Last updated 11:16, Friday, 21 March 2008

THIS week we have been having our office revamped. It has been a major upheaval; it was last done in 1991 and hasn’t been touched since.

Editorial offices are notoriously messy. It is an unwritten rule that they are never tidied, so they never are.

This meant that when we all had to clear our desks, we were never sure of what we might find - Lord Lucan, perhaps, or Shergar, or even a fossilised quarter of boiled ham, bought for someone’s sandwiches and long forgotten under the tottering piles of old notebooks, yellowing newspapers, council agendas and the like.

I once worked in a newspaper office where we actually did find some ancient corned beef in a drawer, together with a pair of handcuffs and a quill pen, but that’s another story.

We were able to leave behind things that were fixed to the walls, such as street maps of towns and our ‘know your councillor’ Allerdale Borough Council wall charts, which feature, along with the usual suspects, councillors who have such a low profile that they are almost flat.

All surfaces and drawers had to be cleared and we had to find a safe place for Gnorman, the office gnome mascot.

Everything, including novelty gorilla pen holders, mugs, plants and important stuff such as expenses forms and holiday lists, have gone into cardboard boxes where they will allegedly be safe until we move back.

So this week we have been camping out throughout the building, sharing desks with colleagues who have to tolerate our individual passions for peppermint tea, goats’ cheese crisps, garlic chicken sandwiches or whatever.

And as we are exiled in ones and twos across the building, no longer yelling at each other across an open-plan office which usually has 12 phones on the go at once, it’s strangely civilised.

In fact, as long as I can find my secret stash of Kit Kats, I intend to stay put.