I went out with Will tonight. We drank in the Bricklayers’ Arms, and then the Carpenters’ Arms to give the whole night a building site theme, but broke the flow with dum sum.

On the way home I rode a taxi from the station.

‘That smell you can smell isn’t me. It’s the car in front,’ said my driver, pointing to the taxi ahead. I admitted that I was relieved that it was not us that stank of raw petrol.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Nasty, isn’t it. I had to drive all the way back from Danbury behind him and it made my eyes sting all the way.’

‘Why didn’t you go past him?’ I asked, calculating that it must have been a journey of at least 20 minutes.

‘Not allowed,’ he said. ‘He had his light on, you see, and there’s an unwritten rule; no taxi can overtake any other when they’re both free for business. It’s kind of like pushing in.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and tried not to breathe too deep.

I’m a digital nomad right now. Monday night, the Internet disappeared. Just like that. No notice, or anything. One minute it was fine. The next, gone.

I fiddled with every connection, blew the dust out of my plugs, spent an hour playing with the configuration screens of the modem.

When it still wasn’t working on Tuesday, I called Tesco tech support, who admitted that they had deleted ‘a number’ of accounts to get around some technical problems they’d been having at the weekend. Nice. Thanks for the warning. Still, they fixed it, for a while, but yesterday it was gone again, and an email from the tech bods claimed that we had no account on their customer services database.

If I was dithering about switching services before, my mind’s certainly made up now.

But, I did get a very nice guy on the phone this morning. He asked who had sent the ‘can’t find you’ email and said that it was absolute rubbish. Claimed that the guy who wrote it (Andrew someone) can’t even have looked at the database because he found us right away, and that he’d submit our details again to try and get things moving along.

To be honest, though, I’ve not entirely missed it. I’ve had so much else to do that living without broadband for a couple of days hasn’t been a chore. Indeed, even living without my iBook since the weekend when the screen went blank and couldn’t be revived hasn’t been so bad.

Perhaps technology has become such a throw-away commodity now that you don’t crave it when it’s gone.

It’s been so long since I’ve properly written anything on here. So, where were we? I left off in Innsbruck, after we’d been climbing up and down the mountains. It really was very beautiful, if a bit giddy-making, but eventually we had to leave, and so took the train across the border to Munich and then on to Frankfurt, which was a very businessy city full of tall buildings that seemed to spring out of nowhere. Felt quite American in a lot of ways.

The motor show was on, so of course we popped in there for a poke around, and then the next day Paul flew home and I took the train on to Paris for the Apple Expo, which was hard work but very useful. It is definately very French-focused, though, and since getting back I have been reading a lot of French press releases trying to get a grip on the news.

Of course, going straight there from holiday meant I had my suitcase with me, which was a pain on the Metro. The Paris underground really isn’t built for those without nimble legs (I don’t know how you would manage if you actually qualified for one of those disabled seats on the trains), so carting my case around was a far from pleasant experience, particularly as it was three changes and 40 minutes of travel to get from our hotel to the venue. We did get the taxi once, but it took almost an hour when we got caught up in the roadworks to build the new tram system, so gave up on that idea from then on.

I got back in the late part of last week, so should really have made big efforts to get on here and get updated, but the time between them and now has just been swallowed up somehow in a general blur of activity, and Barbara, my iBook, has been blinded in my absence and now can’t use her screen, which is why I’m writing this in the office before work kicks off.

Thursday and Friday were of course spent catching up on the things I’d missed. Had a call from the BBC on Friday afternoon asking if I could do a live spot on News 24 for them at half seven. I agreed, and they offered to drive me all the way home afterwards, which is standard BBC procedure and always strikes me as a criminal waste of the license fee so I always refuse. Three minutes later, though, the producer rang back to say they’d shifted it until later in the evening, which meant I wouldn’t be home much before midnight so I had to turn them down.

Saturday I worked in the morning (despite it being my birthday) and then went to town in the afternoon to fight with the crowds. I’m not much of a one for birthdays so would happily have let it slip by without marking the event, but Paul arranged for us to meet up with Trevor and Jon and we went out for the most fantastic meal in Pleshey. Dad announced he’ll be arriving for a couple of days in mid-October, so perhaps I’ll take him there. We repeated the whole dining experience around at mum’s on Sunday night, and then it was back to work yesterday, when the at-home technology problems compounded as the Internet disappeared and wouldn’t come back.

Which brings us to this morning, when I’d agreed to do a slot on the breakfast show on 6music. All went very well. I took in the iPod nano, which we all agreed was beautifully put together, and although none of us needed one we all wanted one.

So there we go. All up to date in 700 words or less. Speed blogging. In brief.

It’s such a shame I can’t download my pictures and put a couple on here while we’re away. We’ve spent a couple of days this week walking in the mountains, which has left us both practically crippled with aching legs and sore feet, but the views have been fantastic.

Today we headed to the north and rode the cable car up to 8,000 feet, then walked along the narrow ridges that let ou look down on Innsbruck from way above even the planes that use the local airport (stupid American woman at this morning assumed all of the planes coming over were for Zurich because nowhere like Innsbruck could possibly have an airport. They’re almost knocking the tops off the buildings as they pass over here, so I don’t know how low she thinks they fly from here on to Switzerland).

The trees up in the mountains are amazing. They are as tall as a high office building, and the most fantastic green at the top. Around the bottoms of their trunks are great forests of Christmas trees, woven through with pure streams that we have been drinking out of. They taste so fresh and clean, and just like the sweet water you get in bottles of mineral water, which perhaps explains why so many people just dip their empty bottles into streams of under trickles coming out of rock faces for a free refill.

Tonight is out last in Innsbruck, though. Tomorrow we move on to Frankfurt by way of Munich, where we change trains. I haven’t checked the timetable, but hopefully we have an hour or so there and there will be a barber at the station. I am in desperate need of a haircut.

