Pchuh!!! Fat lot of good it did me to stay at home quietly. The bloody lump on my bum just got bigger and bigger! I went back to the surgeon on Friday after my week at home, only to be told that I'd have to go to hospital for an operation after all! And, to add insult to injury, I had to bring my own blood samples to the blood testing clinic that very afternoon, because their driver had already left for the day and I had to have the operation on Monday.

Which left me a weekend of "freedom" to worry about my first-ever in-patient experience in a hospital, with all its associations for me of the last months of my mum's life and general anxieties about MRSA and Christ knows what (okay, so I'm a drama queen, but I really don't give a toss: it's who I am).

Thankfully though, this last weekend happened to be the first weekend of the Oktoberfest. And I couldn't resist the temptation to head over for a few litres of tasty beer, especially as Richard & Paul were in town from New York and I had other friends over from Augsburg, not forgetting that Oliver had friends down from Berlin who I'd met when we were both there for the street festival a few months ago. I just about fitted in my Lederhosen, even with a grotesquely inflated left butt cheek, and the beer was quite a good pain killer...

The hospital experience was a good deal less awful than I had imagined. (That's the good thing about pessimism: if you're expecting the worst, reality is almost always pleasantly better.) The worst part was pitching up at 7.30 in the morning having not eaten or drunk anything since midnight (at the behest of the surgeon lady), only to be told that as the op wasn't until 3pm I could have eaten and drunk until 7! But the pre-op drugs dulled the hunger nicely and - contrary to my pessimistic assumptions - I turn out not to belong to that minority of people who, whilst completely paralysed by anasthaetics and unable to scream, are conscious throughout their operation and feel the pain of every twist of the surgeon's knife.

The rest of the hospital experience was a reasonably anodyne combination of a naff, squeaky & uncomfortable bed, huge German portions of acceptable food, extended periods of reading (thankfully there was no telly in my room), a string of visitors to cheer me up throughout the afternoons, and a few very enlightening chats with my roommate Lasoud, a Tunisian chap roughly my age who is married to a German and came to Germany two years ago to live with her.

For example, I was horrified to discover that for his full-time job in a distribution centre for a large drugstore chain, lugging 500kg containers around between juggernauts, he earns a grand total of just 600 euros a month! Suddenly my temp wages at the EPO seemed generous. But, what's worse, he's not eligible for an apprenticeship to learn any sort of trade in Germany, simply because he is over 25. That's crazy! How can a country refuse to help people who want to improve themselves just because they're not kids any more? Surely people in their 30s are more likely to know what they want to achieve - and to stick at it until they do.

I was allowed to leave hospital on Thursday with a big bandage on my arse, the tube that was draining the last of the fluid out of my haematoma having been pulled out of my leg on Wednesday. But I was told that the chances of the empty sac in my buttock refilling were high and that consequently there was a likelihood of needing further drainage of some sort. The partial refilling has indeed happened; I go back to the surgeon lady tomorrow to decide what to do next.

It's getting ever so slightly boring hanging around at home now, even if (or perhaps because) the weather has been warm and sunny again recently. But this weekend just gone I had more visitors to take my mind off my own terrible suffering (how does one make irony more obvious, I wonder? because I don't think my self-mocking really came across just then): Jamie & Claire flew over from Glasgow for a few days.

They brought with them an American friend of theirs called Chris. It was his first trip to mainland Europe, and I am happy to say that he enjoyed every minute of it. He proved to be very stimulated by the sight of thousands of girls in Dirndl dresses at the Oktoberfest! To be fair to him, there were some extremely good-looking girls there. In particular, on the Sunday night there was a group of Icelandic chicks who were blonder and fairer than anyone I've ever seen.

So at last I've updated my blog with the events of the last few weeks. How, you may ask, can it be that I haven't found the time to do this until today, when I've been off work for almost three weeks now? The answer, I'm afraid, is that I have turned to an old addiction: I've been wasting hours of my life playing Civilisations on my PC.

I thought I'd finally kicked the habit - one that started when I was the tender age of 17 - by travelling around the world and not having a computer to play on. And the good year-and-a-bit that I've owned a PC here in Munich I've managed to stay on the straight & narrow. But when Pascale, Pepe, Edu & Mari Trini were here a few weeks ago, Edu brought me a copy of Civ III and, in light of having hours of free time and having been told by the doctors to move as little as possible, I have now succumbed to its tender, sedentary pleasures.

In my defence, I won't have time to play when I'm back at work. So let's just hope that my bum gets better soon.