Living the dream of working in my underpants

Having re-read my introduction, it could be construed that I am gazing at maverick TV detective John Luther, who is wearing my underpants while solving his latest cleverly-scripted case.

Let me assure you that’s not the case. Luther is on the telly and I’m in my underpants - a yellow and blue stripey pair from Next that are part of a set of three.

This is my first experiment at writing from home, but already I’m picking up on the fact that my casual surroundings may be lending a lazy, opulence to my prose.

Perhaps I should put some trousers on.

The reason I’m in my pants in the first place is because of this heat. It’s so hot I almost considered posting a photo of my dashboard temperature reading on Facebook, then realised I had 405 more important things to do.

Close to the top of my ‘to do’ list is writing next week’s column so that’s why I’ve decided to take advantage of the new laptop I’ve been given by my employers and get it done while my head is bubbling with ideas. Or maybe my head is bubbling because of the heat.

I’m not usually one to be wowed by technology but I find it quite amazing that I can type a sentence at home and it finds its way instantly onto a page of next week’s Lurgan Mail.

We’ve also been given trendy new smartphones which can take high quality video footage as well as tell you the relative humidity in Copenhagan. The plan is to use these smartphones to enable journalists like myself to capture noteworthy stories and events around the town and post videos onto our website.

It’s a far cry from the days of Bernstein and Woodward and typewriters and telephones with dialling circles, though it could prove quite interesting and I’d love to hear from anyone with ideas of things they’d like me to attempt to capture on camera.

Before I go on if you’ll just excuse me for a minute I need to make up a night time bottle for Ben. Back in five...

... Sorry, I took a bit longer than expected. Lucy’s only after waking up. I think she might have had a nightmare and it took a while to sooth her and get her back to sleep. Annoyingly I forgot to pause Luther so I’ll have to rewind to where I left off. Give me a minute...

... You know something, I quite fancy an ice cold beer to toast this first column written from home. I’m just going to nip to the fridge...

... Would you believe it, we’ve nothing in the house but gin. I’m going to have to nip out and get some beer, can’t be starting into the gin on a weeknight. Back in a mo...

.. Funny thing is now that I’m sitting here with a tin of Harp in my hand I don’t feel like drinking it.

And now the banner at the bottom of the laptop screen is telling me I’ve only 22 lines left until next week’s column is complete.

And there you have it - proof that technology is both a curse and a blessing.

It’s taken me twice as long to write my column than it would in work and it contains four times more incidental nonsense than usual.

But of course if I’d stripped down to my pants and produced a tin of Harp in the office I would very likely have been handed my P45.

But only after someone had taken a video of me on their smartphone and posted it on our website.