Lisa Markwell: Staff beware, I feel a mummying moment coming on

FreeView: from the editors at i

As I watch my thirtysomething colleague struggle to tidy up her desk at 7.24pm, it slowly dawns on me that perhaps I should restrain myself from treating her and the rest of the department like office children.

Adopting the same brisk tone that I use on a recalcitrant 15-year-old and the knee-deep mud-caked rugby kit in his room, I had asked said colleague to spruce things up a bit. She's no shrinking violet, but the fact that she has complied makes me fear the work/home lines have become blurred. I'm the bad cop round our house, you see.

Then there's the occasional cake I bring in, as a reward for their enduring commitment and good humour (a desktop fruit bowl idea was quickly, quietly dropped due to lack of interest). It's not a million miles from the "if you do your thank-you cards I'll buy some ice cream" construct. When I worked on weekends, I'd get up very early and make a healthy vegetable frittata for the team, since the canteen's Saturday offering was enough to induce rickets. They probably wanted chips.

I chivvy the commute-by-cycle workers into wearing helmets and hi-vis jackets. I chastise one young man for his disparaging remarks about his girlfriend and cajole another into making Malaysian chicken for his fiancée. (I've never met her. She might not like Malay- sian chicken. Doesn't stop me strong-arming him into taking the recipe.)

Does this happen to everyone as they increase in years and seniority? Or is it the inevitable result of spending more time with co-workers than one's real family, a problem that afflicts many as we feel pressed to show endless application in the face of job cuts?

There is, of course, a great deal to be said for camaraderie and a collegiate atmosphere. However, that's not the same as glorified mummying. As I watch the tidying up (is it with pride or discomfort?), another colleague hoves into view and reads this over my shoulder. "Well, it's not strictly true that you mother us," he states. "There's too much sarcasm for that." It's a technique that I try – and fail – to avoid in both places.

What's needed is a clear mental and physical gap between work and home, not always possible in the age of BlackBerrys.

But it's not just me that gets confused between the zones in life. I don't ask my son to call me "Miss", which he sometimes does – although he's yet to put his hand up for attention at the dinner table.

To cheer the "office children", I tell them about the time I turned to an editor just a few years older than me, to ask him a question. "Daddy..." I began. Time to go home.