Working from home has not all been idyllic, of course. Not everyone has a spare room to use as office space, or a garden where the kids can let off steam. The burden of trying to homeschool fractious children while remote working has disproportionately fallen on mothers, with many risking their jobs by requesting furlough in order to cope. There’s been sketchy internet, a 40% spike in divorce enquiries and skyrocketing domestic violence.

No doubt those for whom the workplace is sanctuary, social life and home from home have rushed to return to its embrace. But given that one early summer survey showed that 90% of workers would rather not rush back, and another July study revealed that only a third of British workers had returned to the office, clearly this isn’t everyone. It shouldn’t come as a surprise: for many — and especially for commuters — working lifestyles have become increasingly unbearable.

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Before we embarked upon our mass national experiment in remote working, the centrifugal power of our cities seemed a law of nature. Anyone with ambition had to be physically present where the jobs were — and that meant, chiefly, London. Caught up in that trend, for a while I took the train from Bedfordshire to London five days a week for work. It was horrible.

When you commute, there’s a relentless, conveyor-belt feeling to every working day: out of the house shortly after 6am, the daily worry you’ll miss your train, fighting for the last station parking spot, fighting for the last train seat, fighting to get on your connecting train when you get to town. By the time you make it to work, you’ve been fighting for two hours, and you know you’ll have to do it all over again at the other end of the day.

There’s no time to do anything at home except make a quick meal and collapse, exhausted, in front of the telly. If I tried to do anything else at all in the evenings, I was running a chronic sleep deficit. I was constantly ill. With socialising and exercising time consumed by travel, I piled on weight and lost touch with friends. In the winter, when the barest hint of normal seasonal phenomena such as ice or wet leaves makes the trains curl up and die, I’d often enjoy an unscheduled hour or so added to my journey time, usually whenever it was least convenient. For all these privileges, I was charged close to £10,000 a year by train companies whose services were overcrowded and unreliable.

I was one of around a million commuters paying a version of these personal costs, for a middling seat at London’s economic banquet. This banquet, while plentiful for many, has had large-scale political costs too. Back in 2016, the Brexit vote revealed a country bitterly split between the urban, liberal and cosmopolitan winners of globalisation, and (as repeatedly implied by that august demographic) globalisation’s reactionary, provincial thicko losers.

Our political class has been murmuring for a while now about how terribly sad it is that cultures and demographics are polarising between urban centre and provincial periphery. They mostly looked carefully past the bottom line, which is that London has enjoyed its pre-eminent position by concentrating the lion’s share of Britain’s ambition and intelligence in its penumbra.

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The advantages of this to the winners in the arrangement have been obvious: a bottomless supply of talent, a global reputation for cultural dynamism and apparently copper-bottomed property prices. The costs, in political polarisation and the ever more extreme nature of commuter lifestyles, were either ignored or treated as unfortunate but inevitable side-effects of the otherwise positive “London effect”.

Borne aloft by his landslide victory last December, Boris promised to heal the nation’s economic and geographic divides by “levelling up” the rest of the country — a phrasing that assumes the way forward is to encourage everywhere else to ascend to London’s giddy heights.

Only now, the boom in remote working means talent and disposable income no longer needs to be physically present in London five days a week. There’s been a stampede to get out of the metropolis, with a surge in enquiries for more spacious rural properties — especially those with space to work from home. That could be great for the provinces; but it also means that the “levelling” Boris promised may turn out to mean less building on London’s success than ending its stranglehold on the nation’s workforce.

I don’t pretend to have been an irreplaceable loss to the capital, but for me, back in 2016, it was having a baby that tipped the balance. I couldn’t think of a London job I wanted to do badly enough, or that seemed likely to pay me enough, to warrant leaving my infant with someone else 12 hours a day while I returned to the treadmill. Once I calculated that the London salary premium is consumed by the cost of commuting for all but the highest earners, the whole arrangement just seemed mad.

