I am sure you love your job as much as I do. (Pause for ripple of hollow laughter.) Even so, it’s a depressing thought that the average Briton will spend 110,000 hours of his or her life in the workplace. And, of course, 18,000 strap-hanging, soul-sapping hours trying to get there and back. I’ll leave it to psychologists to deduce whether that is a more depressing thought for my kids, viewing this prospect from the starting-blocks, than for me, casting a rueful look back as I puff towards the last lap. I’ll leave it to politicians to argue whether the 35-hour week in other European countries improves life by giving people more leisure time or degrades it by making everyone broke. And I’ll leave it to philosophers to assess whether all this adds up to what is amusingly known as “the meaning of existence”.

No, what interests me today is the environment in which we are trapped for so long. Yes, the workplace. Many of us spend more waking hours there than in our homes. But I doubt whether we devote a tenth of the time to thinking about how to improve our workplace that we do to improving our houses. It’s as if we have subconsciously decided that, as work will be a sod anyway, there’s no point in trying to cheer up the place where the torture happens.

The result is that the average British office has hardly changed in 40 years. Yes, I know there is now a computer on every desk and smart phones that allow you to take three calls at once, as long as you’re smart enough to push the right buttons, which I’m not. But those are changes in working practices, not the working environment. There is a big difference. The former benefits the bosses; the latter benefits the workers.

No, life for office-workers is much as it was in the early 1970s, when I first ventured up to London in my school hols to pursue the rough, tough trade of filing-clerk. Oxford Circus at rush-hour resembled Dante’s Inferno in those days, and it still does. In most offices there were grim machines dispensing muddy, taste-free fluid in plastic cups. Still there. As are the rows of identical desks and chairs between blank grey walls. And, in many firms, the control-freak determination to impose the same working day on all. (Saw a droll cartoon recently. Boss lectures quivering trainee: “Now, Miranda, you’ll be glad to hear that we work flexible hours here. Either 7.30am to 9pm. Or, if you want to keep your job, 6am to midnight.”)

Perhaps it takes an outsider to imagine how offices might be cheered up with a little creative thinking. Certainly the jolliest ideas I’ve heard recently came from a bunch of 11 to 14-year-olds who took part in a competition set up by Metro Design Consultants to devise the “office of the future”. OK, some entries had a touch of the Tardis about them. I love the lift that “slows down time on the inside”, letting you snatch a restorative kip on the way up to that crunch meeting with the big cheese on the ninth floor. But I fear that, even if Stephen Hawking goes into partnership with Otis Elevators, such a delightful time-bending innovation may lie some centuries into the future.

What, though, about “walls that show different scenery each day”, so you can be on a tropical beach on Mondays, in a rain forest on Tuesdays, and up the Eiger on Wednesdays? As for seats that “feel like clouds”, or “chill-out rooms with soothing water features”, or “vibrating chairs that massage your back while you work”, or “robots that make lunch” — well, as Roosevelt said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yes, these are outlandish ideas. But at this moribund stage in British office-design history a blast of the outlandish would be welcome.

Of course, there’s one good reason why office design did get stuck in the mid-20th century. People blithely imagined that the very notion of the office, as a place that workers had to attend, 250 days a year, would soon go the way of the blacksmith’s forge: made redundant by gadgets that would reduce the working week to a few hours and replace face-to-face meetings with video-links and other microchip marvels. Well, we now have the technology. But it’s made sweet Fanny Adams of difference. Working hours are longer than ever, and offices even more prisons of the psyche. The fact is, we’re lumbered with them for the foreseeable future. So we had better make them as pleasant as possible. On this point, workers of the world really should unite. So, all together now, comrades:

What do we want?

A lift that gives us time for a nap!

When do we want it?

Now! Now! Now!

Sounds good, doesn’t it? If pushed, though, I think I would settle for a vibrating chair to massage my tired old back.

Whatever happened to the big chill?

Is this it, then? The much-touted “coldest British winter for decades”? All those apocalyptic warnings from the forecasters back in October suggested we should be fitting snow chains to our cars, building up stockpiles of thermal undies, medicinal brandy and balaclavas, lagging our water pipes with whale blubber, training our huskies to pull motorists out of 12ft drifts on the North Circular, and preparing to battle to work by skiing down the Strand or skating along the Thames.

Well, it’s now February, and the experts seem to have gone rather quiet about Britain’s imminent Great Arctic Freeze. Or rather, they petulantly point out that this winter’s average temperature is “a quarter of a degree colder than usual”. Yes, that’s a whole quarter of a degree. Brrrr!

OK, we had a few brisk days last week. I popped out in my shirt for a sandwich, and almost found myself shivering. My kids call that “cold”. But that is because they never lived through the winter of 1962-63, when the snowman we made in our garden on December 29 was still proudly erect in the first week of March.

Now that was cold. How did the Met Office boffins get it so wrong this year? Did they use the wrong sort of seaweed?

Stick with it

A well-meaning friend has given me a strange high-tech object which, he says, the hippest media types wear on ribbons round their necks. “It’s a memory stick,” he explains. “You can sit at a computer anywhere in the world — Bratislava, Tokyo, wherever, — plug this in, and your personal files are instantly accessible.”

Fascinating. Now all I need is a memory stick to plug into my brain. It would remind me why I turned on the computer in the first place, and what on earth I’m supposed to be doing in Bratislava.

www.timesonline.co.uk/richardmorrison

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