There’s an old joke retailed by single women about the ideal man being one who takes you shopping and dancing, shags you senseless, then turns into a pizza. In our increasingly work-obsessed age, it sometimes seems that the joke is overdue for rewriting, with the pizza replaced by a PC. Yet matters were worse than I thought. According to Helen Trinea and Catherine Fox of BOSS magazine, the intermediate step of sex is being excluded altogether; the dancing probably looks shaky, too. ‘Once you would have been embarrassed to admit embracing work as more interesting and engaging than other parts of your life,’ they contend, but now ‘to work long hours is almost a badge of honour in a society that reveres achievement and success’.