The highs and lows of sharing a home office space with your partner

Yes, many people mocked me when I had a giant, 2.5-metre wide desk installed in my home office, but how was I to know the coronavirus crisis would turn it into such a disastrous decision?

Ever since my wife was forced to start working from home, however, I’ve seen her eyeing up all the spare real estate on which I usually spread out a truly incredible amount of unnecessary rubbish (I used to work in newspaper offices, so chaos feels comforting).

I resisted for months and pretended not to hear her claims that the dining room table she was being forced to sit at was somehow less than ergonomically sound.

And then somehow, as is often the way in marriages, I found myself carrying her giant office chair upstairs, against my will, to sit next to mine. Unfortunately there is, as she predicted, plenty of room.

I’m honestly not sure if she meant it or not, but my beloved insisted it would be “fun” for us to sit together all day. While I do enjoy sitting close to her in a restaurant, a bar or a spa, sharing a desk is a different proposition.

For a start, she has a real job, a corporate one, which currently means at least 13 hours a day of video meetings, phone calls, “stand ups” and “whips” (I’m not sure either, but that’s what they call them).

I can’t hear myself think, not that doing so normally produces a lot of noise. Suffice it to say that I can’t get any work done because my mind gets totally subsumed by the impossible mission of working out what on Earth she’s banging on about all day.

Obviously, to get things done, I have had to retreat to the dining table and a tiny laptop, but I quickly grow disgruntled, and pine for my giant desk.

Refusing to be beaten, I stomp back up the stairs, only to be quickly reminded that my wife is a neat freak and thus determined to make my office not only look but feel far more hers than mine.

Some people feel that desks should be kept uncluttered and clean enough to be seen, and some people are normal.

The final straw, though, was the scented candle. My office has smelled like many things, most of them manly, some of them fetid.

But it never, ever smelled of “bergamot, lavender, orange geranium, patchouli” and something I’m sure she made up; “ylang ylang”. The effect of this candle, called, I kid you not, “lapis lazuli”, is supposed to be “calm and serenity”. It must be broken.

If I actually wanted to feel serene, and smell like a just-showered hippie, at work I would have become a massage therapist.

When I asked my normally very reasonable partner why she thought it was OK to introduce such a potent scent into what is theoretically a shared workspace, she replied that it was necessary “to hide the stench”.

Which makes me think that, just possibly, she’s not enjoying this whole shared-office thing much, either.