Now, having demonstrated that remote working is fine at least some of the time, much of commuter-belt Britain seems to be making similar calculations. If your commute is 90 minutes either way, working from home two or three days a week amounts to half a day of family or leisure time clawed back every single week. That’s a whole extra weekend’s worth of free time, every month. Who in their right mind would relinquish that save under duress?

Duress is coming, though. Early in August, US bank Morgan Stanley published research that stopped barely short of calling British workers lazy. When I read the headline British workers more reluctant to return to work than Europeans, my first thought was “wait, who said it was a competition?” But from the bankers’ point of view, when cubicle drones boycott their cubicle, home-working means a deserted City of London. And that, in turn, means a struggling commercial property market, as businesses scale down their office sizes or scramble for premises without germ-laden shared lifts.

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A source tells me workers in financial services have been saying privately for some time that they could do their jobs from home with no loss of productivity. Now that the virus has proven them right, the firms they work for are panicking about their exposure to an urban commercial property market that’s looking shaky to say the least. No wonder Morgan Stanley (whose 2019 advice on the London commercial property market was bullish) is now looking for ways to guilt the plebs out of their home offices and back into London, by talking up some imaginary competition over which nation can resume the rat race with more Stakhanovite fervour.

It’s not just banks: the Government’s return-to-work mood music has now shifted from friendly encouragement, to a more threatening tone. When we hear unnamed official sources whipping up fear of job losses among the stubbornly home-working commuter class, we should remember that London’s skyscraper boom is itself a legacy of Boris Johnson’s years as mayor, with a glut of such applications waved through toward the end of his mayoral term. Perhaps we should not be surprised if Johnson now shows a reluctance to embrace a variant of the “levelling” agenda that would leave all those shiny skyscrapers standing empty.

Nor is it just commercial property. The cubicle-drone rebellion echoes all the way down the metropolitan economy. Last week, Pret A Manger announced it was cutting 2,800 jobs, as commuters and office workers stay home instead. Pizza Express, Byron Burger and Frankie & Benny’s have also announced job losses.

Beyond the “lunchtime economy”, countless small-business owners depend on the daily influx of commuters, from masseurs and City gyms to dry cleaners and in-office yoga instructors. Such businesses often have little working capital. One City-based physiotherapist reports turnover currently at 20% of the usual figure. If London ceases to demand workers’ physical presence every day, the consequence will be a tsunami of pain through all levels of the capital’s economy, from property giants down to sole traders and baristas. And it’s one thing telling Morgan Stanley to “take the hit”; if we’re facing a major economic rebalancing away from London, we’ll also have to face the human cost of that rebalancing on countless small businesses.

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And yet, this human cost was “market forces” when it was the provinces declining toward despair while the cities flourished. Globalisation has winners and losers, we were told; to make an omelette you have to break eggs. So you’d think there might be the odd voice arguing that shifting some of London’s talent and spending power out to live in the provinces is at least a plausible tradeoff.

Before coronavirus, London was home to around a third of all the coffee shops in Britain. No one is advancing the possibility that losing some of these might not represent an absolute loss to the national coffee-shop total, so much as a shift in daytime disposable income to suburban or small-town locations. It might even mean the opening of new coffee shops in locations where they previously weren’t viable.

But it seems as though, should we wish to make omelettes, it’s only okay to break provincial eggs. The golden egg that is London’s economy is not available for culinary purposes. Early signs from our political leaders indicate that “levelling” is only a political option if it’s ‘up’, toward a London whose apex position stays unassailable. But if that “levelling” turns out to be a tradeoff, at London’s expense, we can expect the revolt of the cubicle drones to face brisk Government counter-measures.

I suppose — to be charitable for a moment — this is what used to be called planning, getting ahead of the problem. But futurists take all this to quite another level. They are usually highly serious, geeky overgrown teenagers, generally men, who have been brought up on way too much science fiction. And they have turned what is basically a sucked finger raised into the air into a highly technical sounding art form. As the old Yiddish proverb has it: “Man plans and God laughs.”

Even so, all this MIT-meets-end-of-the-pier stuff does sometimes have interesting things to say. And the American futurist Jordan Hall’s “Civium Project” is a case in point.

