It's approaching 1am at Rio's Sambódromo on Sunday, the first big night of carnival. I have been dancing down the middle of the parade ground for close to an hour and I can see the gates of the finish line, lit up by floodlights, with the promise of a cold beer beyond it and the chance to get rid of my costume.
As it happens, my costume seems just as keen to get rid of me. My skirt, which is bright green and pink (the colours of the Mangueira samba school, which I have joined for the night), hemmed with straw and held together at the top with a bit of string, has survived my shuffling and hip-shaking. Then the string snaps and it gives way. My skirt pools around my ankles, which makes me trip over it. My headdress - 4ft, heavy, and exploding with feathers - comes off and I'm on my hands and knees, bottom in the air. In front of several thousand people.
There are, obviously, women far more underdressed than me, but I would rather have been wearing a sequined G-string than the huge M&S pants that are covering my behind. I would, at least, have fitted in. As it is, I am very white, slightly podgy, and destined, I fear, to become a fixture on Brazil's version of You've Been Framed. No, I am carnival roadkill.
I am helped up, hot-faced and flustered, by two gorgeous Brazilian girls, who smile kindly, but I think one of them turns to the other and says, 'Look at the strange giant pants they wear in England', because the people behind me laugh, only I don't speak any Portuguese, so I can't be sure. Still, there's no room for dignity and self-consciousness in the Rio carnival and in a city where bikinis seem hell-bent on disappearing up their owners' bottoms, I can only suspect that huge British pants are something of an exoticism.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists pour into Rio de Janeiro for the world's biggest carnival but only a handful join one of the 14 big samba schools to take part and parade down the Sambódromo. It's a very different way of seeing the carnival, in that, actually, you don't get to see very much apart from the dancing tribe around you and the 65,000 spectators but I'm told that watching it from there, enduring float after float until 6am, can get rather dull after a while. This way, it's a sharp carnival hit, mainlined and intoxicating.
An hour of dancing down the parade avenue feels like 10 minutes and you leave wanting more. Two hours earlier, I had forced my way to Mangueira's 'holding pen', 100m or so before the start of the Sambódromo's main strip. Mangueira is probably the most popular samba school and Cariocas (the name Rio residents give themselves) support samba schools like they support football teams - everyone has their school and they're passionate about it. Over two nights of the carnival, the big 14 schools are judged, marked and hope to avoid relegation. There is only one winner - the school that has the best costumes, music and choreography.
Pushing past other samba schools gearing up for their turn, I started to feel dizzy. Lime-greens clashed with violent fuchsia. Dancers wielded stuffed electric guitars in evil magenta fabrics. People wore black and white stripy clown's trousers, accessorised with neon wigs and Elton John star-shaped glasses. Jesters jumped out of huge dice. The floats were incredible - one, a 15m lizard, which changed colour, and Mangueira's pink and green float that spat fire. Feathers, glitter and sequins littered the ground, as if a bunch of transvestite chickens had been holding a fight club.
