Domestic bliss and long hours? Not a hope

For a start, I've learned that I need staff. It's a full-time job running a home. And when your week extends way beyond the 37 hours worked by the average Brit, as mine does, you don't put in the graft at home.

Things slip - fluffy tumbleweed breeds beneath beds, curtains drawing-pinned on for a day are still there weeks later, lending your home a crack-den aesthetic, and untended gardens slide into mulchy decline.

Standards will be slipping too in houses across the city, because long hours are back with a vengeance. For the first time in a decade the number of those working more than 48 hours a week is on the rise - one in eight UK-wide, though predictably more in London, with one in six slogging away beyond the legal limit.

It's the very situation that led me to book a break with time to hire a cleaner. And a gardener, chimney sweep and handyman. After all, Christmas is looming and my home was about as welcoming as a student squat. Having bought at the top of the market, my vast mortgage kept me at work while the house it paid for felt ever less worth it.

I cannot articulate the relief I felt the day after my new Polish cleaner sanitised our home to the standards of a wartime matron. The gardener drew up a plan to reverse the tangled mess of my back yard. The sweep declared my chimneys fit for purpose and warm fires now glow in the grates. Curtains were hung.

I've also had keys cut, spaces measured, addresses changed. I threw a party that I had time to organise and clean up afterwards. I've paid bills, queried accounts and cancelled unnecessary gym memberships. I researched the right curtain poles. And the best cordless phones. I had three pictures framed. Various hours were spent in the offices of solicitors, dentists and bank managers. I even arranged some flowers.

In the space of a fortnight I went from feeling like hard-done-by Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol to Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf 's selfsatisfied housewife. But all the time I wondered - just when are we supposed to fit in the stamp-buying and shoe-polishing? The little things that keep life running smoothly but are the first to go when work takes over.

But you can't live like Mrs Dalloway for ever. Not in today's London where the slightest domestic task becomes a huge inconvenience in the middle of a 10-hour day.

The news that work is increasingly coming before home life gets us down more than we care to admit, especially when we're trying to impress in the office. It's fine to claim you're stressed because of a deadline, but not on to say you're hankering for a tidy bedroom and a clean kitchen.

As a lifelong workaholic I am loath to say it, but there's nothing to beat the satisfaction of getting my house in order.