We went out to lunch yesterday

with friends who simply do not understand that if I go out to lunch I have to make up my work time in the morning or in the evening. This puzzles me.
More and more people work from home for at least part of their working week. Some of them do so out of choice, others because it seems like the easy option and some out of necessity. I come into the latter category for two reasons. The first is that I am also my father's carer. At 87 he is still mentally agile but he is unsteady on his feet and, although perfectly able to remember things, more likely to get side-tracked in the way that single-minded men sometimes do. He needs someone to watch out for him. That is the first reason. The second is that the people I work with live all over the world. They are not tidily in one place so we never meet. I will never physically meet 99% of the people I work with and they will never meet each other.
That does not bother me but it does tend to mean that other people believe I do not work. It is even more difficult to explain that things can go along with nothing more than minor ups and downs most of the time and then something will happen and a deluge occurs. The deluge may last a few days, a few weeks or months. The nature of the deluge can change too. It can start with a small shower of rain and end up as a blizzard or it can be a sudden downpour of Noah's Ark floodlike proportions which begins and ends suddenly.
The people we had lunch with yesterday do not understand this at all. They mean well and they are perfectly pleasant. My father gets on very well with the husband so the effort is worth it. We usually go to a cheap and cheerful cafe like establishment and have pasta or pizza or fish and chips - and I take my knitting with me. Why not?
Yesterday we were sitting waiting for our meal. I was knitting and chatting to the wife when a man from an adjoining table stood up and came over to me, "Can't you stop that?"
He indicated my knitting.
"Well I could but why should I?" I asked
"Because it's bloody annoying watching you."
I looked at him. There was an uncomfortable silence and then he clapped me cheerfully on the shoulder and said,
"My wife forgot hers...do show her what you are doing."