London

Excuse the long silence.

Pam and I are in London for a couple of weeks. One of my main reasons for coming, apart from catching up with friends and family after nine months' absence, was to give a presentation at the conference of my professional body, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.

Yesterday morning, we were staying at a hotel opposite Buckingham Palace near the conference venue. I was severely jetlagged, the room was very dark and surprisingly quiet for such a central location, and I didn't wake until the housekeeper barged in at 12.20 pm - five minutes after my presentation was due to start.

I threw on my clothes and hurried along Birdcage Walk to the elegant headquarters of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers where the conference was held. But I was too late.

Fortunately, everyone was very understanding, and they reshuffled the programme a bit and fitted me in later on.

The presentation was about my walk, with particular reference to the ways in which it had affected my attitude towards my job. I'd been a bit jaded with the whole profession before I started, but the walk renewed my enthusiasm for translating - not least because I took my laptop with me, and worked in all kinds of weird and wonderful places along the way.

Once, in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, the heartland of the Amish people, I plugged my computer into a Coke machine and worked as horsedrawn buggies laden to the gunwales with Amish families clipclopped by. The walk made me realise how, thanks to the laptop and the internet, translation is now a more mobile and flexible profession than almost any other.

Yesterday evening, we were staying at my parents' place in south London and I had to send a job to a client. They have no internet connection, so I took my laptop and walked down the road, looking for a wireless network that wasn't password-protected.

The thirty or so houses between my parents' and the end of the street had about fifteen networks, and I imagined all these people hunched alone over their computers, each in an online world of their own.

Eventually I found an unprotected network and sent my email, feeling very selfconscious and hoping that no one would come by. But it was cold, dark, and late, and the streets were empty.

Switching off the computer, I reflected that this was yet another instance of what I'd been talking about at my presentation.

I can now work with my laptop perched on a neighbour's front wall at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night. Once, I lugged dictionaries, the tools of my trade, around with me whenever I worked away from home; now they're online and free. The staff of the language bookshop exhibiting at the conference admitted to me that it was hard to sell paper dictionaries any more. The internet has freed us from the tyranny of the desk and given us near-total mobility.