I know it's a cliche, but I do find it quite wonderful that I can sit in the back yard of an abandoned auto garage in a forgotten small town in Alabama, with my bare legs in the sun and my chickens pecking around, and do useful work for a cutting-edge UK company by surfing the web from my laptop. Inside, some friends make huge papier-mache puppets for a short film they will shoot with a pocket DV camera and edit in iMovie.

How did we ever live without this stuff? It is ultimately liberating, enabling a lifestyle choice that questions every convention about where we need to live and why. Why do I have to return to the UK? well, the only reason really seems to be that the US government requires me to have one of those old-fashioned visas, and my perfect lifestyle choice unfortunately doesn't qualify me for a green card. Though if they'd ever find me in Hale County, I don't know...