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"Seriously, how do you think we're doing?"

Tough question to dodge that, particularly over a meal you haven't paid for. And I've been asked it twice in the last fortnight by senior staff. Luckily, for all concerned, it's not one I had to swerve as they are doing really rather well.

For evidence of this cast your mind back to Monday and the coverage they got for reaching without major mishap and getting a train to travel five miles in under seven minutes. didn't get as much praise as Seb Coe's Javelin.

So well done, Locog/ODA, you've done a blinding job...so far. There are plenty more fences to clear before you're home and hosed. Here are 10 of the biggest - feel free to scribble them down on post-it notes and scatter around the office.

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There are plenty of reasons why nobody should feel too sorry for - he was a master of the universe at , for example - but his current job does involve a lot of headaches.

If it's 2012-related and it's attracted the interest of Fleet Street's Olympic attack dogs it will be in Deighton's in-tray. Which is probably why he looked so delighted to be in Manchester last week to see something wonderful take place, especially as it was happening three years early.

When London won the bid to host the Olympics one of the key pledges the leaders of the bid made was that , not just London. Those leaders have spent much of the last four years trying to convince everybody there was some substance to that sentiment. .

Until now, that is, because there's nothing like the presence of 70 members of the in green, gold and flip-flops to convince even the most disbelieving of Mancunians that there might be more to this Olympic lark than a few games at and the vicarious thrill of watching our ride to glory.

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Towards the end of , the Australian took a trip that would change him forever.

He visited parts of the world suffering from the most demeaning poverty, places where the inhabitants had almost no opportunities for escape or improvement and where diseases eradicated in the developed world still took a terrible toll.

It was a trip that shocked Thorpe because it was a journey to the heart of his own country and those inhabitants were fellow Australians. In fact, they were the original Australians.

I heard the 26-year-old tell this story at a conference last week called , an apt title because sport has played a vital role in Thorpe's journey from to campaigner for aboriginal rights. But his story is about more than sport, or more than we usually assume sport can achieve.

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When I told my boss I intended to tweet from he looked at me as though I'd just told him I wanted to broadcast from beyond the grave.

Having spent the best part of an afternoon trying to set up a page for myself I wonder if the latter would have been easier. But I got there in the end - I'm still in my 30s, after all.

As I'm sure you're all with-it, web-savvy types I won't have to explain what Twitter is (you're probably already on to the next thing, buying newspapers and writing letters perhaps), but how about Beyond Sport?

In my last blog I quoted London 2012 boss Seb Coe describing sport as the "best hidden social worker". Well, Beyond Sport is a new organisation dedicated to making that happen.

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