It's okay, it was time," my sister said to me over the phone a day ago. I'd called to inform her that I'd successfully received a refund from my bank for the amount that had been fraudulently withdrawn from my account while I was in Vienna. I'd been the victim of a crime I learned is called "skimming", when someone reproduces your debit or credit card and then uses it to withdraw money from your account. My sister was responding to my grievance about my laptop being stolen on the night train to Vienna. It's true, what she said... it was "time"... the laptop was old. It was a Macbook Air I'd bought back in July 2012 — a gift I gave myself after having saved for almost a year. It was on that machine that I'd finished my first book. Last week's column ended up being the last bit of writing both performed and dispatched using that somewhat dysfunctional device.

I now found myself in a peculiar, somewhat precarious situation here in Europe. I cannot access my bank account, since my debit card had to be blocked, and I am laptop-less. The desktop in the apartment in which I'm living in Tramin presents itself as a potential solution, but the German keyboard is confusing, the y and z keys are in the exact opposite position as on the QWERTY keyboard I'm accustomed to, forcing my fingers to move counter-intuitively. Added to this is the phantom-pain-like consequence of the habit I'd got into of using my caps-lock key to replace my non-functional left shift key. It was my way of avoiding spending Rs12,000 to have the whole keyboard replaced. It's easier to write on my smartphone, I've discovered. It's not writing so much as swiping. But here I am, sitting at the kitchen table as I wait for the bread pudding I steamed to cool down so I can upturn it and leave it to stand in the fridge.