I've got a month to tell you all about, and it goes a - NO, HANG ON, there must be a more original way to start a blog. Even if it is exactly true again. Because, sad to say, I've been away from my dear readers for too long. So long, in fact, that the whole of September remains to be written about.

Please forgive my crapness. There has been quite a bit of turmoil in my life these last few weeks, most notably due to the Oktoberfest (about which more later) and my recent house move, which has entailed a curbing of internet access at home and - coupled with a recent (hopefully freakish and one-off) rise in work levels - a consequent failure to be blogging much.

Aaaanyway, getting back to the point, September was lots of fun:

The weather was generally much nicer than in August, so I could go on lots of bike rides alone or with friends. Munich is very much focused on bicycles. The bike path network is tremendous (with barely a major road in the city sans cycle path accompaniment) and there is just so much to do on a bike. Foremost among the two-wheeled destinations are several beer gardens set in pleasant forests or riverside locations which you just can't get to easily by car.

My mate Tom is an avid cyclist, and he took me on a monster 30km tour of three beer gardens to the south of the city right at the beginning of September. It's something we've done a few times since. I've also been out to beer gardens on bikeback with Harry, often in combination with scrummy food. And I've gone off cycling down the banks of the Isar all on my own, just for the hell of it.

It's so easy to reach the edge of town and to go beyond it. Lovely. It reminds me of getting on a bike in our village in Austria and just cycling out into the forest. There are paths, true, but there's hardly anyone on them, especially once you leave the central areas of the city like the Flaucher beach (the river was put in a concrete straitjacket in the '60s to avoid flooding, but now they've built a huge reservoir upstream they're renaturalising the riverbed, so it's all nice with gravel and trees and beaches and nature and stuff).

I caught up with my Canadian friend Andrew who lives in California and who was in town for a conference. He was chuffed to get away from the tourist centres (I took him to places you just don't reach if you're on your own in a new town).

In a cultural highlight, I went to see the new Almodóvar film in Spanish with German subtitles with Lorna, in a cinema I never even knew existed but which is slap bang in the middle of town.

My house move was exhausting but I was ably assisted by Michaela, Matthias and Harry. I managed to borrow a trolley thing off my mate Andy and so we could wheel all my belongings around the corner from my old place to the new. It's a bloody nuisance that there's no lift in the new place, but then again it's a load cheaper so I can't really complain. And it's good for me anyway.

Oktoberfest, ah Oktoberfest! What can I say? It's a world of its own. Contrary to popular belief - and arguably common sense, given the name - this world-famous beer festival takes place in the second half of September (technically, it ends the first weekend of October) and attracts pissheads from all over the globe. It's insanely big and simply defies description. Part funfair, part food market, part booze binge, part cultural museum, all good!

And of course, I was morally obliged to go along as much as possible. Well, it was an excuse to crack out the Lederhosen! In the end, I found myself at the Wies'n (as it's known in Bavarian) a total of ten times, and consumed something like 30 litres of beer. This is nothing short of heroic.

The main joy of being there is the fact that you strike up conversations with absolute strangers, just because they're sat at the same trestle table as you. In fact, purists would argue that's the whole point of the Fest. Yeah, you go with friends, but it's the "new" friends you meet that make the event special, even if it's clear on both sides that you'll probably never meet again.

I had two sets of guests staying with me for the Oktoberfest. For the middle (or "Italian" because so many head up from beyond the Alps) weekend, I was host to Jamie & Claire, who flew over from Paris on Friday night, drank beer all day Saturday, we went walking in the hills on Sunday with Tom, and then we had Weisswurst breakfast on Monday before they went back to the airport.

For the last weekend I had Wolfie and his mate Schorsch up from Aulendorf. Oh my God. Carnage. Total carnage. Memories of dragging Wolfie out of the Underground train by the foot. A haze has descended over the second half of September. An effect which was compounded by the obligatory post-Wies'n 'flu; well it stands to reason, doesn't it? all those germs from all those tourists.

I think I'm going to leave September there. I could write so much more; regale you with tales of drunken stupor; bore you with the ins and outs of my private life (oo er missus!); list the beer gardens I've had the pleasure to visit, and their associated breweries. But no. Some mystery must remain, else no-one will bother to come and visit me.