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Sam Leith: Home-working is really not as easy as it sounds

Warning: Working from home can be bad for your health: Shutterstock / racorn
Warning: Working from home can be bad for your health: Shutterstock / racorn

Too much work will kill you, as Queen so nearly sang. A peer-reviewed study in the latest edition of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience argues that the practice of taking work home with you — answering your emails in the bath, fretting about tomorrow’s M&A meeting before you go to sleep and so on — is a direct contributory factor for heart disease. “Dealing with work while at home is pernicious to health and is directly linkable to cardiovascular disease,” one of the co-authors says. “That is now measurable and before it was not.”

The study tracked a number of City workers and found that stress levels were “dangerously high” until 8.30pm, when the kids went to bed, but many remained high until midnight and 1am. A small hardcore of stress-monkeys, the study discovered, woke up between 3am and 4am, “mentally returning to work”.

Naturally these well-paid, stable-salaried, heart-failure-prone city workers command all our sympathy. But where, it makes me wonder, does it leave freelancers — who don’t take work home from the office but whose home actually is the office? Those who imagine the freelance life is a never-ending cycle of daytime television and opportunistic self-abuse have it only half right. It’s like taking work home from the office without ever having the respite of the office itself, without ever having a place where you can relax and gossip on somebody else’s time and your children are not allowed to chase you shouting: “Dad! Dad! DAD! DAD!”

My kitchen floor is a wasteland of Lego caltrops, my sink groans with washing-up, and my “work day” is punctuated by the bleating of washing machines, feuding infants and the doorbell. Unmet domestic obligations and unmet professional obligations share physical and mental space. Everywhere I go I’m in danger of upending one of the “potions” my three-year-old makes with instant coffee, washing-up liquid, good olive oil and cayenne pepper. When I go on — ha ha! — “holiday” I’m conscious — intensely conscious — of the unanswered emails piling up, the pushed deadlines, the unread books and unwritten articles.

I’m writing this on a Sunday, something made possible because my saintly wife has taken the children for a walk in the mud-churned local park. And I can’t sit properly in my office chair because the cat has taken up residence and shows no enthusiasm for moving. By the end of the day I have at least three more articles to write — which is, I admit, marginally more encouraging than being in the even more stressful position of the freelance who has no articles to write at all.

I don’t say this to whinge. OK, that’s a lie. I certainly do say this to whinge — but not just to whinge. Rather, to make the point that my experience will be typical of a growing number of those of us who home-work, tele-work and freelance in the exciting new gig economy. To concentrate on office workers who can’t leave their work at the office is, surely, to have things upside-down. That’s the last millennium’s occupational health hazard. If you really want to see people disintegrating under stress, it’s the freelancers you should be looking into.

Feel the power of ageless Christie

All that glitters: Christie Brinkley on the red carpet at the Sports Illustrated event in Houston, Texas (Rick Kern/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated)
All that glitters: Christie Brinkley on the red carpet at the Sports Illustrated event in Houston, Texas (Rick Kern/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated)

At 63, the model Christie Brinkley has a body and a face that many 25-year-olds would covet. She flaunted her curves, as the Sidebar of Shame has it, on the red carpet at the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit festival wearing a shiny frock slashed to the hip and plunging nearly to her navel.

Those of us who worry about these things, though, aren’t sure what to make of this. Is this an empowering post-feminist contribution to the model’s own objectification? Does she offer an inspiring role model to older women whom our society conspires to portray as sexually extinct? Or is it just another example of unrealistic body images being held up to immiserate ordinary women?

A definitive answer would be a great help to the consciences of any people, for example, who spent the last 20 minutes Googling “Christie Brinkley swimsuit”.

The people have spoken, and can keep doing so

What a boggins this Brexit is turning out to be. The latest hiccup is the realisation that since we’ve no records of how long EU nationals living here have been in the country, there’ll be no way of establishing how many of them will be entitled to stay.

That’s no small impediment to the “take back control” brigade. Tony Blair has caused outrage among Leavers by suggesting, gently, that when details of the likely terms of Brexit become clearer we decide we don’t fancy them, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be entitled to change our minds.

But surely he’s right. Our whole democratic electoral system, with its fixed-term parliaments and its pursuit of floating voters, is built around the idea that people are entitled to change their minds. It’s an odd concept of democracy that insists that once “the people have spoken”, the people have an obligation then to shut up for good.