Last week I gathered up seven years of my working life and threw it away. I filled three plastic sacks of miscellaneous rubbish for landfill sites and one oil drum of paper for recycling and built six tottering towers of books to be sent to Oxfam.

The reason for this savage act of clearance was that I had been told to move desks. Since 2000 I have sat in a large open-plan office by a window looking out on a flat roof and a brick wall. As of last Monday I now sit 10 yards along in the same open-plan office with the same view of the same flat roof and the same red brick wall.