Last Tuesday morning I woke up at 7.30, removed my eye mask and earplugs, enjoyed a bowl of Coco Pops, caught a Tube train to London Bridge, walked into an office block on the river front (which, with its glass and polished aluminium, looked like something out of Spooks), and, rejecting offers of coffee and muffins, began work.

In case anyone is wondering why I’m divulging such banal details about my smug working life, I should explain that things aren’t normally like this. If you have ever been to The Times’ office, you’ll know it is more EastEnders than Spooks, while my home office is like something out of Porridge. I was actually spending Tuesday morning working at the “Business Lounge”, described by its operator, Regus, as “a new concept for the on-the-go businessperson”, but perhaps more simply conveyed as an alternative to working in coffee shops when between home and work.

Is it better than Starbucks? Well, the colour scheme is certainly less vomit-inducing. And you do not feel the need to drink yourself into insomnia with coffee, or eat your own bodyweight in muffins to retain the moral right to a seat. Meanwhile, some might say the £15 entry fee is worth paying just to avoid having to listen to Paul McCartney’s new album.

Indeed, there only seem to be two downsides: (1) unlike Starbucks, there is not a Regus Business Lounge on every corner; and (2) it is not noisy enough. But before I explain the second point, some context about remote working, a subject I consider myself to be an expert on, having spent the past four years doing it.

There was a time when remote working was synonymous with desperation and automatically triggered images of Del Boy flogging dodgy car stereos from a flat in Peckham. But things are different now. Employers offering flexible working options are considered enlightened, while technology companies, eager to sell equipment, feed us images of happy, attractive workers tapping away at keyboards in cornfields, and publish reports highlighting the misery of conventional office life, with one recent study backed by HP even claiming that “commuting to work can be more stressful than a fighter pilot going into combat”.

However, anyone who has actually tried working remotely will know such images are highly romanticised. Take mobile working for instance. Leaving aside the question of how you establish a wi-fi connection in a cornfield, and the fact that laptop batteries rarely last more than a couple of hours, in Britain working out and about has the additional challenge of bad weather and being robbed blind of your expensive kit. Also, have you actually tried sitting upright with a laptop on a beach or in a field for more than 20 minutes? Torment.

Then there is home working, which would be wonderful if it were not for the lack of IT support (you may hate the helpdesk in the office but try living without them), the printing costs (do you have any idea how pricey printer cartridges are?), the hours wasted on air guitar/ singing/talking to yourself, the not-washing for days at a time, the being-dressed-in-elasticated-clothing for days at a time, and the loneliness that eventually drives you to hang on to the words of supermarket cashiers as if they were uttered by Friedrich Nietzsche himself.

However, if it is so bad, you may wonder why increasing numbers of people are doing it. Moreover, why do I do it when I could work in the office? First, I think lots of people work at home because it suits their personal circumstances, not because they necessarily enjoy it or work better at home. Second, I think people are beginning to wake up to its shortcomings: there have been several pieces in American newspapers recently about the new trend of “co-working”, which involves home workers clubbing together to share office space. And third, I would return to the office in a shot if I could, but cannot. And this is the thing no one tells you when you begin working remotely: once you start, there is no going back.

There is a parallel to be drawn here to sleep. I used to be able to sleep anywhere. Then one day, following a noisy party in my apartment block, I bought a set of ear plugs. A week later I found myself buying an eye mask to block out the morning light. And this summer I bought a “chillow” - a cooling pillow. Now there is so much sleeping paraphernalia that I spend longer getting ready for bed than Joan Collins must spend getting ready for Christmas balls.

It is the same with remote working. One day you are happily working in the office, then you try working at home, and suddenly you find you cannot concentrate on work unless you have a certain type of tea at arm’s length, a certain kind of light coming in from the window at a certain angle and a certain type of music playing at a certain volume in the background.

Which brings me back to the overquietness of the Business Lounge. I could only stand it for an hour because I require a certain pitch and level of background noise to concentrate. I could justify the predilection by citing scientific evidence. An academic called Benjamin Markham has shown in a study that workspaces designed to be quiet actually increase distractions because in a completely quiet space workers get disturbed by the slightest thing.

But the truth is that remote working has driven me insane. And my advice to anyone considering it is to resist. Avoid Starbucks, avoid the Business Lounge, avoid home. Work in the office like normal people have done for decades. Otherwise you will end up like me, writing this at 2am, dressed in furry pyjamas, a pair of bunny ears flopping dementedly about your head.

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