Rio: Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats

I'm writing this the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper in my lovely room on the sixth floor of the Royalty Hotel, Rio de Janeiro. It's 5pm on Monday and just starting to get dark. I'm impressed by the cosmic coincidence that in Derby, where it's four hours later but in the other hemisphere, it will also be just getting dark. Anyway, I'm intending to type this up and stick it on my blog, so if you're reading this now it's safe to assume that that's what I've done. It occurred to me that it might save some time when I get home, because this holiday's going to have a lot to write about and I've got a spare moment now - I'm assuming Alberto's going to call at some point since I told him what room I'm in but somehow neglected to ask him his room number in return. I'm improving my Portuguese in the meantime by watching cartoons - Clifford O Cachorrinho is Clifford's Puppy Days, although I'm pretty sure the title translates literally as Clifford The Puppy, possibly with an extra diminutive suffix on the end. See, I'm multilingual!

Anyway, this was meant to be an account of the holiday so far. Let's start with book reviews. I decided to get two new books for the trip - John Banville's "The Sea", which regular readers will recall me saying ages ago that I was going to buy, and while I was in the bookshop and not being entirely confident in the ability of "The Sea" to keep me going all through the four days away from home (it's not all that long), I decided to see if there was anything by Flann O'Brien that I hadn't read (remembering that the first trip I blogged about, I waxed lyrical over O'Brien's work). The only one they had was "Best of Myles", a compilation of the column he wrote for the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. These columns, by the way, are exactly what I would love this blog to be like, if only I was a halfway competent writer. They're hugely clever, witty, inventive and just plain funny.

Having picked my two books in such a random way, I was rather surprised to see that the writer of one had obviously read and enjoyed the other. Not only is there a character in "The Sea" called Myles, but both books include a pun involving a Primus stove and the Latin phrase "primus inter pares", which CAN'T be a coincidence.

And speaking of The Sea, I can see it from my window - the hotel's right on the beach. The smell of sea air, I only realised today when I smelt it, is something I haven't experienced for a good three years. It's lovely, and the beach here is wonderful. You can't really understand how much I love a nice beach without appreciating where I grew up - in and around Boston, Lincolnshire. Firstly, it's thirty miles in any direction from the nearest hill, which makes me admire inclines whenever I see them (and the mountains around here - wow!), and secondly, the nearest beach, where we always went for holidays and days out, is Skegness. Now, I quite genuinely would recommend Skegness to anyone, it's a great place, but if your idea of the seaside is clean, sparkling white sand and pure blue water topped with shiny white wave, gleaming in the sun... you might be disappointed. Skegness is on the North Sea coast, and the sea water is the colour and texture of thick mud (with, by all accounts, a generous quantity of raw sewage mixed in). So I love a good beach, and even the lack of donkey rides here doesn't put me off.

It's also hot! It got up to about 29 degrees here today. I had the morning free (I got in late last night, just in time to see the penalty shoot-out, and was asleep by half seven), and spent it walking around the beach and the bit of this ginormous city within walking distance of the hotel. Globo, the TV company, have paid for me to have three meals a day at the fancy hotel restaurant, but there's only so much posh food a man can take, so I had lunch at Bob's Burgers next door. Delicious!

Then this afternoon Globo's driver came to take me to the studio, which turns out to be a long journey along some terrible roads - they reminded me of the Old Hammond Beck Road in Boston, although that's not a reference anyone reading this will understand, so I don't know why I'm writing it. Suffice to say that they were full of potholes and bumps, and indeed at one point the whole road had collapsed into a huge chasm, so we had to go over into the wrong lane where it wasn't quite so deep or wide, to get over it. Still, we got to the studio in one piece, and it turns out that 'studio' isn't really the word. 'Village' comes closer, but only if Derby is also a village - it reminds me more than anything of the town built by the Globex Corporation in that Simpsons episode - there are lots of big studios (Globo do all the big Brazilian soap operas and things), exterior sets, offices, buildings all over the place, it's fantastic. I met all the people behind the show we're recording tomorrow. I demonstrated my amazing ability to recall the cards in Portuguese and they looked at each other and said "Maybe you can do it in English, and we'll have a translator." I don't blame them.

I memorised another pack in English for the crew (slowly, and with mistakes, but they were still impressed), then the presenter Luciano came in (he's more Ant and Dec than Noel Edmonds, I've decided) and I memorised another one (perfectly) for his benefit, plus a string of numbers he wrote down. Everyone liked it. He took me to meet Scorpio (okay, he isn't actually called Scorpio, he's Marcel I think, although he does have a beard), the big boss, and I did another pack for him. Not perfectly memorised, mainly because he was saying "Wow!" and "Look at that!" all the time I was memorising, as if the fact of me looking at the cards was in itself somehow amazing, but he still thought it was cool when I could recall most of them. My standards of impressiveness in memorising are much higher than everyone else's, I need to remember that and not worry about getting jeered tomorrow if I take 90 seconds to memorise a pack. Anyway, that's filled an hour and two sides of A4, I'll write more tomorrow but now I should go and find Alberto (who I notice I forgot to write about today although I met him for the first time).