When I tell people I work from home, they react in one of two ways: ridicule or awe. The concept is either preposterous and can result only in Jeremy Kyle and first name terms with the postman, or it inspires a level of unquestioning admiration usually reserved for firemen and Stephen Fry.

To the first bunch, humans are unable to labour without carrot and stick, or at least if they have a carrot and stick it’ll be turned into a sculpture in pursuit of avoiding graft. To the second, domestic toilers are paragons of self-discipline – industrious Stakhanovites dressed in Opus Dei baw-ticklers for good measure.

Local author Daniel Gray breaks free of his historian’s shackles...

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There are many theories about how best to work from home, very often written by office-based journalists who have never suffered the daily agony of taking in the rest of the street’s Amazon deliveries. Regular breaks, dressing smartly and going for a walk round the block ‘to work’ every morning are recommended (the latter falls down when you get in and mistakenly think you have been at work all day, open a can of lager and find it’s 8.45am. That’s what I told my wife, anyhow).

Rats and intelligence
The message seems to be ‘make home like an office,’ an edict I am closely following. First off, every Monday morning I’ll call a meeting with myself about the week ahead. As I walk into the kitchen, I’ll say in a thoroughly irritating voice, possibly my own, “Oh hello. Someone had a bit of a rough weekend!” And banter with the kettle about how Ian from accounting got off with the new girl. At some point in the week, there’ll be a surprise fire drill: I know, because I do the alarm noise. Single-filing downstairs, I’ll assemble in the forecourt at the front of the building (the flagstone by the wheelie bin) and reprimand myself for thinking ‘Christ, I hope it’s a real fire.’

It’s outside too that I perform another of my office functions. With no water cooler to congregate near, chats over the fence with my neighbours are invaluable sources of business intelligence, if you count who isn’t sleeping with whom and which local takeaway has rats as intelligence, which I do.

Morale is very important to our organisation, with teambuilding exercises toe-curlingly frequent. Mood facilitation games include trying to balance a pencil between my lip and filtrum and roll it into my mouth, throwing a teabag into a mug from across the room and running my finger along surfaces and tutting at the dust as I pass.

Really, it’s a wonder there’s time left to watch any telly at all.

Cultural quarter
The recent opening of The Parlour (a pub, it’s a pub, ok?) on Duke Street just confirms that area as Leith’s hippest. With a Pets & Things (what things?), three bus stops complete with Tracker and the brand new Marksman quiz night, it is every inch the Cultural Quarter.

The Parlour has nothing to do with a former Arsenal midfielder and is a little bit ace; with a popcorn machine and separate section on the menu for Monster Munch, how could it be anything else? Aside from an atmosphere that couldn’t be any more amiable if it kissed you on the lips, wiped dirt from your face with its hanky and gave you 50p. By stripping the old Golf pub back to its knickers and deep-cleaning them, they’ve revealed the building’s inner-gargoyle; now, you can look up and enjoy being eyeballed by ornate Victorian carvings. I’m not sure which one out of Ying and Yang is the good one, but if it’s Ying, and Yang isn’t just suffering from a bad press profile, then the Parlour is Duke Street’s Ying to the new Tesco’s Yang. Got that?

Guilty pleasures
It was in The Parlour that a dentist friend revealed her love of Haribo Tangfastic. This is no mere dalliance with the wormy sweet made to make your mouth cringe, but full-blown, twice-a-day addiction. The depths plummeted to avoid detection impressed me – after a morning visit to the hospital WRVS shop, she waits for the midday staff change before an afternoon visit to avoid the same old woman’s disapproval twice. What she expected was shock and tut; what she got was accord and nod. I am just the same, only with a wider range that lurches from chocolate limes right across the scale to Midget Gems. This conversation was therapy for us both. We agreed that society would be more accepting of us should we come out as alcoholics or drug abusers than adult sweet fiends, and that green wine gums were vastly underrated. It was the kind of erudite discourse typical of the Cultural Quarter. ν

Info: Luath Press publishes Daniel Gray’s Stramash! A Ramble Through Scotland’s Towns and Teams in October