Well, it shows how much I know about meteorology: the last few days have been just as sunny and warm as it was last week! Well, okay, in my defence, Sunday was cloudy and a bit cooler, but since Monday it's been gorgeous again. So all my bollocks about frenzied end-of-summer mass hysteria was just that, bollocks. But am I repentant? No! Will I desist from writing this drivel? Never!

On Sunday afternoon Jackie brought a couple of friends back to the house, Amy and Tom. Despite what I said above, I'm sure there was something funny in the air at the weekend, because we sat in the living room and talked about nothing in particular, only everything was hilariously funny! We had a good couple of hours of rapid-fire amusing stories flying hither & thither.

The most enduring image I have from that conversation is the story Jackie told us about a woman who came into her pub one evening, sat in the middle of the pub, took off her boots and began to massage her own feet. Which is in itself a bit bizarre. But then Jackie told us that under the boots she was wearing not tights, not socks, but lacy "toe-ettes" that looked like G strings for the feet! (Hm, on re-reading this, I feel something of the magic of the original story has been lost. Oh well, just trust me, it was damn funny at the time.)

That evening we reconvened in the living room to watch Shaun Of The Dead on DVD. What a hilarious film! I felt I could identify with the location (oh so suburban London), the characters (late twenty-somethings) and the plotline (no, not the zombies bit but the I'm-nearly-thirty-where's-my-life-going bit). I highly recommend.

As you will see below, this week's been all about finding work. But before I go into that I'll tell you about some of the fun things I did:

I had another feast of comedy on Tuesday night. I started with Gamarjobat, a Japanese duo who do silent comedy. It was hilarious! Very very good indeed. If they are ever in your part of the world, dear reader, go and see them!

Second I saw the Umbilical Brothers, who (unfortunately for me) do a similar kind of physical comedy, but with commentary. Straight after Gamarjobat they weren't as funny as otherwise I might have found them to be, but there was some very good material there.

Third was Mr Methane, who describes himself as an expert of Controlled Anal Voicing. Need I say more? Well, yes I do: the funniest part of his routine was where he farted a dart from a small blowpipe into a balloon tied to a volunteer's head. Only, as Mr Methane explained, dart farting is a "contact sport"; he had to drop his trousers and insert the tube up his arse, affording the young female volunteer (and indeed the whole audience) a magnificent view of his crack and sack!

On Wednesday night I played badminton again. It is still feeling so good to be back on court after such a long absence! And I'm getting to know a few people in the club now, so it's cool.

Thursday was a return to backpacker form: I spent the afternoon soaking up culture in Melbourne's wonderful National Gallery of Victoria. There is so much there! I'm going to have to "do a British Library" with it and visit several times. This time around I took in their collection of Antiquities (which deftly juxtaposes Egyptian and Aztec statuary, among others) and, after lunch, the Aboriginal modern art section. And on Friday, I went back for even more, soaking up the many delights of their European 16th - 19th century collection.

At lunchtime on Thursday, after an excellent masala dosa on Swanston Street just like the ones I enjoyed so much in Penang, Malaysia, I popped out to a camera shop. Becaue I have an admission to make, folks: I was a silly billy. I foolishly put my water bottle into my rucksack the other night without the lid on properly. By the time I realised my mistake - ie the water was dripping out of the bottom of my bag - my camera case was soaked. And sadly, so was the camera.

I took it out to dry, which has worked for me for waterlogged cameras in the past, but that's one (for me) unforeseen consequence of the move to digital: cameras don't like water any more. So, much saddened, I went to a shop where they confirmed that to repair would cost more than a new one. But thankfully they had exactly the same camera on special, and it was cheaper than what I paid for it back in August in Canada. Still $300 dollars though.

In the evening I met up with Rainnie and her friend Linda the Freaky German (who has been in Sydney for a week or so) and Linda's German friend Claudia for a few beers and a bite to eat. Linda & Claudia are setting off around Australia for three months at the weekend, so it was a preliminary goodbye drinks session. We were at the Grace Darling on Brunswick Street, sitting outside, and for the first time in ages I felt cold. Maybe the weather is turning now after all.

We ate next door to where Linda & Rainnie used to work, at the Cafe El Greco in the casino building. The food was remarkably good: I had veal scaloppini with roast sweet potato and snow peas. Then Rainnie introduced us to vodka shots taken with lemon, coffee grounds and sugar. Kind of weird: you coat one side of the lemon slice in coffee, the other in sugar, neck the vodka, then bite down on the lemon.

We walked back into town after a nice cup of tea, then headed our separate ways home. Although it was cold out, there were lots of people on the streets, and I took a few photos to try to capture the nighttime atmosphere. We'll see how they turn out on the big screen at some stage.

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.