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were still calling it a studio then, out of habit and because the invoices said so. By March we had started calling it the room, which is what it was: a spare bedroom with two desks in it and a window that faced a wall.

What we came to realise over the course of that first winter was that the overhead we had been carrying was never really about the square footage at all, but about the expectations that came attached to having any.

Clients did not notice. Not one asked where we were calling from, and the two who commented on the window assumed it was a rented set.

Every single freelancer I have ever spoken to said exactly the same thing, without a single exception, inside the first ten minutes of the conversation.

The part nobody warns you about is the quiet. Clients do not notice where you are calling from. You will either love it by June or be back in a co-working space by August, and there is no way to know which from here.

I loved it by June. I say that as someone who spent eleven years arguing that the walk to work was the work — that you needed the twenty minutes to become the person who did the job.

It turns out you can build the twenty minutes. Ours is a loop around the reservoir, and it is not the same, and it is close enough.

What I miss is overhearing. Not the meetings — nobody misses the meetings — but the half of a phone call you catch on the way to the kettle, the sentence that tells you a project is about to go sideways a week before anyone writes it down.

We have not solved that. We have a channel where people post what they would have overheard, which works about as well as it sounds.