I have discovered a brilliant trick. Recently, when people have asked me to do pointless bits of work (have lunch, sit on an unpaid panel, comment on somebody’s high-school paper), I’ve hit them with my killer excuse: “Sorry. I’d love to, but I’m too busy. I’ve got three little kids.” So far it’s working beautifully: it reduces my workload and raises my status.

We columnists are prone to treating our own life events as harbingers of a new zeitgeist, but something significant may actually be changing: it’s becoming possible for fathers to use childcare as an excuse at work. That’s because status for men in western countries is changing. Old status was, “I’m so busy that I can’t even talk to you properly because everyone is sending me messages on my BlackBerry”. New status is, “I work and I’m raising my kids. Take that, sucker.” That changes the workplace

When I started work in 1995, I thought that in the office you could only show your working face. If someone asked you to do something, you said, “Yes.” It was your job. Everything else had to fit around work. Once, covering Amsterdam for the FT, I phoned a big Dutch company that had just reported quarterly results. I asked for the chairman. He’d gone home. It was 5.15pm. “Can he call me?” I asked. “He doesn’t work evenings,” his secretary said. I was aghast. This bloke was breaking the unwritten rules for men.