There’s nothing at all remote about working from home

Home – a word and a world with which we are intimately and instantly familiar. We thought we knew its every nook and cranny; its bright spots and its damp spots – but, until now when we were confined to it by understandable force, it seems we hardly knew it at all.

We were gone out to work, so we never knew that the sun streamed in the kitchen window in the late afternoon, that the birds chirped all day in the trees outside, that the cat from next door languidly took an evening stroll through both of your hedges.

Home is the most expensive purchase you’ll ever make – but just to pay that loan back to the bank, you’ll spend a lot more of your waking hours away from it than enjoying it.

Even when you get holidays, your immediate response is to head away from home as much as work; two weeks spent in the house never qualified as a summer break before.

Yet we’ll willingly traverse continents to spend time in homes that are not our own; homes that are owned by people we’ve never met but who are happy to either rent out their abode to you or swap it with you, so that they can do what you don’t want to – spend your holidays in your own house.

But home, of course, is more than four walls and a roof; for most of us it is a refuge, shelter in the storm, a safe place full of the people you love most of all.

And boy isn’t that required just now?

Safety comes in many forms – the security of the familiar for a start – but also the protection you get from locking your front door to the world outside.

Because just now, the streets aren’t safe; there’s a virus in the air and it has claimed thousands of lives. Home doesn’t guarantee you’re safe from it either – but it at least reduces the odds.

Home is not always a refuge of course, and pre-existing tensions spill over when those at the heart of it are cooped up in a confined space for days on end.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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