You can keep your open-plan office, with its lurgies, stinky lunches and inane babble

It is, by all accounts, a spectacular building. The £700 million Francis Crick Institute in Kings Cross has a cavernous, high-ceilinged atrium, cathedral-like coloured glass window panes and a four-storey basement housing state-of-the-art scientific instruments. It’s the inspiring workplace of around 1,500 neuroscientists, geneticists and molecular biologists, all sharing knowledge and conducting research at the cutting edge of their fields. In fact, it was carefully designed by talented architects with just such collaboration in mind. The only problem? You can’t hear yourself think. A year after opening the Institute is fielding several complaints from staff about noise levels, especially around the atrium.

This is a familiar grievance for today’s office workers, who typically toil in one of two extremes. Either we’re isolated home-workers — a set-up known to turn even the most gregarious co-worker into a grunting, scraggly-bearded shut-in within a matter of weeks — or we’re languishing in an open-plan purgatory. Here, someone is always eating their foul-smelling lunch al desko, someone else is chatting loudly about last night’s Blue Planet II two inches from your ear, and someone else is spreading their lurgy around with stifled sneezes. Plus, there’s the anxiety of knowing that at any moment, your boss could wander by and spot the open ASOS shopping cart window on your screen.

Why do architects, typically such amiable sorts, continue to torture us in this fashion? Especially when the solution is so obvious. Let’s go back to that happy medium of making sound-proofed, private offices available to those who’ve earned them, by serving their time in the hot-desking trenches.

Partly, it’s because encouraging creative collaboration has become the be-all and end-all of workplace design, even to the exclusion of other productive habits. Such as actually sitting your arse down at a desk and concentrating for five minutes. In theory, open-plan offices are also the, er, “fun” option. There’s enough floorspace to really build up some speed on an adult-sized scooter when you make that Friday 5pm dash to the beer fridge. Who needs a life outside of the office when your boss is also your best mate?

This is how the open-plan office is making you sick, by the way — in the head, as well as with the aforementioned lurgy. It’s a descendent of Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century panopticon prison, which the social reformer memorably envisioned “as a mill for grinding rogues honest.” The key element of his design was a large, open space for prisoners, overseen by a central watchtower. In the modern equivalent, the watchtower is replaced by one officious guy in IT but the principle of constant surveillance remains.

No, thanks. Until this particular office design fad dies a death, I’ll keep working from home. My Vitamin D levels are plummeting, my speech is starting to slur and the beard will likely follow, but it’s still the preferable option.

No-nonsense Helle’s my new hero

Here’s the thing about dynasties: they’re terrible in politics but great on telly. You’ll know that if you caught the pilot episode for Keeping Up With The Kinnocks, also known as this week’s BBC Two documentary, Labour: The Summer That Changed Everything.

There was pathos. See the scene capturing that exit poll moment when Labour MP Stephen Kinnock realised that rehashing his centrist dad’s politics wasn’t going to cut it for the Corbyn era. There was fashion inspiration. See Glenys Kinnock circa 1983, in a pair of suede boots so fabulous, they make a woman want to kick her husband into the Brighton surf. Imagine that!

Clearly this as-yet-uncommissioned series has everything a great reality TV needs. It even has its own Honey Boo Boo / Joey Essex / Cardi B-style breakout star, biding her time before the inevitable spin-off. That would be Stephen Kinnock’s wife, the former Danish PM, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. When Helle gave her husband a stern dressing down re his reckless interview technique, she proved herself worthy of all our most fevered Borgen fanfic. This is a woman with three names — and not one of them is Kinnock.

I think Big Phil missed a trick

The Chancellor delivered his “make or break” Budget yesterday. So what? I’ve been drawing up spreadsheets for years and I stick to them. A great budget begins with its title — it must be motivational, like “Boss Bitch budget” or ‘Mo Money, No Problems: The Notorious B.I.G. Tribute budget 2017”. And you must take perverse pleasure in penny-pinching. A Chancellor only has to convince the nation; you have to convince yourself.

* Why do I know so much about other women’s ovaries? Here’s a list of people whose ovaries I want to know more about ... Nope, couldn’t think of one. And yet along comes Rita Ora with a live TV announcement that she’s frozen her eggs, “to really be safe”. And Chrissy Teigen announcing another IVF-enabled pregnancy. Er, good on ya, girls, I guess. But isn’t it weird that women feel compelled to give regular fertility updates? Perhaps the more radical act would be to keep the contents of your womb on a need-to-know basis and talk about your work instead.