The computer chair is one of the abominations of the age. It is a design that embodies the savage dehumanising brutalism of the late twentieth century.

My loathing of ‘computer chairs’ comes from an incident with a fat programmer I once worked with. Chairs seem to come in only one size. On the other hand, humans don’t, for when God made Mark, he used an extra wad of clay. Mark was big, and his sedentary life didn’t help. God seemed to have had a spherical theme in his mind that day. One day, whist exasperated with some ineffectual bug-tracking, Mark flopped down heavily onto his computer chair. The chair had a piston spring that gave a height adjustment, and cushioned any shock. The top mounting of the piston gave way under the severe compression forces, and the piston rod shot upward, straight through the top of the chairs support, and nearly impaled the hapless programmer. It was a close thing, and Mark was severely shaken by the incident. We all were, having seen the sharp end of the rod a clear half-inch proud of the seat, having penetrated the plastic moulded seat.

There is actually no need to reinvent the chair for the computer age. There are already several perfectly adequate designs proven by many thousands of years of sitting down. You may think that the whole idea of sitting is a modern invention, like the introduction of the cluster bomb, or the invention of the health and safety officer. Actually, the very earliest terracotta images of people excavated from mounds by the Black Sea, show people four thousand years ago contentedly sitting in comfy wickerwork chairs. Many crafts entailed sitting down for quite as many hours as we do. There was never any radical requirement for ‘anatomically contoured cushions, premium components and a robotically welded steel frame infrastructure’… with …’precision backrest adjustment ‘… and …. ‘Adjustable lumbar support’. They had it sussed.

The human body isn’t designed for the sedentary life. The lymphatic system only really works if you are in fairly constant movement. The idea of making a chair so comfortable that you never need to move or wriggle is a dangerous one. Also, you must be able to vary the distance at which you focus your eye, and alter the angle of your spine.

We’re fortunate to know how those people with sedentary jobs in the middle ages coped, due to the survival of illustrations in incunabula (early printed books from before 1500), and the large number of drawings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts (inserted deliberately to assist memorisation). The sketches of scribes, jewellers, clerics, translators and so on show in enough detail that they preferred benches, sometimes dished. Many, particularly accountants, always worked standing up, or in high benches like choir-stalls.

The introduction of the Windsor rocking chair in about 1720 represented a radical change of design, which was a clear advance. You can flex, wriggle, swivel and rock back and forwards. You have support for your arms, and perfect back support. At any time you can alter your centre of gravity by flexing or relaxing your legs. You can change the distance between your eyes and your work just by tipping forwards or backwards. I’ve spent the last ten years or so using a Windsor Rocking chair for working at a computer, quite often for twelve or more hours at a stretch. I have a few, and they are more comfortable for long use in front of a computer than anything else I’ve tried. You need to select one where the seat is highly dished, with a pronounced ‘moulding’ at the front. It never occurs to me that there is such a thing as discomfort whilst working at a computer, unless, of course, circumstances demand that I have to sit on a wretched ‘computer chair’, as insisted upon by the Health and Safety Stazi.