Sometimes when you are far from home and feeling a little emotional, all you want is a hug from your dog.

Friends and family can sympathise and offer platitudes but nothing beats the soothing company of your sage, four-legged friend.

Dog lover Andy Murray has admitted to regularly using Skype to keep in touch with his two terriers Maggie May and Rusty. They help raise his spirits when he is away from home, he says.

Similarly, Dario Franchitti, the retired motorsport legend, told me the same during an interview. While his beloved dogs remained with his ex-wife Ashley Judd in the US, he now lives back in Scotland but often calls to speak to them and watch them play.

In the dark old days when face-to-face phone-calls were strictly the preserve of international spies and business magnates, if you left the country, you and your pet were plundered into a communication black hole.

You could catch up with humans on the blower, but would be deprived contact with your pet. But now the animals are apparently getting in on the virtual action.

I'm actually amazed that these hounds have the nouse to get connected. Despite having opposable thumbs my own attempts have had mixed results.

When my brother was working in Australia we attempted to catch up via the medium of Skype. After a few minutes of chat and him taking me on a virtual tour of his flash harbour-side accommodation, the sound inexplicably cut.

After some time faffing with volume controls and microphones, we had to accept defeat and conduct the remainder of the conversation by scribbling messages on bits of paper with marker pen and holding them up like contestants in a particularly exhausting game of Blankety Blank.

Speaking to another overseas friend, we encountered the opposite problem. While we could hear each other clearly enough, the visuals jumped and jarred before finally freezing, forcing us to converse with a contorted version of the other's face, caught mid-blink.

Even when "face calls" work, I could never really get past having to witness the sight of my own fissog - often recently roused from sleep due to different time zones - nodding away in the bottom corner of the screen like a particularly inept interpretor for the deaf.

Don't get me wrong. This technology is a fabulous thing, allowing as it does, far-flung families to bear witness to the minutiae of each others lives, it's just that like anything involving computer screens and me, it has a fairly high Tears to Success ratio.