One of the perks of going up to London to the launch of Circe was the goody bag.

It contained the print version of the Circe manual, along with Julian Morgan's CD rom of Pompeii, with neat programming to present his pictures and accompanying text in user-friendly fashion. I'm grateful for both of these.

But the real eye-opener to me was the gift of the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary as a CD rom.

I had read commendations from other people, and thought, with the superior feeling born of ignorance, that a smaller dictionary was bound to be less use than my aged and much-thumbed Lewis (for everyday) or Lewis and Short (for the really hard words).

What I hadn't realised was how much quicker and easier the CD dictionary is to use. It's on my laptop hard disc, and when I sit down to read a piece of Latin from the web, or emailed to me by an e-pupil, I click on the POL icon and immediately a wee popup window - in fact two popup windows - are sitting in a corner of my screen. I can make the popups as small as I like, down to about 3 by 1 1/2 inches. Then when I find a Latin word I'm not sure about (there are lots of those!) I simply highlight the word and click on it, and the relevant dictionary entry appears in the popup screen. At once. Instanter. Immediately.

But that's not all. If my grammar is not up to scratch, the smaller of the two windows gives me all the info I need; it parses the word for me, and if it could be one of several possible parts of a verb, say, it gives them all. esse, which I've just tried, gives edo verb infinitive present active, followed by sum verb infinitive present active.

And all this without having to go to my bookshelf or turn a page.

Two more lovely and clever things. If I am feeling confident in my grammar, well able to identify potato as poto verb participle perfect passive singular dat/abl msc/neut, and beer as beo verb subjunctive present passive 1st person singular, I can close the Pocket Latin Analyser window and have even less of my screen taken up. And in the dictionary window that is left, I can click on any of the English meanings and be transported to an English/Latin dictionary.

Having looked at beo, I bless, for instance, I clicked on the word bless and found benedico, consecro, bene verto, prospero, aspiro, secundo, with their conjugations. Very useful for Latin verse composition.

Now, tell me that's not as neat an aid to reading Latin as you will come across in a month of Sundays.