new life in a cottage for Albert Rodney Webb, or Bertie for short - which just goes to show that sex can be a problem even for kittens.

An investigatory look into the naughty bits location convinced me that Bertie was tooled up appropriately to his name when, in fact, "he" was not, as the lady vet informed us the next day. "Bertie," she said, "is actually Bernadette."

Well, yes and no - yes, our kitten was a she, but no, she was no Bernadette. "I hate that name," growled Elizabeth over ex-Bertie's yowls in the car on the way home. We debated the matter for a few minutes, and somewhere about four miles down the road from Banbury toward Oxford, Albert Rodney became Mollie Melinda.

Now began the next interesting phase of her new life - meeting the resident felines. Ali hissed. Currant Bun walked away. Bear gave Mollie a glance, then gave us his "Where's the food bowl, anyway?" look. Bear's priorities are gastronomically oriented.

For a few minutes, we were the owners of a new kitten. Then natural order took over and we became owned by a new kitten as this ball of undiluted energy revved up. Mollie's first targets were other cats' tails - much to Ali's fury - then her own, which she chased round and round the kitchen floor.

Next came the newspapers, which she ripped into with gusto, showing a definite preference for the tabloid Daily Mail over the broadsheet Daily Telegraph (probably something in the ink). Then it was across a table, where framed pictures were sent flying like rectangular bits of shrapnel.

To my wife's dismay, Mollie's next targets were Elizabeth's rather expensive bedroom curtains, which she shinnied up to attack the tassels on the tiebacks. Then it was downstairs at a rate of knots to go after other tassels, on a living room lampshade that was knocked off its pinions.

She has gone on to assault an assortment of books, pictures, other lampshades, cushions, the bedspread, various electric wires, cups, pens, pencils and naked feet. Mollie climbed into a cat tray and sent poo-laden cat litter zinging like smelly hailstones across the room.

This has been, in short, a character-building experience for us, and the first night we collapsed, bone-weary, into bed - where Mollie promptly spent the night sleeping in the palm of my right hand, thus preventing me from moving a muscle for about five hours.

What is impressive - and at the same time exhausting to watch - is the sheer speed of a little cat who can get from the bedroom curtains down the stairs to the litter tray in the utility room, then a dash across the garden room's couch, off the living room lamp and back up the stairs again to the bed, all in about 8.3 seconds flat.

Until now, our pace of life has sort of kept track with Bear, whom the local snails regularly outrun. Someday, we know, Mollie will grow up and also slow down, and stop chasing tails and running up drapes and shredding newspapers.

And that, in a way, will be sad. There are few greater pleasures in life than watching the little ball of pure energy that is a kitten, and the wanton destruction it can wreak. We shall treasure every minute of it, as long as it lasts.

Thought for the day: Make an armadillo smile, and the world is your oyster.

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