The answer, it turned out, is nowhere. Or rather a small room on the ground floor of my house that everyone else calls “the office”. I call it “my office”.

I’d never have believed, after 15 years of corporate life, I’d enjoy working from home — leave that to the flakes and losers, the women who couldn’t take the heat so got into their kitchens. I dashed back after both maternity leaves to bright lights and cameraderie, safety and control, a PA who made my tea just so.

But visiting a real office these days, I’ve become a puzzled Martian. What, you sit all day next to people you don’t much like? And during a hiatus in your work, you talk to them about crap TV shows rather than, say, putting on a load of washing?

Almost 2.5 million Britons are now “teleworkers”, The Future Foundation revealed this week: by 2020 we’ll form 16 per cent of the workforce. This is widely regarded as a progressive, family-friendly trend. But is it desirable to reverse the industrial revolution, end a 200-year division between work and home, without thinking it through? Did you know that a third of home workers toil without natural light, almost half have no permanent place to lay their laptops. Tele-cottage? More like self-made sweatshop.

Office-bound spouses ask what you did today with a special condescending tone. You worked really hard, oh yeah, ordering shoes on the internet. They have no conception of the many vices you are prey to, alone for achingly long hours in an empty, silent house.

Sloth: motivation can be hard without busy-looking colleagues around to make you look bad. And the internet is both the homeworker’s liberator and corrupter: I can Google for hours, the search engine becoming an extention of my restless brain, looking up someone I was at school with, then shooting off on a random trajectory that has me pricing hotels in Copenhagen. This can feel like work. But then so can trying to extract gloves that have fallen behind the hall radiator with a coat hanger.

Pride: it is the decline of this that troubles homeworkers most. I look at my now-dated designer duds with incredulity: to think I once wore hosiery every day. I am writing this in the running kit I put on this morning. I am unshowered, my hair unbrushed. I think — but can’t be sure — I’ve cleaned my teeth today. Why bother? Who’s looking?

On days I collect my sons from school, I manage to be presentable by 3.30pm. Sometimes I even get out of my jeans. Thankfully, I don’t run with the cashmere-clad, big-sunglasses, private-school mums. At our state primary, overdressing is greeted with bemusement and hilarity. Recently a fellow homeworker, pitched up at the gates in a business suit. “No, I haven’t been anywhere,” she said forlornly. “I’m just using up all my old clothes. I’ll be going to the PTA meeting in a taffeta gown.”

Gluttony: as Homer Simpson said, “I have discovered a new meal between breakfast and brunch”. I’m sure there are folk who cook lunch for one, with salad and a glass of wine. Let us call them the French. But most homeworkers never stop eating. I don’t trust myself to buy biscuits, but at 4pm I find myself up the stepladder, rootling in the cupboard for stale trifle sponges.

Lust: every office has a cute person who, even if your desire is unrequited, can quicken your day merely by wearing a nice new shirt. I’m sure there are male homeworkers who have found internet sites to address this need. I, however, just have the occasional Friday afternoon in summer when Southwark binmen — with surprisingly fit bodies — collect my refuse without shirts.

Anger: the homeworker’s pain amounts to this: you just don’t understand! Our work never goes away, sitting next door reproachfully when we’re supposed to have clicked over to “family time”. Taking business calls I am commonly glaring like a basilisk, standing on one leg, the other extended to keep a squawking, resentful child out of earshot with my foot.

Those in snug offices don’t understand homeworker paranoia: the extra courage it takes to ring an important, scary person when alone rather than emboldened by a gang of colleagues, the terror that you are being carved out, your work rubbished, secret decisions made never to employ you again. In jogging bottoms, disgusted with yourself for finishing the Pringles, you imagine your carefully phrased e-mail is unanswered because everybody hates you, not because it’s Friday and they ’ve all gone to the pub.

Avarice: what do I covet about your office job? Your company IT person, even the grumpy techie who’d lecture me for getting crumbs in my keyboard.

Envy: when I happen to travel at rush hour, mingling with the sassy London girls, the urgent young men snatching an e-mail on their BlackBerries, I miss being part of this flow of purpose and energy. Sometimes the only human contact I’ll have in 12 hours is a couple of e-mails. After a very head-down three weeks, I had lunch with a friend and realised I’d forgotten how to hold a conversation. Was this topic too personal, too boring, too weird? I really couldn’t tell.

A friend, pleased with a fabulous pair of shoes but realising no one would see them, took a photograph of her feet and e-mailed it to pals: only the homeworkers understood. I’ve begun engaging shop assistants in unwanted conversation, so if you get stuck behind someone in the butchers debating chump chops v cutlets, please be kind. It’s just that working from home, no one can hear you scream.

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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