Actually, I spent most of last week away from the ground floor - the builders are in again and one of the disadvantages of the home office is that when the home is under reconstruction so is the office, which renders it impossible to work in.

The mayhem is largely to do with the fact that between books and newspapers and goodness knows what else in terms of the written word, the home is being swamped and larger office space is necessary.

I do have a pretty firm view that the living area and the working area should be separate in the home-office environment but the lines were becoming more blurry each day. Now, with a few walls being knocked down, they've become temporarily non-existent and I was forced to decamp for a few days to avoid the sound of cement mixers as I struggled with the muse.

Forced is probably being a bit disingenuous about things because I fled to sunnier climes, deciding that Spain offered much by way of warmth and solace. As I don't have any heating in the home or office at the moment, this seemed only reasonable.

Anyway, for those of you who feel envious of my temporary relocation, there was an element of "out of the frying pan and into the fire" about the move. The Spanish economy is booming and with it the construction industry - which is being helped along by the growing demand for more and more homes for us fellow Europeans from the freezing north. So, the sound of cement mixers and JCBs made me feel right at home.

To top it all, we flew into the biggest thunderstorm that they've experienced on the east coast since God knows when.

Water poured down the streets, rivers burst their banks and the thunder and lightning would have put any Hollywood special effects director to shame. To be fair to Spain, the storm only lasted a couple of days and then the sun broke through, so I did manage to have some time in a balmy 25 degrees, which was very pleasant. Anyway, the interesting thing about taking my work to Spain is that I'm not the only one. I discussed working from home a few weeks ago, only then I made the assumption that home was in the same country as the company you worked for. But there are a number of people living in Spain who work from their Spanish homes and travel back to Ireland or the UK once a month for meetings and the like.

That certainly has an idyllic ring to it, although possibly not when the rain from the thunderstorm has washed your garden over the back wall and left a six foot hole in its place as happened to one of the English people I met. (OK, I know I was supposed to be musing and not chatting to the neighbours, but you can't do that all the time.)

The Alicante-Dublin commute has a certain cachet but the Central Statistics Office's recent quarterly survey about travelling to work doesn't concentrate on those people who flit back and forth once a month by plane. It looks instead at how we, in Ireland, get to and from our jobs on a daily basis.

According to the survey, and despite all of the interest in teleworking, only 10 per cent of people really do work from home, while 54 per cent of the population drives to a place of work every day and a further 8.6 per cent gets a lift.

Frighteningly, for all of us who have been caught in rush-hour traffic, things are not getting any better since - in Dublin - only 16.1 per cent of people get the bus and 4 per cent the train. (For the country as a whole those percentages are 6.9 per cent and 1.6 per cent.)

Most workers are still wedded to their cars, even though more than a quarter of car journeys are less than three miles. Given the speed at which traffic crawls along our main roads, it is difficult to avoid the thought that we would be quicker walking (as 11 per cent of the population does) or cycling (only 2 per cent).

At worst we should be sharing our cars because more than three-quarters of drivers don't have any passengers at all.

In my commuting life I have to confess to being one of those non-sharing, car-driving people although I did, occasionally, use public transport, which less than 2 per cent of drivers ever do. Most drivers don't take public transport because either it is not practical or available or it doesn't go to their destination.

That really wasn't the case for me because the bus stop is a five-minute walk from my house and the IFSC was a five-minute walk from where it left me.

The only problem was the uncertainty factor. It was bad enough getting up in what seemed like the middle of the night without then having to stand forlornly at a bus stop in the rain with no clear idea of when a bus might arrive. Of course, when I worked on the south side of the city using public transport turned the journey into an expedition.

When I first started work, the office was along the canal. The nearest bus stop for my home journey (at that time I was a southsider myself) was Adelaide Road. I used to have to walk to the end of Rathmines before I could get a bus because they always filled up in the city centre and nobody got off until Rath mines.

You'd imagine that in 20 years things would have changed but all that's happened is that they've got worse. And so the overall results of the survey are not in the least bit surprising.

I'm sure there are pockets of people working hard to achieve an integrated public transport system but I bet that all of the good ideas are lost in a morass of paperwork and political manoeuvring. The answer really isn't bringing in piecemeal systems that simply connect different areas to the city centre all the time.

Someone living in Baldoyle but working in Leopardstown doesn't have any alternative but to use the car. And the only way to change that is to have a system that can link our ever-expanding industrial areas by public transport. No chance, I imagine.

It took me less than six hours to get from Alicante to Clontarf on Monday including having to be at the airport two hours in advance of the flight to check in, and the inevitable wait for my luggage to appear. I've spent two hours getting from Mount Street to Clontarf in the past. The last time I drove home from Rathfarnham outside peak traffic times it took me just over an hour. A 12-hour round trip once a month sounds quite good in comparison.

And, of course, you don't have to worry about the currency thanks to the euro. It might have declined against sterling and the dollar but, if you stay in the zone, it doesn't really matter.