It's been a while since I posted an update. But fear not! I am still alive, and still loving Melbourne. This city rocks! I've been online in the last couple of weeks, just not blogging. Instead, I've finally uploaded stacks of my photos from here and from my holiday in Malaysia. Please enjoy them. They hopefully give some sense of the amount of fun I've been having in recent months!

Probably the most exciting thing I've done since my last update was something I've been meaning to do ever since I got to Melbourne all those months ago. I finally went to see a game of Australian Rules Football - or Footie, as the locals prefer to call it! It was one of the culminating games of the season, and I went on a spur of the moment decision because I read in that day's paper that an extra allocation of tickets were being made available, because the stadium (the historic MCG) is being expanded for the Commonwealth Games and literally tiers of seats are being put in on a weekly basis.

The game was confusing to begin with - the only exposure I've had to footie was when I watched ten minutes of a game on the telly in my house with my housemate Spotti, who usefully is a very serious footie player (he nearly played at national level a year ago) and was able to explain some of the myriad rules to me - but I soon got the hang of the more obvious details. And it was a corker of a game: the Sydney Swans and the St Kilda Saints were very evenly matched for the first three quarters, but in the fourth quarter the Swans just stepped it up about seven gears and were unstoppable. I was surrounded by Swans fans, so the atmosphere was amazing. A capacity crowd, and lots of excitement on the pitch. This is what live sporting events are about.

I am such a silly billy sometimes! The other day I was changing my bedsheets and I thought that perhaps it was time to turn my mattress over. And when I did, I discovered that my mattress only has one way up. Yup, I'd been sleeping on it upside down! No wonder it had been a bit uncomfortable ever since I built the bloody thing; and there was me thinking it was just because it was a cheap bed from Ikea.

There's a sex shop on the main shopping street in Melbourne, Swanston Street, that I walked past every day on my way to work. They have a big advert outside which shows a young couple in a cosy snuggle, their happy faces filling the billboard. And then I was on yahoo.com the other day, and the self-same image of this smiling couple was being used to advertise an online dating website! Fancy that.

Flinders Street station is Melbourne's main railway hub - at least for now; the other big station in the city, Spencer Street, is being refurbished for the Commonwealth Games, but won't be ready in time ha ha - and it is reminiscent of London's Victorian railway piles. It is a long stretch of red & yellow brick splendour along the northern bank of the Yarra River, and its main entrance is on the corner of Flinders Street and Swanston Street, Melbourne's main shopping thoroughfare.

A traditional meeting place in town is "under the clocks", which refers to the row of clock faces that hang below the art deco entrance sign to Flinders Street station, and here it is that I met Em on Tuesday night to go to Footscray and eat Ethiopian food. Wow! How delicious was it? Once again, I headed to Cafe Lalibela (where I'd been with the folk from Great Engineering that time) and once again it was a right royal feast.

After food we went for a few drinks and shot some pool in a nearby hostelry. Em used to live in Footscray when she was younger, and it was interesting to see her walk down memory lane in this inner suburb with its not-very-exciting shopping precinct and generally shabby buildings. I imagine I would feel the same walking down some of the streets in Harrow. At the pub (which happily served James Squires pilsner on tap) I equalled my personal best of potting four balls in a row - but it was a very small table. Then I headed home whilst Em headed to her home, on the train heading the other way.

The other day I actually slipped - on a banana skin! No, really! I was walking along with Fiona to go to a Melbourne University lecture with her (it was a very good talk by one of Australia's High Court judges) and on the way there I totally failed to spot the banana skin lying in my path. Fiona was even more relieved than I that I didn't hurt myself too much when I fell, because she said she would never have been able to move me!

In other news, I've been working in the City again for the first time in a while. It's a data crunching job for a mortgage company. Foolishly, I was so efficient in the first two days that I did the whole week's work. If I'd known that was all they were expecting, I might have gone a tad slower. But they gave me the impression there was more to it. Oh well, I filled another couple of days there doing filing, shirfting archive boxes and designing some report or other for their new IT system.

What else? Oh yeah, I went down to St Kilda the other night for the first time in ages. Nea suggested we have dinner at Wagamama, down near the beach, and I can never resist noodles so I readily agreed. Then we had a drink at the Prince of Wales, before heading back into the city on a tram and spending the rest of the night at Cherry Bar - where I also haven't been for ages.

It was so cool!!! Not many people (well, it was a Wednesday) but the music was fab! The DJ - a long-haired metaller type by the name of Yuri - had one of those faces that it's just a pleasure to watch: he had such an honest, open smile, and then he was pulling crazy faces whilst playing air guitar to dodgy 80s rock anthems. And the beers were going down very well. I ended up hanging around until three in the morning - on a school night! - and even went so far as to have a kebab on the way home. Great.

At the weekend I went with Em up into vineyard country. Em had the use of a friend's big comfy car, so I suggested we do a trip out of the city. The weather was frightful in the morning, but by the time we got going after lunch it was sunny and nice. We managed to fit in five vineyards in the afternoon, and had dinner in Healesville before driving home.