It's said that a monster called Ogopogo lives in Lake Okanagan. Dom Joly heads to the stunning valley in hope of a sighting

Ihave been staying in London all week, because I have been very busy doing promotion work for my new TV show. Have I mentioned this before? Probably not, I'm loath to do something so crass. Being away from home has been particularly tricky because I've started doing a fasting regime every other day.

I should really write this column about the Paralympics, and how wonderful and inspiring and brilliant to watch it all is. I should say that it's better than the actual Olympics. I should write all these things because it seems to be what everyone else is writing. The thing is, I don't agree. The problem is that if I write that then I become like the loathsome Frankie Boyle, or someone desperately trying to be contrary in an attempt to get publicity because I've got a new TV show or a new book out.

Back in the UK and things are hotting up: my new TV show goes out next Saturday as well as the release of my new book. I was thrown from the calm tranquillity of the Ardèche into the madness of promotion. It should be really easy to talk about what you've spent the past year doing. The thing is – it isn't. Sometimes it just flows, but most of the time you realise that your answers are either unhelpful or boring and you spend a lot of time sitting in the back of cars thinking, "Why didn't I say that instead?"

There can be few things more pleasurable in life than floating gently down the Ardèche river on a hot August day. A whole group of us rented kayaks and spent the day negotiating tiny rapids as though we were negotiating Niagara Falls in barrels. Although the river was full of other boaters, there were several stretches where we were totally alone in the shadow of magnificent rock walls that towered above us. The last time I'd done this descent, it was a sunny September day in 2001 when we returned to our house after a long day on the river only to turn on the television and see the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre. I remember wondering just what kind of world had we brought our little daughter Parker into.

I'm in the Ardèche on a family holiday, so my Olympic viewing has been via French television. I am not allowed access to British TV on my laptop although I can get the radio. This can be extremely frustrating as the French's priorities are obviously not the same as mine. I can be all set to watch some crucial long jump when coverage is abruptly cancelled and we swing over to a very long and dull interview with a French judo medallist. I can't blame them, of course: I'm sure that British TV is hardly fascinated by the exploits of French athletes unless they are being thrashed by a Brit. Certainly, BBC radio has lost all sense of its legendary impartiality as foreign listeners are battered with stories of continual British victory over the rest of the world.

That's it. I've finished the marathon session of filming that's gone into making my new TV show Fool Britannia. Over the past 15 weeks or so I have travelled across the UK in order to dress up as curious characters and harass the general public. It's not what my parents would have wanted me to do, but it's a living.

Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony took me straight back to this time four years ago when I covered the Beijing games for The Independent. I had no idea what to expect. I just knew that, since watching the Montreal Games on a fuzzy television somewhere in Tuscany in 1976, I had always wanted to go to the Olympics. Now I was there, in the Bird's Nest stadium waiting for the opening ceremony to begin.

I've spent all week in queues of one form or another. On the way to a shoot in Dover we were brought to a standstill for over three hours in Lewisham. It was on the first day that London traffic lights had been "rephased" for the Olympics. By "rephasing" I presume they mean "someone's had a go at changing stuff but it's his first day so give him a chance …". The whole city was chaos.

I've just spent the week in Benidorm … not something I'd ever thought I'd find myself writing. I was there for work, not joining the thousands of Brits that flock to this unofficial Brit colony on the Costa Brava.