Locker Room: Some Typical Scenes in the Life of the World Cup Reporter Wallah:

Torquemada, the Sports Editor and self-styled "hammer of heretics", has run out of obscure matches between makey-up nations for us to cover. He has discovered instead the late-evening game in a city far, far away - or as the medical profession call such assignments, the extreme cardio work-out.

Let us paint you a picture. It goes down like this. Rise early for the train which will deliver you to the appointed city. Board and have a row with a large and frightening German frau who apparently owns the seat you've booked. Stand for four and a half hours. Detrain (as the Yanks say) and by means of levers and grease insert yourself somehow into a media shuttle bus.

Your arrival within the bus deprives the existing occupants of the last few cubic centimetres of air, which they had been quite looking forward to. They look at you with the horror of coalminers who have just seen their canary die.

The shuttle is full now beyond all previously known concepts of fullness, and really it should leave for its destination. But it is the half-past-six media shuttle and it won't be leaving until half past six.

By the time the shuttle moves off you have lost all sense of feeling from the neck down, which is good because you don't really want to know why the Italian journalist behind you is repeatedly whispering the words "suffer baby, suffer" in your ear.

Fast forward through the torments and anguishes of the media centre to the end of the game with its agonising four minutes of time added on. The final whistle shrills. You pick up your laptop with your half-written report on its screen, sling your bag over your shoulder and join the stampede of hacks sprinting back toward the media centre three floors down and a couple of hundred yards away, there to finish the report and file before you can say "cardiac arrest".

Now many readers will have formed an image of the modern sports journalist as the rugged individualist: latter-day frontiersmen, characters from Brokeback Mountain without the hanky or the panky (you can't count shuttle buses, you just can't). In fact, we are "nanny state" people.

At 10 past 10 the other night the entire World Cup computer system in Cologne folded up. Having paid hefty money for the right to file via this wireless system, most papers will be pleased to know their representatives just broke down and wept.

After the filing, the real trouble begins. The dash to the shuttle; the stoical sufferings and violations on that shuttle; then the night train. Ah the night train, your partner till dawn.

The night train: back in the time of France '98 the loveable rapscallions we call the English football fans had a little chant for when they got on the train. They'd board and then they'd happily start up a sing-song chorus of "We're on the Train, We're on the Train, We're on the Train, We're on the Train, We're on the Train."

I loved that song. Having concentration difficulties, I found it useful and adaptable. At home I would sing "I'm in the Car, I'm in the Car" or "I go to Work, I go to Work" in order to keep myself task-focused.

Eight years on, everyone has forgotten the "We're on the Train" song. Except me, the sad old uncle who keeps the joke going. I don't care. I sing it loud and I sing it proud anyway.

The other evening's jaunt from Stuttgart to Cologne was good in a weird, World Cup way. I remember it particularly because it was the day after I went into the healthfood shop and bought the large bottle of apple juice which turned out after three lusty slugs to be a large bottle of apple vinegar. I was, as the Aussies say, feeling crook all day.

The aforementioned Aussies and the Croatians thronged the station, and though we had a one-and-a-half-hour wait it flew past as the Germans had installed a swing band to play in the main concourse. We cha-cha-chaed and we charlestoned, we congoed and we jived (Sports editor: Give us 900 words on that congo-versus-jive game you mentioned). Then we all fell asleep on the train and it was lovely.

The previous night from Frankfurt hadn't been quite so much fun.

Picture the scene. We are in a six-person carriage: your correspondent, a Mexican, an Aussie, a German and two Japanese* journalists. It is 1.35-ish in the morning. The train will not hit Cologne till 5.45am. We have some time to kill together. It's not pleasant in the little carriage with so many strangers inside, but outside the window, out in the corridor, there are many thousands of less-fortunate passengers squashed together in various states of discomfort and pain. It looks like Guernica, but with the jolly colours Picasso might have used if Benetton had been sponsoring him.

Two things about your correspondent. First, in circumstances like these he fears sleep, lest his bestial snoring drive his companions into a conspiracy to kill him. Second, despite being able to speak only halting English himself, your correspondent fancies himself as something of a linguist. In any situation where there is a breakdown in communication your corr will be the one who steps into the middle and in a very loud but patient voice shouts some absurd non sequitur at the non-English speaker.

It is a combination of these failings which leads your wakeful corr to nod brightly and say the words "Sí, Sí" when the Mexican suddenly addresses him from the seat opposite. "Sí, Sí," says your corr and laughs winningly.

A minute later the Mexican has removed from his backpack a small video camera which he points at his own face and says solemn words to. It's hard to speak for the representatives of the other cultures gathered in the carriage, but for an Irish person just being present for this business is intensely embarrassing.

Not, as it turns out, nearly as embarrassing as when the Mexican turns the camera around and points it in the face of the person who has given the impression that he has fluent and idiomatic Spanish at his disposal. This person now gapes in horror as he is invited to comment on some pertinent issue.

There is a stunned silence in the carriage now as all occupants turn their heads toward the fake polyglot among them. Oh yeah, Mr Berlitz is pretty silent now. Not one word of Spanish can he hablo.

The red glow from the imposter's cheeks lights the carriage and warms his fellow travellers. The Mexican turns the camera back on himself and utters what sounds like a long soliloquy of disappointment at having found himself in a world filled with charlatans.

It is a long, long way to Cologne but not if we all sing together. "C'mon. We're on the Train. We're on the Train . . . Aw c'mon, make an effort . . ."

*Footnote: Some of you may remember the Hays Office, whose edicts determined all sorts of moral and racial matters in the heyday of Hollywood. Of particular concern was the number of black people who should appear on screen at any given time when a gathering of white people was depicted.

The Hays Office is now defunct but in all scenes here depicted or previously described in these columns the reader should assume that there is at least one Japanese journalist present. Sometimes there are as many as 430 Japanese journalists present.