AS the normal world properly kicks back in after two weeks of revelling and workplace fits and starts, spare a thought for those who are now back on the commuting treadmill.

I’m very definitely the lucky one – my office is my kitchen so I don’t even have to step out of my door to go to work. But time was in this house that long distance commuting was very much the Nelson household touchstone.

The Other ‘Alf spent more than ten years on a daily round trip commute of nearly 400 miles which saw him rising at the crack of dawn five days a week and returning home when the offspring was heading off to bed. It seems crackers now, but if you worked in the rail industry as he did, it was pretty much the norm.

No one in the railway family batted an eyelid about those who got on an early morning train out of York each morning because so many people did it, and still do. Rather than bring the kids up in London in a house the size of a large shoe box, railway folk would far rather endure a long distance commute and a better quality of life up north – when they’re actually at home, that is.

And it’s good having a travelling office with little to distract, other than the refreshment trolley and over-loud on-board train announcements to disturb the train of thought.

The Other ‘Alf got more work done on the train than he did when he was actually in the office – indeed, if he had important reports or strategies to write he’d take himself off on a long train journey somewhere and ride the rails until it was done.

Granted, taking advantage of a quiet rail carriage on a regular basis isn’t something open to everyone – especially now that rail fares have taken yet another hike northwards – but being a railway boss with the ability to get out on to the front line and see what life was like at the coalface rather than surmise you knew from the comfort of an office certainly had its benefits.

And it also meant that you didn’t have to endure the rush hour stop-start inch-by-inch snarl-up of heading into York or Leeds, which when I was doing it some years ago was guaranteed to send the blood pressure to 99 before you’d even sat down at your desk and been summoned by the boss.

But if you think a 400-mile daily round trip is ridiculous, how about this for size? I know someone who lives more than 3,000 miles from his office and commutes there and back on a regular basis.

He lives here in the UK but his office is in Manhattan, with a hot desk in London. In any seven days the chances are he’s on an airplane during five of them.

He waves goodbye to his wife very early on Monday, heads out to New York, spends a good part of the day in the office there where they’re five hours behind us, then might fly down to Atlanta that evening.

He’ll put in a day’s work in the Deep South before heading back to the UK, arriving early on Wednesday.

A quick shower in the airport and then he’ll hot-desk in London, meet up with his wife for dinner, then fly back out to New York on Thursday morning, where he’ll stay until Friday night before flying home on the red eye to land back in the UK early on Saturday.

You’d probably be justified in calling him bonkers, stark raving mad and off his chump, all at the same time.

But what he does is no different to what long haul airplane crew do, and there are still plenty out there who think having a flight deck as an office is a glamorous life. If there weren’t, airlines wouldn’t still have hordes of people queuing up to don their uniform.

But back to our international commuter. What makes it work for him is that he can sleep absolutely anywhere and that includes on an aircraft even when he’s slumming it in steerage. Which, incidentally, he does most of the time – not for him the waited-on-hand-and-foot life in the international jet-setting business class lane.

And most important, when he’s at home, he really is at home and appreciates his wife and family all the more for it. And he doesn’t have to endure daily Lendal Bridge closure snarl-ups either….