Right, this has got totally out of hand. I've been rushing around doing five thousand things and not finding the time to write about any of them. So here, in very brief, is what I've been up to for the last month:

I went skiing in Arctic Finland, near a town called Ruka, with Ruth & Andy and their friends Julian & Carol & their 11 year old son Rupert. We had a lovely log cabin just for us, which was toasty warm and amazigly well insulated - a good thing because it was down to -25°C at night and crept up only as high as -15°C during the day.

On the plus side, the walk up to the skiing hill was scenic, across a frozen lake and through bizarre landscapes of twisted trees that were coated in so many layers of snow & ice it was impossible to tell what kind of tree they were. And I had a nice teacher who was very amusing as well as thorough and good at motivating the group.

On the minus side, it's pretty damn flat in the Arctic, and there really wasn't much skiing to be had. Also, the food was generally bad (one exception being a delicious smoked reindeer and peach pizza and another exception being these übersized donuts coated in sugar and cinnamon). Also, the beer was generally expensive and shite - get this: they pre-pour them in the bars, then hand you a beer when you pay for it! - with the exception of Lapin Kulta, which can hold its head up with many a Euro lager.

We had quiet evenings that revolved around us taking turns to cook (we'd done a massive shop on our first night in a supermarket on teh edge of town) and then playing this cool game where you each write a famous person's name on a bit of paper, then these go in a bucket, then you work in teams to play three rounds against the clock: the first round you have to describe who it is without saying the name; the second round you're only allowed to say two words to describe the person on the bit of paper (but everyone's heard them described in the first round already, so it's a bit easier); and the third round is charades-esque miming of names.

There was a sauna in the house, which we used with glee to ease our aching bones. But sadly, this being a houseload of English people, we offended the sauna gods by not being butt naked. We did however try to please the sauna gods by actually running out into the front garden and throwing ourselves into the snow to cool off. Mad? Yes.

Enough about Finland (there were plenty of anecdotes, but I really should have written them down sooner).

So next stop was Guildford for packing and time with nieces. I stayed there two days and then flew back to Munich, laden down with some of the many belongings I had retrieved from my flat in Leam.

Back in Munich I began to feel angst at suddenly having so much stuff again after three years of living pretty much out of a rucksack. It will take time to become reacquainted with my wardrobe.

The highlight of the next few days was a curry with Lisa the boys' kindergarten teacher and friends followed by Brokeback Mountain at the English language cinema followed by drinks with Lise from the EPO and friends (quite by chance, they were sat in the same row as us in the cinema). The girls were blubbing all the way through the film, but unusually for me I was completely tearless. It was a sad film but somehow not a tear-jerker.

I had my first official visitor from the UK at the weekend: Gareth who I used to work with arrived late on Friday and we had a quiet evening at home because the next morning we were catching the train to St Johann im Pongau for another weekend of skiing. Because of the recent huge snowfalls, the skiing was glorious, with fantastic deep snow all over the place. We met Michaela, Tim & the boys down there at Frau Schnell's Pension and had a jolly good time of things.

On the train on the way back, Gareth & I treated ourselves to a slap-up Hungarian meal (well, it WAS the EuroCity train from Budapest to Munich, after all). This made up for the hunger we had to endure from St Johann until Salzburg - not even a snack trolley!

Monday was dedicated to aimless wandering around town, the highlight of which was the moving Alice (a broadband company with a most attractive blonde woman as their slogan) advertising in the Hauptbahnhof: at first we thought they were robot hoardings, operating on some sort of infrared camera in the base, but soon we realised that the hoardings were just too good at creeping up behind people. That's when we saw there was a couple of guys controlling them remotely from an upstairs ledge. Most amusing!!