When you’re in the business of developing and promoting ubiquitous communications and interaction, it’s something of an axiom that, as long as there are good virtual and physical communication links, it should be possible to live and work pretty much anywhere you choose. There’s also a time to put your own money where your mouth is. So that’s what we’ve done: after a couple of years of hunting high and low in and around some rather wonderful parts of the world, we’ve now moved both selves and Two Worlds to a 200-year-old farmhouse in the unbelievably beautiful Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park.

Said farmhouse is now at the start of the process of being thoughtfully turned into a thoroughly modern living and working environment with minimal net ecological footprint. So far, so good, with one major exception – the elephant in our particular bathtub (“fly in the ointment” simply doesn’t cut it here) is British Telecom, who are displaying a truly and staggeringly vicious incompetence and disregard for timescales in providing our basic network infrastructure – the sort of attitude that can only be achieved in an environment where they are both the monopoly provider and where there is no effective regulation of that monopoly. As soon as we’ve passed that particular shibboleth, we’ll be fully back online. In the meantime, taking one’s breakfast coffee on the shore of the Loch as the Winter sun rises over the hills is a more than adequate substitute for the morning scrum at Waterloo.