Civium is a way of looking at cities, and specifically what a post-city world might look like. It imagines an alliance between technology and the countryside replacing the city as the focus of creativity and wealth-creation. It is the idea that there is no longer much point living in the middle of a large conurbation when you can now move out, look at fields through your window, breathe clean air, and do all your meetings with video conferencing. Covid has accelerated this fantasy. Rightmove has just announced that August has been one of the busiest months ever for buying and selling houses, with many moving to places such as Cornwall and Devon.

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“Cities are to people like stars are to atoms,” explains Hall. Like stars, cities have this inward gravitational pull. The more people that pack into an area, the more ideas it buzzes with and the greater its capacity to make money. The bigger the city, the more money (on average) that one can make there — so he argues. It’s all about the economies of scale. But just as there is a centripetal force that sucks in people, so too there is a centrifugal force that pushes them out. Because people have bodies, they take up physical space, and have physical needs like food. Thus the dynamic of the city is created by the intense inward pressure of the economic pull to the centre, and the resistance to this constant pull that our physicality engenders. People can only be packed in a small space so much before they want to break out of it.

But can technology — always the futurists’ deus ex machina — really square this circle? The Civium project imagines that the density of people that has made the city so much of a money spinner can now be recreated online. Indeed, when people can be translated into digital images, they can be packed together even more tightly, with even greater creativity and prosperity being created. The “gallery view” of Zoom, for example, allows many people to cram into the tiniest of spaces. And if density of people = creativity = prosperity, then the city as we have known it is doomed — because in the digital realm, the thing that attracted people together, what Hall calls “minds in relationship” can be de-coupled from the negative consequences of being physically piled up on top of each other.

The Civium imagines that we can have it both ways. We can live by the River Tamar, soothed by gentle music, without a neighbour for miles — yet we can also, and without commuting, instantly become a member of the sort of community that has made cities the economic hubs of civilisation for centuries. Yes, online conferencing has its own unique ennui to contend with. But that’s why we are moving to the Tamar. With all that time saved not commuting, there will be ample opportunity to chill out in your hammock and work off that disturbing feeling of existential dislocation with some good, old fashioned, country walks.

“It’s because minds are embodied that we have cities. Up until very recently the only way for minds to interact was to have bodies close to each other,” Hall says.

In other words, cities were an unfortunate consequence of the fact that minds have to carry around with them their physical bodies. Today, however, the virtual world allows us to jettison those bodies when we want to be “minds in relationship” and then relax by the river when we want to put body and soul back together again. This will not be an “adjunct to civilisation” Hall argues, but “a fully symmetric basis to civilisation with the physical side”.

He even imagines the virtual, the Civium, could represent a “single city” with the kind of scale to be maximally generative in terms of wealth creation. This is Capitalism 2.0.

What most interests me most about Hall’s proposal is that it recreates in such sharp focus our old friend the mind/body dualism and of a sort very similar to that imagined by the philosopher René Descartes, he of “I think therefore I am” fame. Hall’s idea of “minds in relationship”, and minds that have jettisoned their troublesome physicality, would inscribe into the very basis of civilisation the division that has created so much philosophical trouble since Descartes.

Perhaps the best way to critique the Civium project would be to argue that minds do not have relationships: only people do. And people are an indivisible unity of mind and body.

Yes, it is unfair to suggest that Hall neglects the body — after all, his vision of the bucolic life freed from the crowded, polluting, traffic rammed city is in many ways a return to our one-ness with the natural world. But this is achieved by pulling us apart — the creative, innovative mental part of ourselves making money in the virtual world and the bodily part being soothed in the physical.

And I am highly suspicious of this split. Physicality has a much greater role in innovation and creativity than Hall allows. In many disciplines, creativity is a very tactile business. My wife, for example, teaches weaving at university. She researches innovation in weaving technology. But it’s almost impossible to imagine what this could mean as simply “minds in relationship”.

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Likewise, to pick another example among many, the sort of trust that is necessary for creative and economic collaboration requires a much stronger sense of the face to face encounter than made possible over a screen. Morality is a remarkably physical business, I find. The obligations we have to other people make much more sense when we can see and touch them.

