As I type this, a friend of mine is sitting about 80cm away, working on her laptop and eating the apple I picked from a tree beside the ring road during my morning run. We are both in unelasticated trousers. We are both sitting at screens. We are both trying to look busy.
Yes, I have a work buddy. After many, many years of talking to no other adult between the hours of 7am and 6pm (and no, Twitter does not count), I realised that I needed to stop spending so much time on my own. I asked another freelance friend if she would like to come and work in my shed – on a separate computer, doing a separate job, but close enough that, should I want to, I could reach over right now and push a raisin up her nose.
I can’t speak for her (I mean, I could: I could turn 45 degrees to the left, ask her the question and just type her reply here), but so far I love the arrangement. First, it means we each have someone witnessing our faffing, procrastination and knuckle-examination, which makes all of the above slightly less easy to get away with guilt-free. Second, it means I am not tempted to do the washing-up or change the bedsheets or all the other manifold tasks that sit 30 seconds away from my home computer. And finally, after a decade, three books and several million words produced at my kitchen table, I have someone to talk to. To bounce ideas off. To make tea for and annoy with my phone calls.
Have I just reinvented the office? No. But do I think that a working-from-home buddy system is excellent and probably deserves its own Bumble-style networking app? Sure. If you can sort the details. And don’t push raisins up each other’s noses.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of The Panic Years and Square One
