The glamorous life of a sports writer

Here I am in the grandstand of the Olympic rowing lake outside Munich, a brutalist concrete structure that makes you think that if the rest of the 1972 Olympics venues were designed with such lack of beauty it is no wonder that people started shooting each other.

It is raining. It is cold. The cheese in the press box rolls is bland, the apple juice slightly salty. I am staying in a hotel in Dachau, just down the road from the concentration camp. To add to the general mood of misery, the local press spent the afternoon watching their national team lose in the football World Cup to Serbia. It is not a jolly place. I got up at 5.30am to come here today.

I'm not moaning, though. It's just that when people sometimes express envy that I get paid to write about sport, they don't realise that it is not all Pimm's, sunshine and girls in pretty frocks (although at Henley it pretty much is that). But I am very lucky to be doing what I do.

This is a busy time, hence the lack of posts this week (I'm really sorry to the few kind souls who visit this blog each day and leave disappointed, I will try to write more often so that you can be disappointed only by quality rather than quantity). I flew to Munich this morning, having spent the past four days commuting from London to Eastbourne daily for the women's tennis.

I get back Sunday night and it is straight off to Wimbledon on Monday for a week and a half then it is a few days at Henley Royal Regatta (where really no one can complain about their lot - they even have courtesy gin and tonic in the press tent!), a day doing a one-day international at Lord's, three days covering rowing in Lucerne and then up to St Andrews for the Open golf.

That takes us to the third week of July, but I'd rather be this busy than twiddling my thumbs. My diary for August just says "sleep". And "blog".

(Thanks to Rachel Quarrell, my colleague on the Telegraph and editor of Rowing Voice for the photo of our bleak workspace above)