It's funny how going out drinking until eight in the morning and then having a lie-in until three in the afternoon can make your head feel a bit woozy. But I think it's got more to do with the sudden weather change. As I write these words it's grey and murky outside, whereas yesterday, even through the night, it was hot hot hot. Okay, there was a gusty wind blowing, but it was a hot dry wind from the interior.

I think yesterday's wind had foehn properties; during the day there were great views of the hills that ring Melbourne, in much the same way that from Munich the Alps look close enough to touch when there's foehn. In addition, the people out and about in Melbourne last night were getting up to all sorts of bizarre antics that you just wouldn't see on a normal night. I think there was also a sense that this was going to be the last night of summer, and the last chance to fool around. Cooler, wetter weather has been forecast for the next few days, and it's really autumn now, not summer any more.

It's been a lovely few days of desperately trying not to think about having to work and doing anything but finding a job. I've spent a lot of time with Rainnie, who found herself briefly between jobs and therefore had time on her hands. We met up for lunch on Thursday (a fantastic grilled lamb & goat's cheese salad followed by the best coffees I've had in Melbourne - well they were Jacobs), we met up for dinner on Friday (I got to chat with a gaggle of elderly Spanish ladies off Brunswick Street when we asked them for directions to a decent tapas bar), we milled about aimlessly all day on Saturday after a delicious breakfast up the top end of Lygon Street. We even visited an unfinished Greek Orthodox church that has been being built for the last 16 years near her house. It was quite a privilege to get a guided tour from one of the community's volunteer workers on the building, and all because we just asked nicely.

But of course I have been thinking about work as well. I have sent my CV off to another clutch of agencies, I've chased a few agencies that have had my CV for some time, I've bought the local paper to check out job adverts. It all seems to take so much time for so little result! I'm going to have to step up a gear I think, and start knocking on doors or something. This emailing of temping agencies is getting me nowhere.

And, in the absence of paid work, I've been thinking about training & education. I was inspired by a massage that I had at the City Baths (my return to badminton left me a little sore, as I had expected, and I've got backpack/stress neck & shoulder stiffness too). As I usually do, I got chatting with the masseur about his work, where he learned, and all that stuff. Only this time, instead of just thinking 'wouldn't it be cool to do that', I decided I would actually enroll for some massage training. So I have. At Victoria University. An introductory course which would allow me then to sit for a full diploma. Yay!

Then I thought about some language training. I've decided I want to learn Mandarin Chinese, so I asked about that at CAE, a language college in town, and had a chance to chat with one of the Mandarin teachers. I'm glad I made enquiries rather than just signing up because, after looking at some of the materials and talking about classroom dynamics, I think I would become very bored very quickly in the beginners' class. The teacher instead very kindly gave me the address of a bookshop where I can pick up a teach yourself guide, and accomplish in my own time what would have taken twelve weeks - and $300 - with CAE.

On Saturday Rainnie and I met at midnight to go for a few drinks. We started off at the James Squire Brewhouse, where we enjoyed a variety of their beers including a "thrice-hopped American red ale" - "but not American as in piss weak", so the barman informed me - that was (unsurprisingly) extremely hoppy. Later we were joined by Mike, who Rainnie used to work with until this week.

We moved on to the Cherry Bar, which was recommended to me by Nils in Sydney. What a bizarre place that is! Like many of Melbourne's bars, it's off a tiny lane that looks like an access road for the dustbin men or something. You go in through a very nondescript doorway and bang! you're in another world. The Cherry Bar world was at first glance decidedly dodgy, with all sorts of people - well-dressed, dressed in black, dressed like tramps - thronging the dimly-lit bar area or swaying on the dance floor to the strains of forgotten 70s heavy metal numbers.

But it didn't take long for the charm of the place to warm the cockles of my heart. Soon I was happily soaking up the atmosphere, chatting in shouts with Rainnie and the people around me, sipping on my Newcastle Brown Ale and watching a group of girls going for it up on stage, dressed like they were at a school reunion disco.

Against the lugubrious background of the bar's grungy decor it somehow seemed normal, even right, that there should be guys-about-town in their big stripey shirts and girls in little black numbers mixing with feral hippie types (when I asked him, one guy who was sporting a most impressive - and well-groomed - chinny beard confirmed my theory that it had taken him over five years to grow it that long). And the eclectic DJing fitted right in: Painted Black, Fox On The Run, Highway To Hell.

