I have just returned from a brief jaunt back to England, my first for a long time. My job being what it is, I am able to work from home most of the time, which has been fantastic. Setting up home in a new country is hard enough without the strain of having to leave it all behind every week to return to the rat-race.  It can be quite tough though, working remotely. After a while you do start to feel a bit forgotten and, although there are always conference calls, email, MSN and Skype, there’s not really any substitute for a 1-to-1 face-to-face meeting.

So I actually don’t mind spending odd days back in the office. It serves several purposes.

It keeps my brain active. Being one of the more senior guys there, I am generally a magnet for enyone with tricky questions. This does me good as you can very easily “zone-out” when working from home, especially when home is a quiet corner of rural france and its sunshine and blue-skies outside!

It reminds people who I am. In a large organisation it can very easily become a case of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. And you can find people unconciously excluding you from conversations or going elsewhere for information just because they haven’t seen you in the office for a while. It’s nothing personal, you just start to “fade-out” of their conciousness after a while.

It’s a change of scenery. My desk faces the corner of the wall, so, like a naughty schoolboy, I can see very little of what is going on around me. The lazy spider that lived near the cieling above me seems to have slipped down and is now hanging on his web, looking rather dead. So I don’t even have him for company. Going back to the office gives me a new view of the world, with lots lots of faces around, none of which are generally dead.

I get to earn loyalty points at the hotel. One of the few perks of the job – staying in lots of hotels means one soon collects a stack of hotel loyalty points. I shall soon enjoy spending my collection on a bunch of nice stuff

I can reconnect with the organisation. Working at home it’s easy to forget that you are part of a wider organisation. Just visiting HQ for a day reminds me that there is more out there.

But the best thing for me about going away is that I get to come home. As I drive into Foussais Payre and see all the sights that have so quickly become my signals of home, I can feel myself relax and all the stresses of trains, planes and automobiles are left behind on the road.

It’s worth going away just to get that feeling.