Thank you, June. You were a smiling ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak day.

Just ask Owen Slot, as he stands here in the Olympic press centre in borrowed shirt and shorts, stubble gradually lengthening as he waits for his bag, containing three weeks’ worth of luggage, to arrive.

There are days when you wonder, and we had one of those as Team Times prepared to make its way to Beijing to start our coverage of the Olympics. You would have thought that, with four years to work up to it, there could be no last-minute hitches.

Er, not quite. Which was why a courier picked up my passport from my home in Hertfordshire at 10pm last Thursday night when six of us discovered our Olympic accreditation - and therefore our Chinese visas - had been declared invalid. Don’t ask me, but it seemed to involve numbers on passports not corresponding with the numbers on our Olympic accreditation, which acts as a visa and general go-anywhere pass. Poor Lisa Pedrisa, our valiant office manager, spent all of last Friday trying to rescue the situation with the Chinese Embassy, but to no avail.

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So, Sunday’s flights were cancelled and, at that point, we were looking at having a Beijing-based Times sports staff for the Games made up entirely of, er, Simon Barnes.

The disenfranchised six - Mr Slot, Matt Dickinson, Ashling O’Connor, Marc Aspland, Craig Lord and me - were told to be at the Embassy’s Holborn office in London at 8am Monday morning to meet Mr Liu, whom we were assured would smooth our passage.

Ah, but you know what comes next, for "China" and "bureaucracy" are two words that often occur in the same sentence. Mr Liu was very nice as he carefully scrutinised our documents but, no, it wasn’t him. It was Mr Peng at the Embassy in Portland Place. A taxi ride and a short wait and Mr Peng emerged. But no, it wasn’t him either. Just queue up and buy a visa like everybody else, he said. No Olympic priorities here, then. Three hours and a considerable number of £10 notes later, we were all suitably equipped with a visa, although just for seven days, not exactly handy for an Olympics lasting three weeks. Never mind, at least we were on our way.

***

Quick dash home, collect bags and then off to Heathrow’s Terminal Three, which is to modern air travel as canned sardines are to elbow room. It was crammed. Which was where the lovely June came in. She took pity on our cattle-class tickets and shepherded us through the queues behind the Trinidad and Tobago track team, and then scribbled a note to the powers-that-be to allow us into the executive lounge for a refreshing libation far away from the madding crowds.

Actually, it was Master Slot she seemed to take a shine to as the charmer became our self-nominated tour leader and led us onto our Air China jumbo, which is to air travel as sardines ... you know the rest, and made all the more worrying because Air China’s Boeing appeared to be older than me.

Ten hours of knees round the chin, execrable food and a film, apparently on an eternal loop, of people appearing at immigration in Beijing airport. All the actors and immigration police were smiling on the eternal movie. We had our fingers crossed we would be, too.

***

Blimey, everybody in Beijing does smile.

Thousands of them decked out in their Olympic uniforms and smiling for China. Pity it is not one of the Olympic events; the Chinese would walk it.

There were far too many smiley “hellos” to reply to, although that was not much help to the young Slot as he waited in vain at the carousel for his luggage. He stared hopelessly as bag after unwanted bag passed him. Which made me wonder: who do those unclaimed bags you always see going round and round on the carousel belong to? Who are the people who fly ten hours to Beijing and then wander off without their bags? Do they get to their hotels, wander into the bathroom and then wonder, “where did I put my toothbrush?” before realising they left the airport, took a taxi and checked in to their hotel unfettered by a giant suitcase crammed with the clothes they had taken the trouble to pack at the other end? Bizarre.

Anyway, no bags for Slotty. Could it be that one of the Trinidad and Tobago team mistook his bright red holdall for one of theirs? I have visions of a T&T 100m sprinter - all legs and arms and muscles, not quite Slot-like - pulling on a pair of Slotty’s trousers and wondering why they barely reached his knees.

***

There was more good news and bad news for Master Slot. The good news, sort of, came at the Olympic accreditation department as we struggled to get the army of smiley bureaucrats to understand that we needed the yellow plastic cards, which will hang around our necks for the next three weeks, correcting. Master Slot looked at his accreditation and decided that, actually, there was nothing wrong with it, except for a single missing final digit. Seems he could have come on the original flight, after all, which would probably have meant that he got his luggage and that the Trinidad sprinter would be wearing his own trousers.

***

The bad news: still no bag, although Air China rang to inform Master Slot that they had found a briefcase at Heathrow that didn’t make our flight. Was that his? Possibly not a briefcase containing three weeks’ worth of clothes, eh? Off to the shops, then, for Master Slot.