When we moved on to the Exford Hotel we found ourselves back in the real world, in a much more mundane-looking pub. Rainnie used to work here, so we ended up having beers with one of the security guards. His name was Vagis and he was from southern India, but had been living in Melbourne for some time. The evening was drawing on but we found the energy to go on to one last bar whose name escapes me before calling it a night and catching our various trams home. It was eight o'clock and it looked like rain.

And now here I sit, pondering life's mysteries and wondering whether I can be bothered to pop out for a pint of milk.

Hello, my name is Richard, and I have a strange attraction to comediennes.

Looking back, I can see how this is something that stretches back into my childhood: early infatuations with Dawn French & Jennifer Saunders, Ruby Wax, Sandra Dickinson (as Trillian in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Tracy Ullman, even Joan Rivers, are succeeded by fascinations with Josie Lawrence, Caroline Quentin, even the diminutive Sandi Toksvig and the far-from-diminutive Jo Brand.

More recently I've been seeing comediennes in the flesh. First Terri Psiakis, now Rebecca de Unamuno - feted as the world's top improvisor - whose one-woman improv show I saw on Tuesday night and loved. Am I attracted to them both because they're funny? Is it the energy of the live performance that excites me? Is it their Mediterranean heritage? Or is it a 'real' personal chemistry?

Sadly, I'm not going to find out in any hurry; short of stalking them, I feel it's most unlikely for me ever to end up in conversation with either of these women. Ah well, it'll just have to stay in schoolboy crush territory.

Sunday was a very short day. I didn't get out of bed until 3pm (but to be fair, I hadn't got into bed until 10am), and that was only because I had an appointment to see a room in a house. I might as well have not bothered going: the house was dingy, tiny, with a crap damp bathroom and an OUTDOOR toilet - I ask you! Then the other potential tenant turned up. He was the beardy weirdy from hell! Apart from being loud, fat & scary, he said he had a jack russell with a 'strong personality'. I was so out of there.

On Monday I had another house viewing. Only it turned out to be an ex hotel above a pub. The room was small but overall it wasn't a bad place, and cheap too - only $300 per month. They said they'd get back to me (and of course haven't). That evening I went with Rainnie and her friend Aaron to a comedy revue near North Melbourne's town hall. It was being filmed for Channel 31, the local public access cable channel. I have to say it was a bit shite, but at only $10 a head for nearly three hours' entertainment we weren't complaining.

I had a double dose of house viewing on Tuesday. In the morning was a skanky room in a stinking dark flat sharing with a post-grad student whose sense of personal hygiene was quite clearly still-born. So I said yay! I'll take it - NOT. The second house was a dream: beautiful old terrace with wrought iron balconies, dead central, groovy students living there. Sadly, I wasn't the only person who could appreciate the house's charms. They were interviewing 20-odd people that night.

My chances were slim to nonexistent. But there's a possibility that I might move into a different bedroom in the house next month: there's one room which is slightly larger than a cupboard with only a skylight for natural lighting, but which is very cheap ($50 a week). I figure I'm only going to be sleeping in the bedroom; my waking hours I'll be either out (hopefully at work) or else in the living room or kitchen.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I'll be officially moving in to Jackie's flat for a month, instead of just being on the spare bed, next week when her sister has moved her stuff out and back up to Canberra. So my housing worries are allayed for the moment. Now all I've got to do is somehow telepathically convince one or more of the dozens (and it is now dozens) of temping agencies who have my CV to ring me and give me an interview.

A beautiful thing happened on Wednesday night: I played badminton for the first time in almost a year! During the day I'd spoken with the secretary of a local club and then gone out to buy a racket (my one being in Munich with Michaela). I turned up at the Melbourne Sports & Aquatic Centre that evening, handily being able to follow a fellow player I had met on the tram - I recognised him as a player when I saw the Yonex strap on his shoulder - through the badly-lit gardens around the building. There were loads of people at the club, and only four courts, so games were limited to twenty minutes and people were rotated around.

My fear was that I would have forgotten how to play. And for the first five minutes this was borne out by my atrocious serving and general missing of the shuttlecock. I think my opponents were inwardly groaning. But then my sputtering game roared into life, and my partner and I came back from 20 - 6 down to win 24 - 21. Hurrah!!

I was SO happy to be playing badminton again. Just like back in '02, when I moved to Munich and played at my first club night after a couple of months without a game, so it was this evening: I could feel a radiant glow of delight spread through my whole body and manifest itself as a huge grin that I aimed at everyone around me. I'll be back!

