I have a beautiful office in my house. It’s lovely. There’s a wall full of books, a flatscreen TV, the fastest broadband you can get and a desk covered in photographs, objects and notebooks. I’ve never done a word of work in it, mind. And that will be because of all the books, telly, net and sentimental ephemera.

If your house is in any way pleasant, working from home is fatal. Somehow your brain can’t quite believe that you are asking it to engage in some structured thinking in the place where you more usually have a bath and watch How to Look Good Naked.

“Construct a coherent thesis on the evil of Sharon Osbourne? Here? In the Snugglearium?” my mind asks, outraged. “I most certainly will not. I’m going to drift off and think about how I’d spend £1,000 in John Lewis instead.”

This is why working in a coffee shop is so popular with those who supposedly “work from home”. Going there is like entering a capsule where your life can’t get at you – no domestic pottering, no ringing at the doorbell and, most importantly, an internet connection that costs, for 30 minutes, roughly the price of a small, golden crown. Financially restricted as to the number of “amusing” e-mails you can send and YouTube clips you can watch, you finally get that work done, distracted only by the hissing of the espresso machines and the odd toddler escaping its mother to smash at the basket full of muffins with its fist.

Going to an independent café would mean hogging one of their tables all day for well under £5 worth of drinks and I don’t want to drive them out of business. I have no such compunction hogging the space of multinationals – which is why, every morning, I and my husband leave our extremely lovely home offices and spend six hours “working from home” under a huge canvas of a Guatemalan farmer entitled Phillipe is passionate about his coffee.

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