I began this piece being rather rude about futurists. I called them geeks — which is partly a way of talking about physical awkwardness, I suppose. Now I know that, these days, geeks are people with extraordinary power. They are the algorithm creators that shape so much of our lives.

And what terrifies me about the Civium project is that it is a way of imagining the world in which all this geeky awkwardness about physical bodies is turned into a civilisational principle.

Fast-forward fifty years and the situation today has triggered an equally huge adjustment in our work patterns. All workers have had specific challenges, whether it’s the key worker whose status has risen and whose workload has increased (but whose pay and conditions have not) or the managerial class now working from home, tag-teaming childcare commitments with partners, and struggling with the virtual office.

One obvious characteristic of this pandemic experience is that we have a renewed sense of what is valuable work in society: saluting farmers, supermarket workers, bin men and delivery drivers. Health and care workers have been elevated beyond a workforce to the status of a sacrificial army for their undeniable duty and bravery. We do not wear poppies to show our respect but clap in the street to show our thanks. There is a new appreciation for schools, too, not just for their role in educating kids but as wrap-around childcare enabling parents to work. And how many other informal paid workers from cleaners to childminders do we now realise are fundamental to making our households — and our economy — tick?

This is an important corrective to the past two decades which was characterized with a steady decline in respect, status and stability for jobs categorised as “low-skilled”.  Associated with debates around immigration, education and inequality, the issue has dogged politics in most countries for years and has been both ignition and accelerant to the populist flame.

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But as well as reminding us of these under appreciated but vital roles, the pandemic has also made us think about the purpose of work at the other end of the social scale. Before Corona, a Gallup poll found that 87% of workers in the UK felt disengaged in their job, and it is doubtful whether this figure would improve today just because so many of us are working from home.

How many workers are discovering how little they actually do in the office (and that it can be done at home in half the time)? Or perhaps workers are finding the exact opposite; things that could take 10 minutes in the office now take an hour over Zoom. Kids are exposed to what mummy and daddy call ‘work’ — lots of time looking at a screen, something we berate them for doing too much of and an activity that is hardly inspiring for them to see. How many workers are waking up to the fact that the rhythms and responsibilities that defined them aren’t as necessary or as important as they thought?

Given the economic slump that will follow this pandemic, it is unlikely that we will see a mass of dissatisfied workers walk out of their jobs; most will seek stability rather than change. But, even if this lockdown experience is not leading us to question our career, it is undoubtedly making us question our record on work/life balance.

There are three reasons to work: financial survival, professional and financial status, and personal meaning and identity. Since the 1990s, especially among the graduate class, it was the latter that was encouraged. A career was increasingly where individuals found their purpose. Finding the ‘right’ fit became a full time pursuit, consuming all spare hours, weekends and most of our twenties. If we took a wrong turn, we labelled it a quarter-life crisis and simply trained for something else.

Nowhere was this more encouraged than in the millennial generation, whose educational and parenting culture was entirely CV-driven. And for the first time in history, it was a gender-neutral pursuit, with millennial women being instructed that finding the right career was far more important than finding the right partner. The ultimate status update for millennials was not to be in love but to be in love with your job.

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By the mid-noughties, just as manual labour declined and found itself increasingly dismissed by an educational establishment, we began to romanticise self-actualisation through work. Out went the slacker trends of the 1990s: the dead-end jobs, artistic fantasies, faint-hearted careers, twenty-somethings slumped on the sofa like Friends. Rents became too high, tuition fees had to be paid back and a global recession was looming. Work became the ultimate realising of the self. It was not the music we liked or the hobbies we pursued but our career that gave us our uniform, self-meaning and network.