Walking back from the stadium to my tram stop, skirting the northern edge of the Albert Park, I was reminded for some reason of living in São Paulo. I think it was the combination of a huge wide road flanked on one side by larger-than-life apartment blocks with a warm evening and lush greenery on the other side of the road. It was a pleasant thought that kept me company all the way home.

Every now and again, as I walk down the road or sit in a train or search for jobs and housing online, I have to remind myself that I'm travelling around Australia for the year and not sitting despondent in a house in London's suburbia, wondering what my life is for. The visual environment of Melbourne is for me the least Australian I have seen, which I suppose means it is the least different from the UK.

The suburban train network in particular is most British: grotty trains that run late and are operated by Connex (so no surprise on the punctuality issues there), serving stations that are in every way identical to the stations of my youth - even down to the particular design of the bit of metal that joins the platform roof to its pillars. I noted this design not because I am a saddo anorak but because it was part of my school local history project (a station in Harrow still just about holds the record for fatalities in a train crash in the UK, set in the '50s).

But it's not all a big déjà vu trip for me here. There are some very Melbourne things, like the Melbourne Comedy Festival for instance, or the trams - which seem to run on time, even though they have been privatised as well. And of course the ratio of Poms to Aussies is reversed here compared to London: 60 - 40 the other way!

And let's not forget the weather, which has been totally kind to me all week. With the exception of one evening where it got really cloudy and windy and looked like it might rain, it's been almost unbroken sunshine. Perfect weather for milling about not doing much. Pity I couldn't just mill about not doing much then! For I've been busily trying to find work and some accommodation.

I had my first interview for a house, and it didn't go too well. I got bad vibes as soon as I walked in: the house was small and dingy, and the toilet was outside! I could have overlooked these faults, but then the other guy about to move in turned up: a beardy weirdy freakazoid fat old bastard with a jack russell - who had the cheek to say HE attracts the weirdos in shared accommodation! More like he IS the weirdo. But I didn't say that to his face. I have a few more interviews coming up. Here's hoping they go better.

And in other news:

I did yet more comedy. First there was the show I scored a free ticket for when queueing up to buy other tickets. It was held in the Albert Park Gasworks theatre, which is near the beach area of South Melbourne. The show was pretty crap - a one-man spoof documentary on a fictitious third-world country called Klamydia, featuring a singing leper and a ranting US marine peacekeeper - but I decided to go anyway because it was an excuse to go to a new area of town. And I touched the sea for the first time since I was in Sydney, so it was worth it.

Cheekily I left early, because there was a slight timetable clash with my second piece of comedy for the evening: I saw Harold Pinter's play Dumb Waiter, performed by two comedians of national renown (apparently). It was in a small theatre in the Town Hall and was pretty good. On the tram back from Albert Park into town to see the play, I found myself surrounded by hare krishna Indian students who were very friendly and chatty. I think they thought I'd been in the temple with them.

The following night I saw a show called Love Gud, which was a trio of musicians who did bizarre comedy as well. It was really good fun, and quite interactive. Which is to say the keyboard player came and hugged me (and then everyone else in the front row), and other such antics. I had arrived a bit early and got chatting with this goth girl in the bar beforehand. She was a big fan of Gud and was really enthusing about them before the show started. I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed.

During the days I did a fair bit of wandering about, eating in Lygon Street a few times. It's a big Italian food area, so one night I had pizza and one night I had risotto. Both were good, especially the risotto (bacon & pumpkin). I also spent an afternoon in the Melbourne Museum, which is chock-full of interesting stuff. The best bit was an exhibition of dinosaurs from China, including a series of "missing link" creatures which seem to prove that birds evolved from dinosaurs because they are basically dinosaurs with feathers and stumpy wing-like arms.

On Saturday night I met up with Rainnie and a bunch of her work colleagues to go out in town. After a few at the bar where they work, we went to The Lounge, which is a grungy pub with a dancefloor and an outside balcony area on Swanston Street, a main shopping street in the centre of town. We left there at about 8.30am (yeehah! the sun was already up and shining) and Rainnie had two house guests that night: me and Linda, 'the freaky German girl' as she styled herself, who is going back to Germany this week.

It was really nice to get a chance to chat away in German again; after Sydney's plethora of Krauts, I've really noticed not having met any in Melbourne. I spoke some Italian with a Maltese guy called Malcolm who works in Rainnie's bar, and another colleague Michael lived in South America for a while so we were chatting in Spanish all night. Ah, how I love to talk foreign!

So there you have it. No job, no house, no worries!