Thomas believes he can help the Government draw up its new guidelines for people working from home.

The guidelines, I understand, are aimed not at people like self, who work in a self-employed fashion from boot cupboard transformed into home office, but people with proper jobs in offices and encouraged to spend some of the time when they should be in those offices working from home.

The guidelines are intended to cover tax concessions for use of home as office, expenses and that sort of thing and, as Thomas has said about 50 times this week, "they ought to include putting a lock on the door of wherever it is these people are supposed to be working from, so they actually get on with their work."

This he keeps repeating to irritate me and try to get a guilty response because, when he came home unexpectedly from his office, having forgotten some important thing he was supposed to have taken, he discovered me cleaning the windows.

The windows were covered in dust, created by men bulldozing land to build houses at the back of ours. They needed cleaning and Thomas would never have got round to it, so I did. The only problem with this being, in Thomas eyes anyway, was I was cleaning them on a day and at a time when I should have been ensconced in boot cupboard frantically tapping at keyboard in order to meet work deadline.

When I pointed out to Thomas I had been tapping away all morning, had written 2,000 out of 3,000 words and was having a break, he shook his head and told me I was only deceiving myself if I believed I was justified in putting in the amount of displacement activity hours that I did.

When I pointed out I was using this free time constructively, by completing a task, which I had repeatedly asked him to start, he began to look as if he thought he might be losing the upper hand he thought he had.

This, therefore, seemed like a good time to mention the stair gates which Thomas has been promising to fit at top and bottom of stairs, since baby Rugrat began crawling several months ago and which now need to be fitted as a matter of urgency since baby tries to hurl himself up or down stairs whenever he gets near top or bottom.

Thomas went back to work and so did I, but feeling so irritated with spouse I lost my train of thought and was unable to write the next thousand words required of me. So, instead decided to leave it until the next day, when I'd be able to finish it. To occupy the time left of my "working" day I cleaned the inside of the windows as well.

Knowing all the windows were sparkling, I went into boot cupboard the following morning determined to finish the piece and was surprised when Thomas said he'd be going into work a bit later that morning, as he was going to get the stair gates up before he left.

After much banging, during which I was unable to think, let alone write, he came to tell me the gates were up and he was also going to put a lock on the door of my boot-cupboard-turned office, a task the builder who originally transformed boot cupboard into office suggested be done three years ago, when he effected the transformation, in order to make it more difficult for anyone who might break into the house to make off with computer and work therein.

After a bit more drilling, Thomas shouted the job was done and left for work. So, I wrote a few more words and then decided what I really needed was a cup of tea, before I got down to work in earnest.

It was then I found Thomas had decided to demonstrate exactly how effective his suggestion, that anyone working from home should have a lock on the door of wherever it was they were supposed to be working from, actually was...