Yeesh! You'd think that at my age I'd have learned to be a bit more sensible about drinking copious amounts. But no, apparently not. My birthday night was wicked and messy - and that's just the bits I can remember! I haven't had blackouts for such a long time! (And I haven't had to chunder because of alcohol since ages ago either!) But it was all good, as they say in these parts.

The day started out much less riotously. I decided to go to Yummy Bread Place (aka Cafe Banter) for toast and butter and coffee. Rainnie joined me there and brought me flowers - what a sweetie! I don't remember anyone buying me flowers before ever. I was moved. But by the time Rainnie turned up I had already worked myself into a bit of a depression, thinking about birthdays past with friends and family, and then getting into morbid thoughts about mortality and the loss of my parents. Rainnie snapped me out of it and we had a lovely walk back to her house.

A surprise awaited us there: Rainnie's friend Liz had driven by with her little daughter Amy, hoping to catch Rainnie in for a cup of tea and a natter. Amy was dressed as Tigger - complete with little Tigger ears - and Rainnie was over the moon to have a chance to play with her. They haven't seen each other in a while. It was really sweet seeing Rainnie gettting all excited about the baby's outfit.

After Liz & Amy went home, we just hung around. I made pasta aglio e olio for lunch, and then we watched Meet The Fockers while I went online to write the previous episode of this wonderful blog. Later on I went home and got ready to go out. Rainnie & I went for dinner at the Argentinean place on Lygon called Inkari, which we discovered the other week and really enjoyed. Jodie met us there. It was bloody cold, and Jodie didn't have a coat with her, so we moved inside for the hot chocolate course. Ah, the Aztec hot chocolate with chilli is amazing!

Earlier in the day Rainnie & I had decided on a few bars we wanted to do, but then Fiona in my house said she would join the three of us for a drink too and suggested a different bar, Rue Bebelon, on Little Lonsdale Street. So off we went (via Jodie's backpacker to pick her up a coat and some more sensible cold weather shoes). It was lovely.

That's when things started to go downhill: Jodie convinced me to share a bottle of white wine with her - never a good idea in my experience, but something self-destructive in me said yes. The evening slid rapidly into an alcohol-induced haze. I remember we headed down to St Kilda to a nightclub to catch up with Toni & Alex, then headed back into town for more beers at the Exford Hotel. My full blackout starts just after Jodie put three Quick Fucks in front of me to lift my spirits, which had slipped momentarily with the realisation that I am a year older again. My consciousness is revealed to me again some hours later, when I recall shovelling bacon & eggs into my face in a most uncouth manner in Jodie's hostel, then dragging myself home at 5am, my steps unsteady and my gait that of a nasty wino bum. Hooray for birthdays!

Needless to say, the day after was poor. I felt like twenty kinds of shit, but felt compelled to drag myself out of bed for breakfast with Rainnie at Yummy Bread. Rainnie was most amused at my state of health - which is only fair, because I remember heartily taking the piss out of her for similar reasons only a week previous - but my second cooked breakfast in twelve hours went some way to reviving me. The rest of the weekend was quiet, shall we say!

And that'll have to do for an update for now. I promise I'll write more soon, but it's hard now that I'm working a lot of the time to find time to hit internet cafes. It will happen though, of that you can be assured.

It's been another busy week for me in Melbourne. Since my last update, I've been to a birthday party, a roast dinner, an Argentinian restaurant, the cinema, the best dumpling house in town, and a fabulous pasta place. And that's just the food highlights! It hasn't even been too much of a drag that I've been ill with a cold this week: instead of playing badminton I've been reading books and taking it easy.

Kate is one of the girls in my house, and it was her 22nd birthday on Saturday. To celebrate, a huge bunch of her mates plus Rainnie, Jodie & I went to a bar off Smith Street called Alya. It was heaving in there! I felt really quite old, looking at all of Kate's mates, because they're all at uni and full of the joys of spring, but I didn't let it worry me unduly. I've had my fun over the years! And I managed to keep up with the younguns here too: we didn't leave until five in the morning.

Saturday, as you can imagine, was a quiet day. And I couldn't party too hard on Saturday night either, because on Sunday I had a job at the Telstra Dome, handing out promotional material for 3 Telecom. They are the major sponsor of Essendon Australian Football Team, who were playing Fremantle that day. It was amusing working there, because I was the team leader for fourteen other traveller types (including Jodie) and I had to be all responsible and stuff. Well, sort of.

