Today the kids are back at school. Can I go back to my office please?

Many of my friends have an ‘office’ at the bottom of the garden, where they can escape domesticity, and the constant requests to do this or that, but my studio is seven miles away from where I live. It’s my ‘Man Cave’, a place where I can work without interruptions, surrounded by my books and things – things that make me feel good. But for the last few months I’ve had to work from the spare bedroom.

The spare bedroom, is the room we never got to decorate when we moved house five years ago; the room where the laundry gets dumped on the bed, and where I work up a sweat on my spin-bike, in an attempt to stay in shape, after a year battling an addiction to Marmite Peanut Butter on toast, and Johnnie Walker Whisky! I appreciate many have to work from kitchen tables, dressing tables or balance a laptop on their knees, but it doesn’t make it any easier to live/work with.

The blurred line separating work and home life has disappeared. I’m an early-riser and it has been easy to stumble half-asleep into the spare room and start work before anyone else stirs. Lunch at my desk now includes breakfast, afternoon tea and early evening celebratory WFH cocktail for surviving another day.

Today we’re ‘allowed’ to meet another person outside for a picnic. Later this month we can party with five others in our gardens (for those that have them), and on 12th April I can get my hair cut professionally – I’ve risked the tempation of a DIY cut or letting my 11-year-old daughter loose with a pair of scissors, but when are we officially allowed back to the office? I’m not sure if I can wait till June. If anyone with whom I Zoom over the next few weeks, sees a backdrop that doesn’t look like the spare bedroom, it’s just a virtual background… honest guv!