Dear Mary | 25 July 2009

Q. My husband has started working from home. The invasion of my privacy and the disruption of my peace is driving me almost mad. Now he has developed a habit of standing at the bottom of a staircase to the room where I myself work and yelling questions up it. He says he is too busy to come up the stairs and talk to me in a more civilised manner. I have tried to train him by not answering unless he comes upstairs, but then I can miss out if he assumes I am not in and he is calling to, for example, tell me something I really want to hear. I do not want to yell back, Mary, but neither do I want to have to get up from my desk, walk across the room and halfway down the staircase in order to answer him without having to shout myself.