On Sunday night I was going to go swimming with Rainnie, but the pool near my house in the City Baths closes bizarrely early on a Sunday. So we went with Plan B, which was to play tennis at some nearby courts, only to discover that they hadn't taken down Rainnie's booking properly and we couldn't play. So we went with Plac C, which was to eat burgers and drink lots of beer at Birra Bella just at the end of my road, where they also do a mean portion of super thin fries and mayonnaise. That evening I finished off Brave New World, which I had borrowed off Kate.

On Monday I went to the cinema with Rainnie. We saw Travellers And Magicians, a Bhutanese film which is kind of a Himalayan road movie with monks and spirits. Really good. Except we got there a bit late, so we had to sit right at the front and the seats were crap. After the cinema we went for food at Tiamo, a place I've walked past loads of times but never gone in. It turns out they have fabulous pasta! The staff all talk Italian - surprise surprise in a town full of Italians - and it tastes like I think it should. Yum! The ambience was cool too. It reminded me of being up an Alp in a ski hut somewhere, with cosy wooden walls and lots of happy people.

I am working out at Port Melbourne at the moment, two days a week for an engineering firm, cold calling small companies to see if they want to buy a machine to stick self-adhesive labels onto bottles. There is a café nearby right on the waterfront which does yummy sandwiches. I was building this really tasty dark rye bread with ham, cheese, tomatoes, egg mayonnaise, guacamole and more ham, when the next customer after me - who was watching avidly as my masterpiece came into being in the hands of the friendly staff - leaned over and said "I'll have one of those!" I was quite pleased with myself.

After work on Tuesday I went to Emily & Chris' house in Altona for a roast dinner. It was SO good! Roast lamb with all the veggies and lots of red wine. This was followed by a dessert of far too many cupcakes. Em had to bake colourful food for her art class, so she was doing cupcakes with outlandish icings. Chris & I accidentally ate lots of them for afters, but it was okay because I baked a second batch for her. It was a lovely evening, full of fun and yummy food.

I was amused to discover that Rizla rolly papers come in different flavours: Chris rolled a very gay-looking cigarette and informed me that it was strawberry flavoured paper. And it was! When I had a puff, the smoke tasted normal but there was a delicate strawberry flavour on my lips afterwards, a bit like one of those lip balms you get at Body Shop.

Chris dropped me back at the station in time to catch the last train at 11.15pm. The air was crisp and cool on my sated body, and I was glad I had some extra layers of clothing handy in my bag - layers are so Melbourne. On the way back into town on the train, I noticed the oil refinery that I could see from Seaholme beach the other week. It was sparkly with its hundreds of mini spotlights, and looked very festive. Pity it's such an eyesore by day.

On Wednesday night I got to talk to my brother & my sister at once! It was a family conference call. Michaela is over visiting Chris in the UK, so when I called him we could all talk. Yippee! It was nice to chat with them both. It ended up turning into a bit of a reminisce about when we were all younger - and just as would have been the case in my childhood, I failed to elicit any sympathy from them for the cold I'm suffering with at the moment. Ah, that's family love!

I went back to the Camy Shanghai Dumpling And Noodle House for lunch. This is a place in Chinatown that was recommended to me by people in the Parks & Recreations department of the City of Melbourne government, where I worked last week and they had a huge power cut just before I got there and I sat at my desk for the whole morning just reading my book because all their computers and phone network were down and they couldn't think of anything productive for me to do because they couldn't do anything themselves either and it was great because we ended up chatting a lot. Anyway, the dumplings are TO DIE FOR. Huge portions, super cheap, really tasty. The Peking steamed pork dumplings taste exactly like little Fleischknödel, which are the big fat steamed pork dumplings from Austria that for a long time were my favourite foodstuff in the whole world. So these Chinese ones are pretty damn good! The same meaty herby yumminess, just wrapped in smaller parcels of dough.

I've just read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It's great (even if the author can't spell traveller). Difficult to summarise, all I can say is it's not sci fi at all, you just have to take the time travelling thing on the chin and then it's a normal love story novel, and really moving.

Right, I've wittered on enough for the time being. I'll tell you all about what I got up to on my birthday in the next instalment!