My last week at home - Monday

Monday morning, as Wife leaps like a slow motion salmon from our bed, I keep my eyes tight shut and remain determined to enjoy the 5th to last time I'll be lounging about while she is busy beautifying for the day ahead.

I've been working from home for the past 5 years, 1 year in the extended state of mild panic that is freelance web development, and 4 with a thoroughly modern company where everybody works from home.

Unsurprisingly, It's been good. No travel costs, nice lunch's almost everyday and knocking off at 5:30 means exactly that. I regularly have 3 hours before Wife gets home expecting her tea on the table, leaving me plenty of time to work out my thumbs on the Playstation.

This blessing however, comes with a curse, and while our cleverly named cat Tiger is good at sticking his bum in my face as I'm trying to work, he's not much of a conversationalist. My human contact tends to hover about the "'Just that thanks' up at the shop" level.

And it's here that the problem lies, there are people in prison for some pretty serious crimes that spend less time on their own than me and I've decided enough is enough.

I've only gone and got myself an office job for which I'll have to get on the tube!

So as I lie there, listening to the nonsense from the radio at just gone 7, I know these leisurely starts are coming to an end. As time ticks inexorably on, I'm travelling second by second further from next weeks alarm call, which to Wife's dismay will start with a 6.

Despite hitherto unknown early starts, with the exception of some flights and my first 11 Christmas's, I'm still excited about it.

Imagine being able to turn my eyes from the screen/keyboard (my typing is a not quite "touch", more "fumbling grope") and see a real life person.

More than this I get to be one of the sour-faced commuters, cramming into a train, headphones plugged in, reading yesterdays news in a free paper.

Some morning's I'll have to stand next to someone with terrible morning breath and try not to gag in their face.

I'll be able to tut unnecessarily at the old lady enjoying a day "up town" who's forgotten to get her free travel card out with the military precision required to slip through the barriers at speed.

I'll be able to join in the bitchy office gossip, who's done what with who? How much are they being paid? Weren't they wearing that yesterday?

I'll meet people I don't even like, officious jobsworths with a total lack of responsibility for their own actions and a fake laugh.

I may even make an enemy.

All of the things the working masses take for granted, all the unpleasant niggles, the twitching worries and blood vessel bursting annoyances, all of these things are soon to be mine, and in all honesty, I can't wait.