NEVER GO TO AUGSBURG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! At least, not without kevlar boots on! The place is overrun with manic moggies who will pounce on unsuspecting visitors and attempt to tear them to shreds, feet first.

Well, that's what happened to me when I went to visit my friends Matthias & Stefan anyway. Their cat was a paragon of feline pride all evening, occasionally walking up to us at the dinner table and showing off a glorious coat of long auburn fur. Then, when I got up to have a pee in the middle of the night (it had been a lot of red wine - and the lasagne was divine!), the little piece of shit jumped on my bare left foot and, screeching, proceeded to draw blood in a variety of painful ways.

It wasn't until Stefan came running from his bedroom that the beast desisted. I was standing paraylsed in the middle of the living room, not so much out of fear as out of a complete inability to decide what course of action to take: I was in someone else's house and it was someone else's pet, which ruled out killing the monster; but a less-than-mortal counterattack would, I reasoned, be worse for me, because the creature's talons were already very much in my flesh, and a sudden attempt by me to remove the cat would only lead to deeper wounds in the human.

As it is, I ended up with about a dozen long, deep scratches along the top of my foot, and half a dozen more across the ankles. The little bastard. And - in an ironic twist on the gory pawprints that appeared one night on our verandah in the Philippines - I discovered I'd left a series of crimson footprints across the parquet floor. I just didn't realise I was bleeding that much until Stefan pressed a bottle of antiseptic spray into my hand.

Still, the whole thing makes an excellent story - and believe me, I'm going to milk it!

In other news, it's 2008 folks!! So I saw the New Year in on a motorway bridge. We had a great view in towards the centre of town, where all sorts of fireworks were going off, and we had a few of our own to fire into the chilly night sky. And champers, of course. The glasses got so cold they froze to the handrail of the bridge!

I was with Christian and a bunch of his friends, the usual crowd from the Kloster pub up the road from my flat, to eat copious amounts of cheese fondue and to wash said dairy delight down with a bottle or seven of wine: Edith & Chris (our hosts), Sabine (Edith's sister), and a few others whose names escape me for the minute. We were, after all, very, veery drunk at the time...

And, apart from that, I've managed to fall off my bike AGAIN - TWICE! I've never actually slipped over on black ice before. In a funny way, it was almost enjoyable. It reminded me a little of my big car accident back in Kenilworth - was it 1999? - in the slow inevitability of the fall once I realised I was losing control. Anyway, I gave up in the end after falling twice in less than a minute, left my bike at home, and got the tram to work instead. But it's milder now again, hurrah, and blues skies too.

Right, that'll do. Just a quick update this time. Tarrah for now!