FROM next month, a change in the law means that all working parents with a child under six can ask to go home early, share their job with a colleague, or work from home one day a week. As someone who works from home seven days a week, I would thoroughly recommend that you eschew both the “Home in time for Countdown” and “Dump it on Dave” options, and gun firmly for a Bunk-Off Friday. There is nothing more sublime than working from home. It makes riding a Grand National winner to your local pub look like a long day of being knocked over repeatedly on pedestrian crossings.

This is, after all, a lifestyle where your daily commute takes place in your pyjamas, your desk can have a Breville Pie Magic ™ (“Makes hot pies — in under four minutes!”) on it, and your supervisor is someone who encourages you to knock off at 3pm every day, turns a blind eye to embezzlement and fraud, and provides you with a hot frisson of adoration and unrequited lust (ie, it’s you). Obviously having the kids around will put a niggle in your blue wiggle over your more ambitious plans to spend all day on the sofa watching Das Boot and eating Reeses Pieces — particularly if they have claustrophobia and a nut allergy — but then it’s amazing how much more malleable children become when you spend more time with them. My Dora, who’s two, will spend hours draped around me like a big hot cat, quietly watching Fireman Sam videos while I work on my laptop. At the point where we feel our bottoms going numb we run to the corner shop for oranges, and sit on the kerb outside shouting, “Man!” and “Bus!” and “Pigeon!” and dropping the peel piece by piece down the drain. Kids are a doddle when they know they can just come and harass you for ten minutes whenever they like. And, let’s be honest, you’re not going to get that Friday off without them, so you’re just going to have to learn to live with the little guys.

But then, given that it’s 2003, it seems ludicrous that grown men and women should have to ruin their lives with a child just to stay at home one day a week. The daily exodus to work looks evolutionarily stunted from where I am (on the sofa, lightly tanned by a fine layer of Reeses Pieces dust). A hundred years ago, when most jobs involved hot anvils, Bob Cratchiting away at a ledger the size of the Ark, or running after sheep, the work could not be done at home. These days, however — and as your nan has doubtless said in her bewildered but wise old way — we all “do something with computers”, and, unlike a mountain full of sheep, they can go anywhere.

On top of this, everyone knows that you work more quickly at home, simply because you are free of nitwits, office loonies and the terminally droning trying to discuss The Match with you. Never having to discuss The Match results in a 6,000 per cent rise in your productivity, plus the illusion that you live in a world where nitwits, loonies and the terminally droning don’t exist any more. And, man, consider this: you can go to Ikea when there’s no-one else around. It’s win/win/win/win all round.

No, there’s no doubt in my mind that almost every problem currently wearing at the fabric of society comes from people commuting five days a week to Wareham, Leith or Holborn. Congestion, delinquent children, infidelity, slip-on shoes, ready-meals, Pret A Manger, cocaine, political apathy and the Spearmint Rhino strip-club: they are all a direct result of working with a bunch of people who are so dull or weird that the fact that you spend two-and-a-half times more time with them than your family takes on an almost surreal biliousness, and you subsequently become so jaded that only a damp crayfish sandwich, a dose of cocaine and six tarts can inject any happiness into your life. Offices are desolate places; like orphanages full of people in suits. Except that every person there does have a loving family to go to. The whole system is about as sane as a box full of hair.

Of course, the one drawback to working from home is the crippling loneliness that can make Upper Holloway feel like some tundra, and the postman like a penguin you’ve decided to anthropomorphise due to sheer snow-blind madness. But with a well-selected internet chat-room you’re never more than three minutes away from a conversation about what you had for lunch — or, depending on how psychologically damaged you are from years of working in an office, The Match; and if every parent opts for their Bunk-Off Friday, we could all meet up! And help me carry my new sofa out of Ikea!

ANOTHER WAR, another slew of protest songs. George Michael was first off the block, premiering his single, The Grave, on Top of the Pops while the Navy was still somewhere north of Biscay; and now Robbie Williams has scheduled a release called, in the manner of John Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War Is Over), Happy Easter (War Is Coming) — a single that will doubtless lend a much-needed dose of self-conscious North Midlands punning to the forthcoming hail of blasted limbs, broken hearts and white-hot shrapnel.

Of course, while the world would be an incalculably worse place if artists didn’t comment on world events, songwriters often fail to bring the same critical eye to their political artistic output as they cast on politicians’ actions. This suspicion is borne out by Michael’s rambling offering which, if played in the UN building, would fail to get a mandate on it being spun a second time. And then, of course, there’s the essentially lazy nature of the enterprise: despite being powerful enough to do almost anything he chooses, Williams has merely made his song a B-side to a more commercially-viable single, and scheduled it for release on April 14 — by which time the war will almost certainly be over.

Tina Brown is away