Wastrel, Interrupted

There are many joys to be had in working (or procrastinating) from home - plentiful coffee, unrestricted access to Facebook, and the Mediterranean freedom to take forty winks around that sluggish period of the day, say between 2-3pm, without the potential danger of waking up dribbling and surrounded by a gaggle of colleagues who have written the word 'eclectic' in magic-marker upon your forehead. On the other hand, you are suddenly faced with encounters from people that you would never otherwise face. Cold-callers. You know, meter-readers, postmen, window-cleaners, gardeners and the most pernicious of all, travelling salesmen (yes, they still exist).

Far away from the Arthur Miller stereotype, many of them strangely offer passports as a form of identification and claim to be unemployed miners from certain towns in Nottinghamshire. Yet, something about their youth and demeanour make you not entirely convinced and you want to say, 'Aha, but those mines have been closed since before you were born and that particular town has been the subject of massive European regeneration and is noted for full employment, rainbows, and an abundance of toffee'. But you don't, as you're not an arsehole or living in a 1950s detective story, your great-grandfather was actually a miner himself, and so you um, ah, feel guilty at your fortunate position and eventually spend £5 on a fake chamois leather that looks as though it's been torn from the well-loved blanket of a Romanian orphan.

Apart from that awkwardness, you can guarantee that callers always turn up at the most inopportune times - in the middle of a sandwich, in the middle of a phonecall, or even in the middle of a particularly tricky Scrabulous game. Yoiked out of your moment, you become even less well-disposed for the social niceties. So, to save myself from contracting the symptoms of a Daily Mail reader, I have adopted a preventative rule of wastrelism: never ever answer another suspiciously unsolicited bell-ring or caller-withheld phonecall. After all, life is just far too short for that awful feeling of solipsistic Frenchness.