Hit the road, Jacques

Long before Banksy was a twinkle in his father’s eye, the most inspired (and correctly punctuated) bit of graffiti was daubed below the Chiswick flyover. ‘’morning, lemmings’ greeted commuters for years as daily they made the last hard yards towards the traffic lights and roundabout. Even if it’s still there, it probably won’t survive Boris’s pre Olympic clean up, but was the best comment ever on the millions of wasted hours Brits spend just getting to and from work.

Pottering along empty lanes on the way to the office, we’re lucky enough to indulge in a bit of schadenfreude at what we’ve left behind. For most French (Parisians excepted), the prospect of a daily commute further than the nearest small town would be greeted with the same horror as a half hour lunch break.

And, until recently, if you did have to work an hour plus away from home,  then you simply bought a pied à terre there and returned home for weekends, ponts, bank holidays, strike days, sickies, grandmothers funerals (max. 4 a year) and your (really generous ) annual holiday.

The combined total of all these would constitute the main part of the year anyway, so pourquoi pas?

But unless you’re a tradesman (plumbers, builders and electricians seem perennially busy), times have changed, not least since the big nationalised industries have shed jobs and become partly privatised and most other businesses have become less labour intensive too. And property - especially in the heart of the big cities - has become relatively much more expensive, making your potential mistress pad (sorry – essential second home) unaffordable.

So, prompted by the prospect of his P - quarante cinq dropping through the letter box, Jacques is swiftly on the ‘phone to his boss – ‘pas de problème’ he says ‘naturellement, you can continue to employ me without the expense of office space. The internet will allow me to work with positively teutonic efficiency from home, where I absolutely won’t be distracted with the prospect of creating a four course lunch’. And as broadband will let him access all his files from the office, the only real inconvenience is the lack of extra marital female companionship. C’est la vie.