Are you working too hard? Do you divide your day between work and sleep and nothing else and do you have to have photographs of your family on your desk to remind you of what they look like? Or do you have the opposite problem - if you spend one more day staring at the four walls of your home, will you go completely mad?

This week is Work-Life Balance Week. Other papers are full of stories of investment fund managers on £800,000-a-year plus bonuses who find it difficult to find time pick their kids up from school. Well, tough. They could take the next ten years off and still have twice as much as the rest of us.

Instead, we will save our concern for parents who do two or three jobs to keep their heads above water, for families where parents hardly ever see each other because they work in shifts to save the cost of childcare. Or fathers who, desperate to give their children some quality of life, live a couple of hours from their job and spend the equivalent of six weeks a year commuting.

Or Superwomen like Cherie Blair who juggles three jobs - QC, mother-of-four and Mrs Prime Minister. So reassuring for the rest of us when she's caught looking shattered.

But the stress of overwork is still nothing like the stress of no work at all. For every stressed executive heading for a heart attack, there's another man sitting at home watching the racing and fretting to be back earning his keep and sure of his place in the world.

Work still, to some extent, defines who we are. We all think we'd chuck it all in if we could, but would we? Many lottery winners have carried on in their old jobs. Many more have used their money to start their own businesses - often working harder than they did before. Even the mega-rich tend to dabble a bit - working for charities or selling over-priced handbags in chi chi little shops.

It's not the Work-Life Balance that we find hard to achieve. It's the Work-Life-MONEY Balance that's the tricky one for most of us.

My hero is Samuel Pepys. In the days before Working Hours Directives and minimum wage - or any wage at all for civil servants - he got up early, practised his music, went out for breakfast and a few glasses of wine, met a friend for lunch, bought a few books or an expensive new suit And we all knew what he got up to in the afternoons. Then in the evening, refreshed and recharged by his pleasant day, he would go into his office - next door to his house - and put in six happy hours or so re-organising the Navy. Bliss.

Or there's a friend of mine with her house paid for and her children grown, who has found the ideal solution. She works weekends and has the week off.

Now that's what I call a Work-Life balance.

THE surprise about this summer's A-level fiasco was that anyone was surprised. From the time they started school, this year's 18-year-olds have been guinea pigs in an endless round of SATs, curriculum changes and AS-levels. At every stage it was fairly clear that the new strategies were ill thought out, unrealistic and without the resources to implement them properly. But, faced with chaos, the students just battled on, doggedly making the best of things.

And now, after all that, it seems their A-level grades might be a total fiction.

It seems a poor reward for a lifetime of being messed around.. But, sadly, just what they expected.

Stephanie McMichael made it to the last 60 of Popstars: the Rivals before confessing that she was three years younger than their minimum age of 16 and was therefore disqualified.

Just as well. As she was allowed to pose for photographers in a figure revealing top emblazoned with "Bad Girl", maybe the 13-year-old is best kept under wraps and out of the pop music jungle for a few more years yet.

Those celebrity mums have a lot to answer for. The latest craze for showing the bump in all its semi-naked glory looks fine in the glossy magazines. Proud to be pregnant, the Victoria Beckhams and top models of this world showed off their tanned tummies. They look wonderful - glossy and glowing and full of health.

How much more depressing and unappealing the grey-skinned, flabby reality when it's standing next to you in the checkout queue at Safeway, exploding away from perilously low slung jeans and a dingy crop top.

"Just a bit too obstetric for me at this time of day," said the man in front, going pale and having second thoughts about his sandwich.

Published: ??/??/2002