It was revamped two months ago by Tom Conran to cater for the trendy overspill from Ladbroke Grove

It was revamped two months ago by Tom Conran to cater for the trendy overspill from Ladbroke Grove. Now they are all in Primrose Hill.The orange carpets and PVC banquettes have gone, like the Irish and Scottish working class of that part of NW1. Now wooden floorboards, chunky tables and leather sofas accommodate media folk, hungry for gossip and focaccia, who wouldn't be seen dead in a pub.People used to be seen dead at The Cow in Westbourne Park. It was, begged the barman, a rare aberration. Baring its Victorian tiles to the junction of Gloucester Avenue and Fitzroy Road, The Lansdowne used to be in Chalk Farm. So did the Pembroke Castle, the Queen's and the Princess of Wales.

Suddenly, there was more to passing yourself off as a man than asking for a pint of Greene King without a giveaway croak. A few weeks ago, a woman I had often seen on TV complained at the bar that the basil leaves garnishing her tagliolini had been cut, rather than torn, thus inhibiting the flavour. The birthday boy put a condom on his head and blew it up from inside, so that he looked like Astrosmurf, and then buried his head in the traffic warden's breasts and wept at the fickleness of time. THE FIRST time I went to The Lansdowne, angling for an under-age pint in 1985, a traffic warden came into the pub, passed over the niceties of community policing, and launched into a topless rendition of "Knees Up, Mother Brown". "The world can't get to you and you experience that great rarity of being left alone for five hours at a time I'm very happy up there.".

Dermot McNulty, who works for a large PR company, positively enjoys himself in the air He carries a laptop, a dictating machine and a CD player "I just tune the world out," he says. "I think it's conceited to be blase - I feel lucky to see other places. I'm just flexing my muscles and concentrating on a career - at my age I don't need an outside life." Mr Fowler is 32.Others have completely resigned themselves to a future where everyone works from home or plane, with their offices under their arms, and have learned to adapt. "International travel is wonderful," cries Jon Fowler, an international marketing manager for Sony. Armed only with his Psion 3A, he flies once a week to Europe and once a month to America. Technologally speaking, it would be possible to conduct a business without ever meeting anyone, but there are clients who just would not be happy without the personal touch.Brave-hearted road warriors deny they deserve any sympathy at all. A networking area is essential, because the warrior with no home base may rarely have an opportunity to make human contact with anyone but the vitally important clients whom he travels to see.

Me, I just drink more."Most five-star hotels now accommodate road warriors on separate executive floors with computer hookups and "networking" lounges. People are hugely competitive about it." He says that "the No 1 hotel relaxation requirement for my colleagues is a gym. "It's incredible what you turn into when you travel all the time," says a 24-year-old senior analyst with a strategy consultancy firm who travels to Europe at least once a week. "You are so spoilt that you start to get obsessed by the fact that there is no bathrobe in your room or how many air miles you're earning. And the advertisements for wider seats in business class seemed to precede the actuality by about six months."Road warriors can be hard to please. I hate working on planes." Mr Mills has 15,000 air miles clocked up at the moment, all donated by British Airways, but he is not happy "Frankly the stewardesses are all too old. "I always take a Toshiba T4800CT and a modem, so I can send faxes or link straight into our internal system back in England," he says.