I take it back! At the beginning of lockdown I wrote in this column that I missed the impersonal crush of crowds, missed spending time in the UK’s cities, even missed sitting on trains. Well not so much anymore. I’m not even all that keen to go back to my studio three miles away in the centre of Manchester.

I’m happy sitting here, working with my team on Teams, having lunch with my wife, taking long bike rides or walks with Sybil (my dog) and still putting in more hours of work than I was able to do before lockdown. I could be doing this from the Dordogne!

And that’s me, who likes cities, loves my office and doesn’t pay thousands of pounds for a rail pass or spend hours on public transport or stuck in traffic. Even without the fear of infection on public transport, it’s no wonder that companies are questioning whether they need offices. Julia Kollewe in a piece for the Observer, Why the home-working boom could tumble London’s skyscrapers, reports that a number of city firms have already decided to swap their expensive offices for a suite of meeting rooms where their homeworking employees can occasionally get together. Facebook has announced that up to half its people will be working from home in the future and the chief exec of Barclays has been quoted as saying that “the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past”.

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