Ground Floor: It was, I hope, a coincidence that both the cat and I were laid low at the weekend, both of us sick and lacking energy and, therefore, lounging about the house doing nothing - although that's actually par for the course for the cat, who lives a life of indolent ease.
The most irritating thing about my indisposition, though, was the fact that it fell on the weekend and so the man was at a bit of a loose end as the two creatures who shared the house looked at him with mournful eyes and a decided lack of interest in anything.
Being sick at the weekend is a strange phenomenon.
When I did the office thing I nearly always managed to get through the working week before succumbing to any bug or virus which had me in its sights.
I very occasionally threw a sickie (usually if I had a cold and was completely unable to speak, which was not an option on a job where I spent 90 per cent of my time on the phone) but usually I made it in to the office during the week and managed to be ill on my own time.
I'm not the only one. Lots of my friends agree that, Monday to Friday, you somehow manage to block out the niggling feeling of something not being exactly right but, come the weekend when there's no pressure to get up and at 'em, your body decides that enough is enough and gives in.
I haven't had as many incidents of illness since I've given up the financial services lark. Certainly I've drastically reduced the number of colds and coughs I get in a year which I presume has something to do with not working in an air-conditioned environment anymore.
I used to dread seeing one of my colleagues come down with a sniffle because I always knew that sooner or later the bug would be passed on to me. It was quite common for everyone at the desk to be coughing and spluttering at the same time (until our voices started to go and we stayed at home).
Shared illness in an office is almost inevitable, but there has been an upsurge of interest in the cost and causes of stress-related absenteeism in the workplace.
A recent healthcare report detailed stress as one of the top two reasons for absenteeism due to illness in large companies.
I once spent some time in the HR department of a bank where, every week, medical certs would come in for someone who was sick citing "nervous debility" as the reason they were absent.
There was an awful lot more people with "nervous debility" than any other cause of illness and it was the first time that I had ever encountered stress as a stated reason for not coming in to work.
In a whole heap of ways my life is less stressful now than it was six years ago, even though there is a definite stress factor in switching on the computer every morning knowing that there are a lot of blank pages to fill and that nobody else is going to help me.
But the main reason that my life is less stressful is that I am now generally in control of my own schedule and my own destiny.
A feeling of powerlessness is cited as one of the main reasons that people in the workplace feel stressed.
Recent surveys have found that the people most likely to suffer this stress are middle managers - under pressure from both above and below to get the job done and be more productive with fewer resources.
The middle manager too, apparently, is always concerned about downsizing, frequently feeling particularly vulnerable to changes in the corporate structure.
It's long been recognised that feeling stressed does produce very definite physical symptoms. I knew one trader who used to unconsciously rub his foot backward and forward along the floor beneath his desk while he was anxiously watching the screens. The carpet beneath his chair was regularly worn out in a few weeks.
But more common are the symptoms that we recognise in our own lives - the headaches, nausea, sweating, mood swings and poor concentration that come with the feeling of being pressurised.
It's not just the job itself that can cause stress but it's worrying about the future of our careers. The anxious moments of wondering 'is this it?' and reading about younger people who are more successful than us, have made more money than us, and have (allegedly) better lives than us, all of which conspire to make us feel bad about ourselves and our choices.
According to a study at Yale University, 29 per cent of all workers feel "quite a bit or extremely stressed" in their jobs. So basically over a quarter of everyone in the office feels under pressure.
That pressure can be specific to their own job and situation or company-wide, but most jobs which were linked with stress were ones in which the employees felt they had to meet unrealistic deadlines with little support from management and not enough input into the decision-making.
And that's why my life is less stressful now, even though I work to a whole range of deadlines - not all of them realistic. The decision-making process about what I write is entirely my own, while I also have input into other areas of getting the books on the shelves. And that means that, although I get stressed, I'm still happy with how I work.
But it's clearly still in my nature to leave it until the weekend to be sick.
The cat was better by Saturday night.
