Self Checkout

In so many ways, working from home is the ideal scenario for a professional mum. Time saved commuting can be spent hyper-efficiently at my desk. While the rest of you are cramped on smelly tubes, gleaning current events from a newspaper partly viewed through the armpit hairs of your strap hanging neighbour, I am smugly sipping a latte and ticking items off my to-do list.

Lest I sound up my own butt, the flip side is that when I do show up at work for an office day, I am overdressed with vamp makeup and bouffant hair that is so not in line with my trendy 20-something colleagues. I silently muse that I was around for the first Flashdance craze (WHADDAFEEEELING!!!) and thus fully processed the double-belt, leg-warmer look before they were born.

Equally, I acknowledge that pulling my pre-maternity leave wardrobe out of mothballs for our recent corporate retreat was a colossal mistake. The herringbone power suit, oversized pearls and artfully knotted flight attendant foulard were bad enough but the frosted lipstick and scrunched hair were the final straw. Imagine a Dynasty befrocked Joan Collins in the Carrington boardroom, clinging to her diamante clutch for dear life and flanked by Kate Moss and Kate Hudson sniggering into their iphones.

I then regroup in my home office for a few days of trackysuit bottoms and bunny slippers. My way of managing is to keep work and home life separate. That means that I don’t leave my desk to transfer the laundry into the dryer, I don’t do personal emails or Amazon orders on office time. Strictly no googling “perimenopause symptoms” or plucking. I like to think that I am compartmentalising and therefore reaching new heights of efficacy.

A friend came to supper last Saturday and asked me why I was doing this blog. I was completely gobsmacked after all the affirming emails of encouragement and support from friends who have been after me to do this for ages. The answer is that I am desperately lonely and miss the camaraderie of the water cooler. As she is a big deal in HR, I should have perhaps shared this insight with her but I was a bit tipsy from post-Christmas retoxing at that exact moment. Drinking isn’t the answer and admitting my loneliness to myself is a solid first step.

I know my self-imposed sequestration is the crux of the matter because when I do force my colossal shoulder pads through the revolving doors of our corporate headquarters things get bad. I babble like a hysterical teenager to my less than amused colleagues, make pathetic jokes about hot-desking, inappropriate observations about my line manager’s nose hair and find any pretext to monologue on a diverse range of subjects from paper clip chains to Ikea meatballs.

The fall-out of my home-office isolation was further driven home when I found myself audibly musing to a packet of ethically somethinged free range organic salmon fillets in my shopping basket while queuing for the self-checkout at my local supermarket. I politely extricated myself from banter with the dead fish to address the touch screen and bar-code reader. No I hadn’t had a chance to swipe my loyalty card, yes I had brought 2 of my own bags, (where else would I put them if not in the bagging area?), that’ll be cash and you are most welcome, I WILL come again. The sum and total of my verbal interaction for the best part of 6 hours.