Tech idealists were the chief evangelists of this rewriting of the protestant work ethic, with Steve Jobs the guiding prophet, immortalised by an unwillingness to compromise, global success and premature death: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life… have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Where we worked and where we wanted to work began to reflect this new culture. Again, the pioneers were the dot.coms of the early noughties and their influence signified what may be called the “Californication of the office”; evident today in even the dullest of corporate places. It became a space designed not for monotonous uninspiring work but for constant play with break-out zones, super-slides, free-breakfast bars, gyms and sleep pods. Like a casino is designed to keep out daylight, these offices are engineered to make you feel like you were not at work at all (and to keep you there for as long as possible).

Work benefits began to reflect these new priorities. Out went gold-plated pensions (a route map to eventual departure) and in came very different perks from pet insurance to unpaid sabbaticals, even an egg-freezing service and a breast milk courier system.

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WeWork was the apotheosis of this trend. In the words of its poster-boy founder, Adam Neumann, WeWork was where people “made a life not just a living” and whose spaces were based “on mission and fulfilment — not only salary”. WeWork’s mission was always more impressive than its finances. Co-working spaces reflected the lionising of the lone, disruptive entrepreneur — even though the majority of WeWork’s clients were large corporations seeking to tap into the zeitgeist. The original concept of WeWork as a commune was always fantastical: there was no ‘we’ in WeWork; it reflected the decades-long breakdown of the employer-employee relationship.

It was not surprising that in this exhaustive search for meaning and purpose, we were becoming exhausted. Work seeped into our weekends, our social events and ultimately into our home — especially as the global recession hit and wages fell. We monetised our hobbies through side-hustles and further allowed the intrusion of work into our leisure time. The millennial generation in particular, far from their lazy, entitled stereotype, were becoming ‘work martyrs’, more likely than any generation to answer emails at the weekends.

But then came the Great Pause: Covid-19. No company, individual or government could have engineered this experiment if they tried. It is a real test of an employer’s obligations to their workforce. It is a real test of how accommodating employers are to workers’ work/life balance and familial responsibilities. It is a real test for workers as to whether they actually enjoy their job and how fulfilling they find it. I am currently doing a series of lockdown interviews with different professions, from CEOs to yoga teachers, and it is striking how little people are talking about work and how much they are talking about renewed fulfilment in the family, hobbies and home. Is this the time when we stop pretending we love our jobs?

They say it takes 66 days to build a new habit, and given some of the predictions of how long it will take to get back to normality, some are starting to think that it will never happen — certainly in the workplace. A recent Ipsos MORI poll found that 75% of Britons expect their work-life to change because of Covid-19. The question is how? Certainly, those workers — mostly parents — who have had to fight with their companies for flexible working will never have to make the case again. Even two-week paternity leave now seems woefully inadequate.

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Even after social distancing ends, companies may find that they will have to justify why workers need to be in the office at all. With more remote working and staggered shifts, loyalty and camaraderie among workers will become a problem especially for new entrants. Some are already experimenting with all sorts of virtual bonding from cocktail lessons to quiz nights — but is this really comparable to a quick drink before the commuter train?

Even when lockdown is lifted and with social distancing measures still in operation, the office will be a very different place. Out go sleep pods (unhygienic) and break out zones (too social); maybe cubicles will once again become the norm?

More pointedly, many companies and organisations, especially in a recession, will use this as an excuse to “shave off some of the fat” with many roles, departments and people now considered surplus to requirements. Businesses are already sniffing out the huge savings to be made on reducing leased office space. It may be that office HQ becomes like a church: a place for regular worship, a sermon, communion and the odd study class, but with staggered service times and empty most of the time: the expectation will be that the majority of individuals’ work is performed outside the building.

But if true, consider the ramifications for those dependent on a thriving office community in our cities: from sandwich shops to cleaners to transport infrastructure. Business districts on a Sunday are ghost towns — do we really want that to become the norm? And what of the ramifications for company culture? Will the diversity deficit, mansplaining, even sexual harassment no longer be a feature of work-life or will these problems only intensify or be ignored in a working world dominated by Zoom? The suggested model published by the Adam Smith Institute last week of four days in work, ten days at home model may, depending on how long it lasts, totally destroy the concept of a ‘weekend’ and put us all on a rota rhythm that may feel more disruptive than lockdown itself.