Our guesthouse here (run by the wonderfully named family Plank) is over 600 years old. It has fantastic creaky floorboards, and a big winding staircase that in the 24 hours we’ve been here I’ve already almost fallen down twice. The trouble is, as you’re walking down it you get distracted by all the dead wildlife mounted on the walls. Skulls of all manner of strange mountain animals, stags’ horns, stuffed owls… It’s a wonder there’s anything left on the mountains at all.

The mountains themselves form a fantastic backdrop to the city, which itself is pretty ancient. The age of the place where we’re staying certainly doesn’t make it an anomaly, as all the streets around here seem to be well into several hundred years old. It’s all highly religious, too, as many of them have religious icons painted on the walls, and our guesthouse is absolutely packed with crucifixes. And not small ones, either – these are big church-sized examples, about a third to half life size.

We’re here for a few days, so plan on heading up the mountains to walk. Good job I bough new hiking boots before leaving home.

Well here we are in Linz, a torougly modern city straddling a river that is in the process of building a city-wide network of free Wifi hotspots.

The sun is beating down, almost blinding us through the top-floor windows of the Ars Technica museum where’re drinking tea and eating our seven thousandth portion of apple strudel since arriving in Austria, having spent the afternoon playing with virtual reality machines, robots and 3D worlds that don’t really exist.

Austria is a strange country. Everyone is exceptionally polite, and everyone seems to speak English, without exception very good English. They are also quite closely tied into the past, though. We have seen a lot of people wearing traditional dress, and even guys in their early twenties roaming the streets on a Friday night wearing leiderhosen.

Without exception, the food has been excellent, although I can’t understand why everyone here isn’t the size of a house. It’s all so packed with cream and cheese that you can’t help but end a day feeling greasy and fat, even if you’ve had very little. The main drink, of course, is beer, but it seems that measures are very strictly controlled, and spirits come in even smaller measures than they do at home, which wine is often measured out by the eighth of a litre.

The trains have treated us well. They have been clean and well run, and cheap to use. Having said that I’ve probably jinxed us for the next leg of our journey on to Innsbruck tomorrow, but if we have just one bad journey out of almost three weeks’ travelling then we can consider ourselves lucky, I think.

CNN is driving me mad, though. Katrina Katrina Katrina. Yes, I know. It’s terrible. But that’s no reason to apologise for doing other stories as well. They really do. ‘More on Katrina coming up in a minute, but first let’s look at what else is happening in the world.’

Two minutes later you are rewatching more or less the same clip of flooding as you saw five times already.

Unfortunately it is the only English-language channel in most of the hotels, so if you don’t want music and you don’t speak German so well then it’s your only option.

I am feeling thoroughly relaxed, though. I have only checked my email once, and then really only cleared out the spam and turned down an interview request, so I am quite out of touch with what is going on at home. I’ve logged onto my online bank once, and seen that the 512MB memory card I bought in Bratislava cost only

I don’t have time to weite much, and anyhow, this keyboard is all in the wrong order, so half of it probably won’t make much sense. However, here we are in Salzburg. It’s been scorching hot – really, truly firey, so I wish I’d brought more pairs of shorts with me.

The scoot across the vast plain that sits between Budapest and Vienna was smooth and comfortable, which is more than can be said for the dusty, rattly service we took to Bratislava on the spur of the moment. I’m glad we did, though, as it was a fascinating, although evidently very poor city that will no doubt benefit from EU membership and the funds that should soon start to come its way.

From Vienna, it was on to Salzburg where we find ourselves now, snatching a few minutes of catching up on email before taking the train on to Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, which should make for an interesting day out.

More when I have time. For now, though, there’s a train to catch.

It feels strange being back in Hungary so soon after the last time. Budapest feels very familiar, and we’ve spent the night in a far more convenient location than the last time around. Back then, we were in an old Communist-built block used to house party officials. Now we’re just behind the opera, right Andrassy Ut, the main street.

We’re only here one night, so we hunted out a restaurant we remembered from last time around (Fresco), and then walked up to Heroes Square, where we found a big concert going on in the bed of the dried out lake. It seemed to be some kind of celebration for the main radio station, and as entry was free we headed in and joined the crowds. It was strange being there and not knowing any of the acts, though. They were obviously big celebrities, as the crowd was going wild, but in general they seemed like a cross between Timmy Mallet and Shakin Stevens, and it was like being thrown back to British music of about 1982.

It felt like we were invading someone else’s party, as we stood there not understanding any of the words, or knowing the very organised dances going on around us.

Still, much fun nonetheless.

Today we head off to Bratislava and should be in Vienna by tonight. Not quite sure how we’re going to get there. Train, probably, We were planning on taking the hydrofoil up the Danube, but our booking was… Well, I guess lost en route somewhere, to be kind, as we never heard anything back.

Let’s just hope the people at the station speak English, because there’s no chance of us buying tickets in Hungarian.

It feels like a long time since I last posted something on here. In reality, it’s only four days, but it’s been quite a week.

As is customary on the last one before you head off for a while, I had to get ahead of the work that would need doing while I was gone, to the extent where my daily page rate was up to 10 pages by the time I left this evening. My hands ache, and I’ve not been able to bring myself to type again once I’ve got home.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Monday hadn’t been a bank holiday and Tuesday been a whole day spent in the boardroom deliberating the winners of this year’s Awards. It was interesting and entertaining, and we broke for greasy curry at Olive’s at the half-time mark, but it really was incredibly poorly timed. And I must admit that the timing was actually down to nobody but me.

But here I am, all packed and ready to go, and looking forward to some time out of the office spent travelling foreign railways through unfamiliar countries.

Updates may be sparse.