An analysis of government figures shows that while 11 per cent of our workforce now works from home, widespread, cheap broadband connection could cause that figure to rise to 50 per cent within the next five years. Obviously, the use of the word “could” there is fairly key: 50 per cent of us “could” be working in the radion mines on Raxacoricofallapatorius in five years’ time – an idiot workforce of an invading alien race, notorious for their abiding hatred of species with only one face.

Still, though, anecdotal evidence indicates that working from home is genuinely growing in popularity. And so it should. After all, why live in an expensive city, spending hours a day travelling to and from work when – if we get down to brass tacks – most people’s jobs consist of sitting in front of a computer, drinking bad coffee, and futilely whiling away the hours until you die? You could do all that from home!

Having worked from home since I was 15, I feel that this is one area in which I have invaluable experience. Indeed, aside from drunkenly explaining the wider social importance of Doctor Who, and being able to fit my whole fist into my mouth, there is very little I am better at than giving advice on working from home. Here, then, is the sum total of my wisdom.

1) Get wi-fi broadband. With a laptop, this will mean that you can now work in your bedroom! In the garden! On the toilet! What was once five empty minutes of staring into space, waiting for toast to brown, is now 300 hot techno-seconds that can be spent fact-checking, conference-calling, brain-storming and otherwise getting ahead. It’s the smart way to work. You’ll be dead without it.

2) Don’t get wi-fi! With no IT department snooping on your indentured ass all day, the siren lure of Facebook, YouTube, and e-mailing friends about possibly going to the pub is irresistible. Within weeks, your only hope of getting anything done will be to leave the house, and seek out one of the six remaining coffee shops in the UK that don’t have wi-fi. Or get some self-control – as if that’s a valid option, now that your working day consists of wearing pyjamas, commuting all the way to the TV and back, and eating dry Cheerios out of the box.

3) Your working space. Psychologists say it’s important to mark out clear mental territory between “home” and “work”. If possible, you should have a whole room dedicated as your office. Buy a new desk. Splash out on plants and stationery. Maybe even treat yourself to a £200 monochrome devoré roller-blind from John Lewis, with the rationale that it will “motivate you to work harder”. Now watch the room gradually rot as you do all your work on the kitchen table, because it’s warmer down there, and you like being near the fridge, and the whole point of working from home is that you’re not at a desk in an office, you idiot.

4) Health and safety. You are responsible for your own health and safety now. No one is going to come round and run those baffling experiments on your chair any more. You must be mindful of two facts: a) that working from home presents a whole new raft of health and safety implications; and that b) you are far, far more stupid than you give yourself credit for – possibly because you are so stupid, and simply unable to calculate your own stupidity. You could easily do any of these stupid things: run an extension lead across a wet lawn, in order to work in the garden; work in the bath, with your laptop balanced on an upended laundry basket; use a phone so dirty that you spend two years with virulent acne from your mouth to your ear, and can’t work out why; try to lower the height of a desk by drunkenly sawing off the legs at 1am; melt your mouse by leaving it too near a panino-maker. And that was just last year.

5) Working hours. Between 6am and 10am, the human mind is able to process up to 400 times more information than usual – terrified into an adrenalised survival response by being presented with data, and demands, when it is more reasonably expecting eggs, and then maybe some quiet time on the toilet. That society habitually wastes these golden brain-hours packed on a train, or sitting in a traffic jam, is nothing short of an intellectual crime. All human beings should aim to have the majority of the day’s work finished by midday. It goes without saying that, whatever the deadline, you should always, without fail, write off the hours between 2pm and 4pm. No one ever achieved a single worthwhile thing between 2pm and 4pm. At this time, human beings are, technically, monkeys. If the Moon landings had happened between 2pm and 4pm, the Eagle would have fallen over, and Neil Armstrong’s speech would have consisted of “Uh. The Moon”.

6) Office gossip. Putting aside celebrity gossip that you may, in the absence of gossip about people you actually know, find yourself using as a conversational opener with business clients (“So, Winehouse is back on the brown again, I see”) your home will provide plenty of office gossip for you. Partners of home-workers are often surprised at how detailed a resumé they receive on the movements of all animal life in and around the house. “Wasps got in the cupboard. They must have a queen.” “The pigeons have vanished.” “I looked at a dragonfly close up, and it looked like Cherie Blair.” You can even gossip about yourself, at a pinch: “I made a terrible error today, which I’ve wholly failed to cover up. There’s no way I’m not going to be fired. And I’m putting on weight, too.”

7) Office romances. Alas, here, you are literally are on your own. Literally. To say any more would be very indiscreet.

I turn into the Hulk in the phone box

I don’t really write about consumer rip-offs, capitalistic scams, unprincipled individuals or things that anger me. First, I believe that my complaining is of minimal interest or relevance; essentially, it is my task to amuse you, to caper and tumble, like your clown. Secondly, when you feel crushed by the wheels of a materialistic patriarchy, it is far more effective to drive somewhere desolate and mutilate a horse instead. Last week, however, I suffered a wrong of such enraging proportions that there simply isn’t a horse big enough to make me feel better. Have you tried calling a directory inquiries service from a BT phone box? Have you? The initial call costs 60p – then you’re charged an additional penny a second while the drone at 118 118 looks up the number. When you factor in having to spell the name twice, and explaining that Oxford Street is in London, that’s £8 down the drain. Indeed, that’s all the change I had down the drain. I’d spent so much trying to find out the number to call that I couldn’t actually make the call.

Now, I’m not one for conspiracy theories. Indeed, I’ve narrowed down the ones I believe in to 1) Coca-Cola still has secret cocaine in it, and, 2) River Phoenix was killed because he Knew Too Much. But there can, surely, be no explanation for making it financially impossible to find out a phone number, other than BT making the simple decision to drive us all mad.

What’s in a name?

Most baffling brand-name of the week. A perfume, spotted in a local shop, called “Trench”. Trench. Trench is a word with absolutely no romantic associations. Not one.

The associations for “trench” run: 1) a dull coat; 2) fetid, disease-ridden hell-hole in world wars filled with dead squaddies; 3) a place to sow potatoes. And it rhymes with “stench”. I seriously ask: can there be a worse-named product?

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