Teachers who are congratulating themselves on the efforts they made to visit BETT 2002 will be amazed to learn that I once managed to attend no fewer than six trade shows in a single day. To be more exact, I got round the lot of them in less than an hour - without ever having to do anything more strenuous than click a mouse. Even if I had wanted to visit in person, I couldn’t have done so because the events, all hosted by Virtex Exhibitions, exist only in the never-never land of cyberspace.

The sites are modelled on the traditional trade fair, with a ground plan and an army of independent exhibitors clamouring for your attention. You simply click your way around, gawping at the 3D graphics, reading the specs and leaving your email address if you want to know more. It’s quite pleasant to be able to see what’s on offer without being waylaid by overzealous salespersons, hellbent on telling you more about their wares than anyone could conceivably ever want to know.

There are other ways in which a visit to a virtual show isn’t quite the same as the real thing but, with a bit of effort, you can make the experience feel more authentic. For example, you could turn up the radiator so your room is unbearably hot and then persuade friends to regularly tread on your toes, elbow you in the ribs, load you down with carrier bags of bumf you’ll never read and charge you unbelievable prices for paper cups of undrinkable coffee.

Cyberspace is rapidly becoming the obvious venue for any major conference. For instance, last November the British Education and Communications Technology Agency hosted a virtual get-together for 11,000 participants in the Teachers Online Project. They were able to attend for an hour or so, at a time which suited them and without suffering the trauma of having to go cap-in-hand to the headteacher to beg for a day’s leave.

It seems such an eminently sensible idea that it’s difficult to see why the organisers of BETT haven’t abandoned Olympia in favour of the far glitzier environment of the Net. In an age of webcams, video streaming, desktop conferencing and online chat rooms, there shouldn’t be any need for ICT enthusiasts, of all people, to have to suffer the increasingly surreal experience of travelling on Britain’s public transport system. I have met visitors at BETT so exhausted by the effort of simply getting there that they drag themselves around the stands looking, not for state-of-the-art technology, but for somewhere to lie down.

If you have had to endure a gruelling journey, it’s particularly galling to find that you can’t enter the show until you’ve completed the registration form. Those insufferably well-organised types who have had the foresight to pre-register are treated like VIPs and are fast tracked into the main hall, while the rest of us huddle in the lobby, like asylum seekers, nervously completing the compulsory questionnaire - terrified that if we tick a wrong box, a SWAT squad will march us off to a detention centre for bogus BETT visitors.

The part of the form that causes us most problems is the section headed “Purchasing interest”. A geography teacher with whom I queued last year, read it and gave a very theatrical demonstration of the verb “guffaw”. She reckoned that she had less than pound;13 left in the departmental kitty. She hadn’t come to BETT to buy, but to pick up tips on how to get the most from her department’s sad assortment of state-of-the-ark computers before they finally take up their rightful place in the school dumpster or on The Antique’s Road Show.

Of course, she is right to come to BETT. It isn’t just a market place. The seminars, the ad hoc presentations provided by the likes of Microsoft, and the collective wisdom of the experts manning the 400 or so stands, means that it offers any visitor a unique opportunity to mix-and-match an unbeatable day of in-service training.

I do, however, worry about those conscientious sales persons who must waste an enormous amount of time and energy on those of us whose only purchase at BETT is likely to be a prawn and mayo bap. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. The badge that visitors are obliged to wear at the show currently only displays their name and the institutions that they represent. It should also carry details of exactly how much money you have to spend. This would enable the sales teams to home in on the fat cats, leaving the rest of us to forage unhindered for freebie ballpoints, posters, balloons, sweeties, promotional CD-Roms, glasses of plonk, key rings, coasters, more glasses of plonk, mouse mats, those wobbly things that you can stick on the top of pencils and more carrier bags than you can sensibly take home. It’s these free gifts which always make a BETT visit seem so much more rewarding than a virtual trade show - even if you can visit half-a-dozen of them in an hour.

If you know of any good shows with freebies email Arnold at: ArnoldJEvans@aol.com