Hanging by a thread

I wasn't planning to do a blog entry tonight, but my broadband's just come back on, so maybe I'll be able to post something quickly before it goes off again (engineer coming tomorrow morning and then with any luck I'll be back hooked up 24/7 again).

Although the thing I really want to blog about is a present I got for my brother's birthday, but I can't write about that yet in case he reads it and it spoils the surprise. So I'll save it for next week. There, that's got his hopes up, now he'll be extra thrilled with his £1 Smiths voucher.

So instead, I'll jinx the most exciting prospect of fame and fortune I've had for ages by mentioning that there's a sporting chance I'll be appearing on Brazilian TV in July or August, with them paying for my plane tickets and hotel and everything! I can't really say no to an offer like that (assuming I get an offer like that - I've currently only got an offer of a possible offer like that), but I do have my worries.

It's an issue that most people can't seem to get their heads around - I'm a memory champion, in the sense that I do well in memory competitions with their exam-style format, but I'm not a performer. I've never done a Memory Man stage show, and that's what they're looking for here. My memory techniques are designed specifically for the memory championships - more than any other competitor's systems, their sole function is to let me memorise the most information in the particular rules of each competition discipline. I struggle to flick through a pack of cards in thirty seconds and then recite it, because that's not what my system is designed for - the two-cards-to-an-image thing works great if you get to recall by sorting an unshuffled pack afterwards, but for verbal recall you probably need to stick to one image per card. So I'm not sure what to do on this live TV show in front of the Brazilian equivalent of Ant and Dec and an audience of millions.

Also, I don't speak a word of Portuguese, and I hate going to a country where I don't speak the language. It's just so rude.