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All these changes will all be for the corporate class, of course, or at least the office class. And big business will adapt much slower to nimbler smaller outfits. The self-employed already have much of this flexibility built-in, but they may find that with fewer people in the office, their services are needed less and are the easiest to discard. There is already a divide between workers; those that can work from home and those that can’t — and that divide will only intensify post-Covid.

During this pandemic, all those things which are not usually recognised in the economy, such as care and cleaning (typically female jobs) are now what the economy hinges upon. The professional classes currently leaning out of their windows to clap on a Thursday night will soon find themselves confronted by a new world of work, but will this lead to a new era of work/life balance? Probably not. All the research suggests that a clear divide between personal and professional boundaries in life results in greater happiness.

So before we all rip off our lanyards in liberation, it is important to consider how the blurring of boundaries that comes with more remote flexible working may backfire; meaning in fact that we are all working harder, longer and more often. So it is surely time to stop pretending that it is the key thing that defines us.

The bad news is it takes some getting used to. The good news is that if you feel infuriated by your spouse, in despair at what to do with the kids or overwhelmed by trying to manage everything, you are not uniquely hopeless and nor is your family unusually dysfunctional.

When my husband and I started down the homeworking path, we found it much less idyllic than expected. In fact we very nearly split up – even without the added stress of coronavirus worries. But we worked it out. Today, it would take a lot to coax me back to an office job.

Thanks to coronavirus, millions of office-based workers suddenly find themselves in something like our situation. Like everyone else, I hope the pandemic passes soon and we can all go back to normal. But meanwhile, as the nation locks down, here are some things I learned about having home, family and workplace all in the same place without going mad or getting divorced.

Get dressed

If you work outside the home, having to go out in public is motivation to stay presentable. Working from home, the temptation is to treat every day like a weekend, bumbling about in your pyjamas with birds-nest hair. But stay at home mums learn quickly that being clean and presentable – even when you don’t have to – is key to feeling like a normal human being, as well as to that crucial sense of being (at least some of the time) one step ahead of your children.

The same goes for home workers – which is now, suddenly, a lot of us. These are strange and upsetting times. You have just lost most of the structures that define ‘normal’, for an indefinite duration. If you let personal hygiene go as well, you will feel like you are losing the plot. Obviously you don’t have to put on a suit, but you will feel much more yourself if you have a shower and put daytime clothes on first thing. (It also makes short notice videoconferences less stressful.)

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Have a routine

Usually, people have school or office hours to give shape to their daily lives. When I started my stint as a stay at home mum, I tried doing away with all such structures. Egged on by the nocturnal food needs of a new baby, I found myself keeping increasingly strange hours. But once the fog lifted, I realised that even with no one forcing me into a daily routine, I still needed to give my days some shape.

Your office may have shut down, but your body clock has not, and nor have your kids’ body clocks. Get up and go to bed at the same time every day, and stick to regular meals. Life is weird enough right now without giving yourself jetlag as well.

Randomness also wastes energy. You are now in charge of your own daily structure, and your kids’ structure too. If you have to negotiate everything from first principles you will have no bandwidth left for anything more interesting than nagging. The more you can turn into habit, the easier it is to get mundane stuff done and still have energy for more interesting activities.

Everyone cleans and tidies every day

Most families with two working parents get by in domestic terms with a weekend effort or a weekly cleaner. I am here to tell you that is no longer enough. The difference in mess, dust and general grottiness between a family out at work or school every day, and at home all the time, is more than a weekly blitz can cope with.

This matters, because your home is now your workspace and the more of a midden it is the more miserable you will feel. The good news, though, is that you now have time. Hardly anyone really does more than five hours of productive work a day, even if they are at their desk for double that time. You no longer have to look busy in front of colleagues, so between that and your now very short commute, you just gained maybe four hours of daily free time.

When work hits a lull, use some of that time to clean the house. In my experience half an hour a day is enough to keep things under control.Getting up, moving about and watching squalor turn into order is also useful thinking time after a burst of work, not to mention better for your mental health than obsessively refreshing the coronapanic on Twitter.

