Where do you work?

I still can't get this format to keep paragraphs. Bear with me. I may have to re-invent the blog. I was reading a newspaper article today about people who work in the banking and finance sector in London. As the writer pointed out, if you ask any of these people what they do, they may well answer vaguely, 'I work in the City.' This is a British code meaning, 'it's to do with money, you wouldn't understand what I do, but I earn enough doing it to have a spare house in the country and an account at Harrods'. Happily, his office cleaner could just as honestly say, 'I work in the City'. So could a taxi driver, the ticket sellers at Liverpoool Street Station, and the buskers. If I said, 'I work in a village', 'I work in Yorkshire,' would that convey anything? Not a thing. Occasionally, if people ask me what I do and I don't want to tell them, I say I do freelance work for publishers. If they persist, I say, 'the boring bits'. (Believe me, if you're checking the proofs for the third time because somebody's been moving the commas around, it's nothing to get excited about.) But I could say that I work in publishing, or in books, or in a state of desperation because a deadline is looming. If you're a farmer, you work in wellies. If you're a developer, you work in progress. If you're a roundabout operator, you work in a spin. And me? I work in the attic. Well, like most writers, I work in trains, I work in the kitchen, I work in the sitting room. If work includes thinking round ideas, I work in the bath and lying in bed in the mornings. But mostly, I work in the attic. Unfortunately, attics are associated with the family mad woman, like Mrs Rochester. Can I be the official crazy lady? I need a new website. madauthorintheattic.com PS The Archers is getting much too serious. Soembody just tried to burn down a barn, and Josh Archer and George Grundy are in there. So is a cow. Eddie Grundy is selling hybrid garden gnomes and there's a wild boar roaming about. What they need is a mad woman in the attic.