I’m feeling sorry for myself tonight. I’m in Munich, in a hotel room that’s the size of a shoebox. I can’t get online (the wrong sort of phone sockets) even though my trusty travel plug is able to supply my laptop with power.

I don’t want to be here.

I’m starving hungry (in Bavaria they don’t care much for vegetarians or vegetarian diets – it’s all inch-thick slabs of pork or huge sausages) and wish I’d been able to pop into a bar and have a few beers to help me off to sleep. Instead I’m hunched over a coffee table typing this and with nothing more to keep me warm than the prospect of a day-long meeting tomorrow and an indescribably hard bed to sleep in tonight, assuming I can find some sleep.

The events of the weekend have caught up with me and all I want to do is cry. It’s part a kind of pervading tiredness and part worry that are my demons tonight. Numbness is spreading through me like a poison.

The dimensions of the room make me think of ‘Prisoner Cell Block H’ – that dreadful Aussie soap from the 70s set in a women’s prison that my sister used to love with a passion.

I think I’ve worked out why I hate travelling so much. It’s the anonymity. I hate the thought that no-one knows me and no-one that cares about me knows where I am. Standing in the queue for the taxi at the airport, I was thinking about the last airport taxi journey I did and of the young woman who took an unlicensed taxi in Cambridge on New Year’s Eve and I hated the fact that no-one really knew where I was or how to get hold of me.

Strangely, it’s not that productive for me to be away. I am so keyed up that I don’t do my job well and spend my entire time counting down the minutes until I can get in a taxi back to the airport and home.

Looking at my photo, I just wish I could plug myself in and charge myself up with a bit of enthusiasm about my trip and the things I need to achieve.

A year ago apples were on the menu!