Make a conscious effort to set cleaning time aside, set a timer, get the kids involved. If you find yourself just moving piles of stuff from one surface to another and prodding around with a duster without ever seeing an improvement, The Organised Mum has a brilliant system that will help you get a grip.

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Split the shift

I take my hat off to all the single parents figuring out how to navigate home working with kids present. If you live with a partner, though, I recommend you split the shift. In our household, I like waking and working early, while my husband is more productive later in the day. So while schools and childminders are closed he is the childcaring parent until noon (I am usually at my desk by 5am) and I’m on duty after that.

If you do split the shift, try to be clear who is in charge of the kids and step back if it isn’t you. Don’t micromanage if the other parent is in charge. Don’t be Fun Uncle, either: if you wander in from your desk to make a coffee and end up whisking the kids off to play while your in-charge-of-the-kids-right-now spouse sits about like a lemon, they will not see it as ‘helping’. At least, don’t complain if they then leave you with the baby and go off to answer emails.

Dial back expectations

Families that only have evenings and weekends together are more likely to assume ‘quality time’ as the standard. But when you are together 24/7 you cannot keep that up. Especially resist the temptation to be constantly hands-on with the kids. Schools are sending crazy amounts of work out for distance learning but remember they are panicking too. A bit of structure is good (one friend, several weeks into lockdown in Italy, says her kids’ music practice is going great guns) but at least for young children, that structure can be mostly practical tasks and pottering about. A few weeks of Lego and helping with housework interspersed with the odd worksheet will do no harm.

As my husband and I discovered when we moved to home-working, being around your spouse 24/7 also means dialling back the intensity of your relationship and respecting each other’s headspace. If you spring a major worry or decision on your spouse who is deep in work thoughts and just came in for a snack, you are more likely to get a knock-back than the answer you need. A quick check that your other half has enough bandwidth for a chat will spare you many stupid arguments.

We make a point of eating together as a family, and making time for conversation after our daughter is asleep, but otherwise mostly act as if we are both out at work in different locations. We are lucky to have a home office each, but even if your space does not allow that, work in different rooms. If sharing a room is unavoidable, make headphones socially acceptable.

If space is very tight, former submariner Jon Bailey (who ought to know about coping with confinement) recommends timesharing the sitting room so everyone gets an hour or so alone to do as they please.

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Be patient with each other

It takes practice and negotiation to manage sharing space, schedules, chores and childcare alongside work all under a single roof. Be patient with each other.

If you are usually the main caregiver and domestic organiser, you may feel invaded by all these extra bodies in your well-organised space. Try not to radiate resentment or micromanage everyone’s schedules, no matter how tempting it is. (Seriously – this nearly cost me my marriage.)

Conversely, if your spouse is usually in charge of the household, remember he or she has already put thought and effort into systems that make it run smoothly. Don’t insult him or her with your blindness to that achievement. Find out how things work and what tasks you can take on within the existing system. You may think you have a brilliant idea to improve the system, but resist the temptation to hold forth until you understand how everything fits together. Otherwise you will come across like a graduate first-jobber trying to reorganise the entire company and getting sulky when rebuffed.

Make time for meals and exercise

Making time for movement is not a waste of your working day, it is vital to your sanity. Gardening, cleaning, yoga, weights or aerobics  – there are plenty of forms of physical activity compatible with the lockdown measures even if you are self-isolating. Workout apps, YouTube and the internet are your friend for low-equipment exercise ideas suitable for all ages. Likewise, cook proper food and eat together as a family as much as possible – you can go back to ignoring each other companionably in between.

Baking your own bread is easy

On a cheerier final note, baking bread is easy and makes the house smell amazing. If your poncy bakery has closed with the lockdown, this is your opportunity to fine-tune your sourdough technique and irritate everyone on social media with crumb shots. I recommend Ken Forkish’s fantastically nerdy Flour Water Salt Yeast as a foolproof primer for delicious breadmaking. Be warned though: bread is the gateway drug for a weirdly addictive (really!) world of yeast-based hobbies, and you will be brewing your own booze before you know it