HOWZAT

Even with so much choice online, I have British friends who still long for the analogue thunk of the latest Granta magazine arriving in their postbox, just as I relish the tactile pleasure of undressing my weekly copy of The New Yorker from its plastic wrapping. Bookshops have become the dinosaurs of the digital age: you can count on one hand the number of decent English-language bookstores in Asia, perhaps even on one finger. Ordering books online is now second nature, so vital for my sanity that pre-Amazon times seem as distant as a childhood nightmare.

And what did I do before internet banking? Oh, yes, I spent pharaonic sums on international calls to my bank, listening to holding music. You think dealing with your local high-street branch is irksome? Multiply that irk by 6,000 miles.

I don’t dare calculate what proportion of my early earnings was swallowed by phoning Britain. It is an unshakable fact of expat life: loved ones never call you as much as you call them. After all, they reason, it was you who left. This is why few innovations have been more life-enhancing than Skype, easy-to-install internet telephony software that enables me to make cheap calls to land lines worldwide, as well as free calls to other Skype users.

Yes, free. If Skype has a drawback, it is this: you must first shake off the deeply ingrained anxiety that you are running up a truly unpayable bill. My first Skype session was with an American friend in Paris. “So,” I quizzed him, “this is free, right? Like, completely free? Free free? As in not costing anything? Complimentary? Gratis?” My mother, who lives near Edinburgh, installed Skype on her com-puter. She was impressed too. “Free? You mean, completely free?” she began, with the same giddy interrogation that betrays a first-time Skyper.

My mum, a tech-savvy 58-year-old, equipped her house with wireless broadband to help us keep in touch cheaply. My siblings are similarly connected: my Peruvian sister-in-law, Dora, revisits her home with a Cuzco-based periódico virtual. My father, who has remarried, doesn’t even have a computer at home. Result: we don’t communicate as much.

With the advent of cheap broadband, digital photography has also come of age. After my iBook, a Canon Ixus 400 camera is my most used gadget — and swifter internet connections have finally made photo-sharing fun rather than infuriating. Sometimes I post images on the web through my Mac account and send people the link. An English friend in Bangkok takes snaps of her children with her phone, uses wireless Bluetooth technology to transfer the images to her computer, then transmits them across two continents to doting grandparents.

So, for the next 191,000 Brits considering a long, hard journey of their own, here is some advice: you can read online newspapers until your eyeballs dry up, you can Skype until you are hoarse, but it is never enough. The distance remains. Recently, a birthday package arrived from my sister, Jo. In an endearing but doomed attempt to disguise its contents, she had written “Shirt” on the customs sticker. But the package was round and hard, and had a shape I recognised instantly: digital Marmite is great, but nothing tastes like the real thing.

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