Excuse me if I sound a little dizzy, but last week I spent a day out of the house. An entire day. I'm recovering well, thanks for asking. My feet are a little sore from - what do you call it? - walking.

Overall it went well. There are people out there in the real world. Lots of them. For lunch, I ate pasta in a cafe in South Melbourne. With cutlery. Normally I scoff a piece of stale bread with peanut butter, balancing it in one hand while deleting emails with the other.

After lunch, I smiled incessantly at strangers in Flinders Lane and received many smiles in return, and only a few startled looks of incomprehension. I didn't understand why people who are waiting to get on the 10.42 to Sandringham don't let the people getting off have right of way, but so what? I'm a visitor here in the land of the humans. Possibly Connex has devised a set of ingress/egress rules and I didn't get the memo.

When I first started working from home (what my husband calls the ''10-second commute''), I invested considerable thought into the right wardrobe. Something business-like yet casual. Flat shoes. Functional clothes with no ironing required. I thought this would give me the right mindset for productivity. (Ha. Back then, I also thought I'd break for morning tea, finish at four to go to the gym and pop a casserole in the crockpot while waiting for my procrastination, I mean, research files to download.) This bold regime lasted about four hours.

Now I have an entire tracksuit wardrobe. My tracksuits come in a variety of colours, because it's a toss-up: dark is best for showing up the dog hair, whereas light colours collect stains the instant I put them on and make my skin look a tomato. They vary in size, ranging the gamut from fat to extra-fat. They also have different degrees of cosiness, because your central heating wasn't invented when my house was built. (My house is accessible only by Tardis. If only The Sullivans was still in production I could rent it out as a film set.)

Most days I don't go anywhere. I stay home until I feel I'm losing the power of speech, then I swap my indoor Ugg boots for my outdoor Uggs, check that my tracksuit shows the right number of stains and head out. Actually leaving the house is best for human contact, I've found. When I phone friends who have real jobs in the middle of the day, only to ask, ''So, what are you doing?'', they get slightly testy. ''I'm working,'' they say. ''What do you think I'm doing?'' I'm working too, I think indignantly for a moment, before realising that I'm not. I'm just phoning them to make sure my ears can still detect language.

Things are slightly different when I'm invited to social events, like coffee with a friend. Then I suffer from what we people-who-work-from-home call IWE, or Inappropriate Wardrobe Events. Which earrings are best for which cafe? Might taffeta be a tad over the top for a dental appointment? (There is a variation of this problem: CPHD, or Clueless Personal Hygiene Decisions. This covers questions like ''Do I need to wax my legs to go to the dry-cleaners?'')

Working from home brings hundreds of blessings, like not caring when tradesmen are hours late, not owning a car and finally owning a dog (Myron the Wonderwhippet) without the guilt of leaving it alone all day.

But I miss the things that annoyed me the most when I did have a proper job: chats about weekends and football, sharing birthdays and engagements, commiserating over management decisions. I didn't realise it at the time, but these irritations were actually small treasures that I had overlooked in the rush of the daily commute