Here begins my week of living dangerously in an East London internet cafe. Imagine the net cafe in the picture, crossed with the black hole of Calcutta and smelling of stale sweat and KFC.

One of the few advantages of living in the white-van gulag of Walthamstow is that every third shop is a net cafe, so, when your home connection goes up the swanny, you can just nip down the road and log on for 70p an hour.

That said, I've not yet found a local net cafe that's easy to work in. All the computers in this one look like they survived an IT course on the Titanic, and I'm not allowed to download Skype on any of them. But, according to a discussion on Skype's online forum, I can still use it.

Apparently if I save the latest version of the Skype.exe file on a USB memory stick and plug the stick into the cafe computer, I can run the software from the stick. It sounds a little fiddly, but it's got to be worth a try as a short-term headache cure. Worth remembering next time you're off to travel the world.