Whatever happened to working from home? Technology was supposed to liberate us all from going into an office, wasn’t it? Leaving aside that going somewhere to work is palpably good for you, if not for five days a week, then certainly two or three, in terms of exercise, human contact, putting on clothes other than your pyjamas, not going barking mad, your employer remembering you exist etc.

In the long-gone Stone Age of five or six years ago, a computer was still about organising or rearranging or, in some fashion, adding value to words and numbers, ie, it was a great help in what many of us do for a living. Now, a computer is basically a huge colourful entertainment centre, a social club, a cinema, a disco, an amusement arcade.

Your films, your music, your jokes, your mates, your games, they are all accessible. Computers used to be about work. Now they are much more about enticements to stop you working. Your displacement activities — iTunes, e-mail, Minesweeper, watching dancing rabbits on YouTube — they’re all right there.

I spent three quarters of an hour yesterday trying (and succeeding, got 7,645) to improve my score on Bloody Day (basic shoot’em up, rudimentary graphics, gruesome sound effects). Then I watched a clip of a new comedian that my friend Steve had sent me. Then I did some e-mails. Then I did five minutes’ work.

Then I went on the BBC website, followed a link to Alan Turing, read his entry on Wikipedia, decided that I needed to have a look at Bletchley Park on Google Earth, felt seized by a sudden craving to hear Rivers of Babylon by Boney M (much maligned band, surely their time will come again), and so it went on. Good clean fun, but not what I’m paid to do.

Or maybe it is.

Thank you for the music

Meanwhile, the more traditional distractions of life in the bosom of your family have not gone away. I agreed to go home early to look after our daughter while my wife went to a parents’ do at our son’s school. “I can make it by 4.30,” I pronounced, a trifle pompously now that I see it written down, “so long as she realises I’ll have to be working.”

Who am I trying to kid? Young Rachel put her Mamma Mia DVD on the telly. Special singalong version. I stood in the back garden watching through the window, humming. “Hmm,” I thought when it turned chilly, “I’d better go in and keep her company for a few minutes.” Two hours later father and daughter were still on the sofa, daughter recuing the disc to watch our favourite bits again.

I have to say that I do admire the Pierce Brosnan solos. For me that was one of the bravest performances in cinema history. Never mind crash-dieting and pretending to have Aids, or being confined to a wheelchair — to sing a song on camera when you can’t sing, that’s courage. Those critics that slagged him? Cowards, the lot of ’em.

Leafer madness

Then there are the household tasks that should be left for the weekend, and yet, if you are there with something more challenging that you want to avoid, suddenly become hard to ignore.

My house is plagued by dead leaves. Who wants to be indoors working, or indeed playing the helicopter game on the net, when outside it’s a crisp early autumn day and there are drifts banking up against the back door? Especially when you’re the proud owner of a new leafblower.

So then it’s “I’ll just give it five minutes”, but after five minutes of blowing and blasting, scouring and sucking, the leaf fever falls upon you and before long you fetch the extension cord the better to reach into a eucalyptus tree. Vacuuming up every last dead leaf on the ground may be obsessive. Climbing a tree the better to vacuum leaves that are still alive is insane.

Power mad

The leafblower, surely, is a rare example of a domestic power tool that doesn’t have the potential — unless you are really, really, thick — to inflict grievous personal injury. The pressure hose, I suppose, is also relatively benign (and hugely enjoyable, enabling you to scrawl swear words two feet high into dirty paving stones). But as for hedge clippers, chainsaws, the more industrial variety of strimmer? Lethal.

A friend of mine nearly had his foot off with a circular saw the other day. Attempting to cut a brick in half, he slipped and sliced the blade halfway through the bone before he remembered where the off switch was.

I’m all for DIY, but it’s an anomaly, isn’t it, that in these health-and-safety-conscious times that such hardware is so easily available to rent to rank amateurs? Another ten years and I suspect that we won’t be allowed. It’ll be another blow struck against working from home.

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