Here is my very first blog, written at Heathrow airport. I´ll do one about Rio when I leave.

OK, so I have been persuaded to write this diary / blog to keep track of my travels and to keep others in the loop. I was initially sceptical as I tend to think of travel blogs as being a pretty smug "Look at me, look at all the amazing places I´m visiting, look at all the cool things I´m doing and people I´m meeting. But enough about me, how are you? How are you enjoying staring out of the window of your office block at the dull, grey, rainy day outside whilst contemplating the mind-numbing boredom of your 9-5 existence" type affair. And I didn´t want to put anyone through that.

Having said that, I would be lying if I said that I dind´t feel a little bit smug when sat on the train to the airport on one of the more miserable, grey days of a particularly miserable, grey winter. So, actually, I´m not going to promise anything. This may well turn out to be the smuggest (is that a word?) diary / blog / journal you´ve ever stopped reading after one entry. What do I care though? I[´ll be on a beach in some tropical paradise.......

So hopefully this journal will serve as posterity for me as I tend to forget things like, you know, what I had for breakfast; it may be interesting to some people, in a sadistic kind of way; it might even prove useful to my long harboured but aimless literary ambition; and it may very well contain vital clues to my whereabouts if I´m kidnapped by Colombian drug runners (just a joke Mum, just a little joke, they´re just words, they´re not going to make it come true....)

So this is my first entry, as I sit in the Gordon Ramsay restaurant in Terminal 5 at Heathrow (I can expense this right?) Hopefully, if you are bored enough to read another of these blogs, you will be interested, amused, a little bit jealous, and not completely disgusted by the underlying tone of smug self-satisfaction.

I feel like all those greats must have felt when they first put pen to paper - Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Doogie Howser MD. Exciting times.....