Mick Jagger's dad died of pneumonia last Saturday and a few hours later Jagger Jr was on stage performing before thousands. Well, so what? What are you meant to do when your parent dies? Jagger had already flown across the Atlantic to sit at the bedside, he'd been told his father was improving, back he went to the States to work, and then his father dies. Why come back to visit a dead father who won't know whether he's there or not, and would have wanted him to carry on performing, anyway?

My mother also died when I wasn't there. I was upstairs watching Desperate Housewives. A very weedy excuse for absence. Every previous Wednesday I had watched with my mother, but just this Wednesday the Macmillan nurse came to sit with her all night, so I watched it upstairs with my daughter. I ran down at the end to check. There was the nurse standing up feeling a pulse and I'd missed my mother by a whisker. Did she do it on purpose? I was told, afterwards, that this is often what happens. The dying person waits until their child/partner/person they loved most has gone and isn't looking, then they slip away.

Perhaps my mother didn't want me and daughter watching and wailing at the bedside. Or perhaps she couldn't help it. The whole ghastly process had been going on for so long, we couldn't believe it would ever end. "It'll be the weekend," said the doctor. "No more than two days/four days/five days." Weeks passed.

My father did the same. "He has months, rather than years," said the consultant. He lasted seven more years. How long can one hang about waiting? Then, when they have gone, what is the point of sitting there? I couldn't. The dogs wouldn't even enter the room. I would have gone and done a concert if I'd had to. Anything to get away from my poor dead mother. But Daughter wouldn't. She sat there looking at Grandma. Other friends came and sat for hours, very quietly, without blubbing. They combed my mother's hair nicely, they arranged clothes. They can sort through the beloved dead person's things in a sort of trance. Some people can't do it for months. Even years. I couldn't do sitting or sorting out. I like to rush about and have a scream. Because it doesn't really matter what you do. They're not watching, are they. But what do I know?

I go into my bank, my car is on a meter, time is winging by, but how quickly? I don't know any more, because there is no longer a clock in my local bank. Why not? Because a decision has been made, somewhere, by some unknown lunatic, that people become more enraged if they know what time it is. The cashier tells me so. Sorry, not a "cashier" - a "customer service officer". What's the bet that the decision-maker is one of a team of £700-per-day consultants who talk through their bottoms and are wrong, wrong, wrong.

I know because I have quizzed every other bank customer that I meet in the queue, and they all longed for a clock. We like structure, and endings, and to divide our lives into little manageable, finite sections. There is nothing like not knowing what you're doing, or for how long you won't be doing it, to drive people round the bend. But instead, some raving focus-group wallahs order that we hang about in limbo in the bland and clockless bank.

These same faceless ones have also prescribed hot-desking, paper-free offices, mega IT systems, makeovers, endless monitoring, auditing, measuring and assessing and brainstorming, mountainous tiers of management and talking bollocks in the bleak and tidy workplace. Who believes in that talk? Who feels that it means anything?

My old friend Fielding, who taught English for 35 years, was tormented by this sort of crapola in his final years at the chalk face. The shiny new-style headmaster snooped around Fielding's department one night. It was littered with books and papers. He ordered a cleansing. Gradually, over the next three weeks, ghost cleaners came by night and cleared away all papers, marking, footer programmes, immature posters, comfy sofas and, above all, books. "They called it 'restructuring'," said Fielding. "We called it 'stealing'." In came a large, bare, pine table, blank desktops, screens, keyboards and printers. Parents and Ofsted were delighted, children muddled through, teachers were deeply miserable. Beaten down, Fielding was forced to take early retirement. What a lucky escape. Many other younger, and weaker, persons have no choice but to go with the ghastly flow, doing what they don't like, because somebody they don't know has told them that they must. Last week, I visited the offices of a huge, newly revamped organisation. Not a piece of paper in sight, blank desktops, no drawers or cupboards, only deeply swanky chrome lamps and blinds and discontented, buttocky staff. But if they're not careful, before they know it, the sinister makeover will begin to seem normal. They'll stop mocking and start talking in workplace tongues.

It happened to a fellow we know, who once worked for British Rail, then Railtrack. In came the earnest new blue-sky, envelope-pushing, Tiger-Team regime. How everyone laughed. But not for long. Soon our friend was an earnest, beaming, jargon-blabbing Stepford worker. So just say no, everybody. Quick, quick. Before it's too late.

· To buy Michele Hanson's new book, Living with Mother, visit www.guardianbooks.co.uk

· Last week Michele saw Hitler's Holocaust on Channel 4: "It makes you feel weird and sick. But I can't stop watching." Michele read Julian Barnes' Arthur and George: "It's about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a miscarriage of justice. It's gripping, as is the fact that Arthur waited 10 years to consummate his relationship with his mistress."