'Web Robinson Crusoe' moves virtual office to desert island to prove we can work anywhere

Have computer - and internet connection - work anywhere. So goes the cost-cutting corporate human resources mantra.

Even on an uninhabited coral island in the middle of nowhere?

To the dismay, perhaps, of office workers everywhere, Frenchman Gauthier Toulemonde has returned to civilisation to report that it is indeed possible, though not necessarily desirable nor cheap, to relocate "offshore".

Until six weeks ago, Toulemonde, a businessman, journalist and former banker, was inclined to agree with the received wisdom that workers, given the right equipment, can labour more or less anywhere.

Being adventurous as well as entrepreneurial, however, he decided to put the theory to the test and at the same time fulfil a childhood dream of living like a modern-day Robinson Crusoe.

But a year ago, fed up with commuting from his home in the northern French city of Lille to Paris, Toulemonde, 54, decided to relocate his job as the head of a publishing business to an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere for several weeks.

"I found myself in Gare Saint Lazare in Paris just before Christmas watching the continuous stream of people passing by," he said. "They had this sad look on their faces, even though they were carrying Christmas presents. It had long seemed to me absurd this travelling back and forth to offices.