Every parenting forum will tell you the same thing: babies sleep to white noise. What they do not mention is that most of it sounds like a hair dryer left running in the hall, because most of it is, more or less, a recording of exactly that.

Your baby will indeed fall asleep to it. So would a small appliance. The question is whether static is the first world you want to build around a person who is four weeks old.

There is, of course, such a thing as good white noise. Ours simply happens to be genuinely white: the surf that runs pale up the sand and draws back, the bleached hush of a beach at noon, the clean quiet of new snow high on a mountain. That is the white noise a small person truly wants, the white of real places, not the grey hiss of a machine in the hallway.

Pocket Escape offers a gentler proposition. Instead of noise, it offers places. The surf on a Mediterranean beach, rolling in slow, the way it has rolled for several thousand years. A night train on the old sleeper line, the rails clicking underneath and the carriage rocking the way an arm rocks, sleep arriving with the miles. A villa pool, lapping in the afternoon heat. These are sounds people pay a great deal to fall asleep to in person.

Crucially, none of them will betray you at three in the morning. You may switch off the sudden noises, so no gull cries out and no wave crashes at the precise moment the room has finally gone quiet. Any parent who has watched a sleeping baby startle at a slammed door will understand that this one feature is worth the price of admission.

The recordings are hand-designed and in high definition. There are ten destinations, and we add more. And here is a quiet gift for the person actually holding the baby at three in the morning: the sound is evocative enough that the smells return with it. Coconut suntan lotion. Warm salt. For four minutes, in the dark, you get to be somewhere you would rather be too.

Three destinations are free, so you may try tonight's bedtime at no cost. If it works, and it will, everything unlocks with a single payment and stays yours forever. The next child inherits it. Even a private jet does not hold its value that well.

Once, before the meetings and the mortgage, you were going to work from anywhere. A cafe in Rome. A trail through the pines. A sleeper train crossing a border while you answered your email like the main character in a very good life.

Instead you have a desk. It is a perfectly good desk, and it is in the wrong place.

Pocket Escape is a modest workaround. It cannot move your desk, but it can change the room around it. Put on your headphones and open the Piazza, and you are working from an Italian square: the fountain keeps its steady splash, cups clink, a Vespa passes somewhere behind the church. Open the Forest and a stream keeps pace beside you while a woodpecker drums and a proper four o'clock dawn chorus goes on overhead, robin and wren and chaffinch, all named, all real. Open the Night Train and the rails click along beneath your deadline.

This matters for concentration in a way a generic "nature sounds" reel does not. You are not a monkey, to be soothed by unspecified jungle. You are a person, and people focus best in places that mean something to them. So the destinations are specific and hand-designed, in high definition, and if a sudden noise would break your train of thought, you may switch the sudden noises off.

There are ten places to work from at launch, and we keep adding rooms to the building. Some of them answer back: in the Forest you may light the campfire and watch the scene react, which is a small pleasure but a real one at half past four in the afternoon.

Three destinations are free, which is enough to get a morning's work done before you have spent a dime. The rest cost less for the year than a month of coffee at that cafe in Rome, first week free, or you may pay by the month if you would rather commit the way you commit to a gym membership. It is the cheapest office relocation you will ever authorize, and unlike a private jet, it will never once be photographed and used against you.