We
become freakish specimens rather than people. No Skype chat can
replicate what Heatherwick calls the “chemistry of the unexpected” that
you get in person. Offices may not fill the pages of poetry anthologies
but, says Kellaway, they “can be as moving as anywhere on Earth. Because
what moves us is not sitting at our computer, it’s the relationship
that we have with people.”
For all his grumbling, Charles Lamb
believed something similar too. When Wordsworth seems to have grown a
trifle too smug about the sublime joys of the natural world, Lamb
snapped back. “I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.”
But he did care for the city and he certainly loved offices. All his
complaints were, he wrote, mere “lovers’ quarrels”. Above all, he loved
his desk. For it was that “dead timber of a desk that makes me live”.•
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