I'm sitting at my PC, taking careful mouthfuls from my vegetable soup that's just off the hob, and thinking "what happened to summer?" It's officially bloody freezing in Munich right now. This is something of a change from last week, where I was still sunbathing on the Isar and taking a refreshing dip in its cool waters. I think I would die of hypothermia now with just one glance at the gravel bank I lay on last Wednesday!

So, in a vain attempt to warm up my fingers, I shall now recount some of what I've already been up to in September. Phew! It's turning out to be a busy little month, this one!

My dear old aunty Mary passed away at the end of August, and - not having anything cumbersome like a job weighing down on my time - I booked myself some last-minute flights to London so I could be at the funeral. After all, she was the last of my dad's siblings, and I don't think there will be another chance like that to see a good selection of my cousins in one room.

I made a long weekend of it and finally found time to catch up with friends of mine in the UK who I haven't seen in years & years. It was a fabulous weekend actually! Here it is in brief:

Reach Munich airport Saturday morning - chat with my mate Holger who works for Lufthansa - arrive at Heathrow - tea with Jeremy & Tanya - drinks with Memet - breakfast with Memet - lunch with Gareth from primary school - drink with Pratik from high school - dinner with J&T - breakfast with J&T - lunch with Sam & the girls - drinks with Kat, Rainnie's friend who I met in the Philippines - dinner with Simon, Hester & Poppy - breakfast on my own (!) - lunch with Chris & Kate & the girls - finger food at the funeral buffet - drinks with cousin Jim in town - dinner with J&T - breakfast with Sanjeev from high school - lunch with Justin - fly back to Munich on Wednesday afternoon.

My movements were somewhat splatter-gun-like across the London metropolitan area, but for some reason I really didn't mind all the training & tubing it everywhere. I think, because the whole trip came about suddenly without forward planning any of it, I just got stuck in and enjoyed myself. The weather was so-so - but who cares when you're indoors eating & drinking? I haven't dashed about like that in quite a while, so perhaps I just enjoyed falling back into my peripatetic rhythm of old.

Only one thing marred an otherwise delightful long weekend: I managed to lose my favourite baseball cap in the Underground. It must have worked its way out of the pocket of my jacket whilst that was slung through the shoulder strap of my leather manbag. This event was particularly annoying as I'd had one of those prescient moments about an hour before, where I became aware of my cap rubbing against my leg and thought "I should really put that in my bag" but then decided not to because it was still raining and I was about to be outdoors again. Dammit!

I got back from the airport just in time to head straight back out again, to the first choir rehearsal after our summer break. We left for our four-day trip to Thuringia (the region adjoining Bavaria to the north, and the holiday destination de choix in the former East Germany (because, let's face it, they weren't really allowed to go anywhere else). The trip was a little hard on the spine & legs, with a big ol' bus journey to get there & back, but otherwise it was a lot of fun.

Thuringia is much prettier than I was expecting. There's loads of forest everywhere, so the air is very fresh. And the towns there had the mixed blessing of being left absolutely untouched during the years of Communism, and therefore being capable of massive restoration in the years since, with the result that they have risen again to become sparkling jewels of mediaeval urban splendour. Erfurt in particular pleased me enough to want to go back there for a weekend at some point, but Weimar (more famous thanks to its connections with Goethe, German literature's Shakespeare) is also delightful.

And the food was fab too! Thuringian sausages are famed, and rightly so. They're spicy like Cumberlands and they taste three-dimensional. At least, that's how I tried to describe it to someone in the choir. You know how some foods just taste flat & tired, and leave your mouth wondering what just happened? Well, Thüringer Bratwurst are the opposite of that.

The sausages were most memorably advertised in pictorial form just below a huge sign for an erotic superstore. Somehow the word "Erotik" underlined by a fat German sausage tickled me!

Our local guide, Egon, was a bit of a windbag but he had some entertaining stories and bons mots. One of the local slang terms he shared with us refers to the newly ubiquitous wind turbines as Miefquirlen - literally "pong mixers" - and another has masseurs rendered as Fettschieber - "flab sliders".

I could have done with a portable pong mixer when I was walking down a pleasant cobbled pedestrian street in Weimar with Martin, another tenor in the choir, only to be greeted by a local man pushing his bicycle along beside us. Because the greeting came in the form of one of the longest, juiciest farts I've heard in a long time! And then he had the gall to look at us with a scowl!!

And then, in a bizarre follow-on incident, I was walking to my place in the Church of the Heart of Jesus (where we gave our concert in Weimar) when a soprano in her middle years, shall we say, walked past me and tootled twice with her sphincter - which, let me tell you, echoed admirably in the delicate acoustic of the Catholic church in which we found ourselves!

Besides Weimar and Erfurt, we also visited Arnstadt & its Bach church there, we went to Eisenach & its Bach museum (which has been recently re-done and is now kitted out with iPods & headphones to explain various aspects of his music), and we had a tour of the nearby Wartburg, Germany's foremost castle/palace that has been continuously added to since the 12th century & has been a museum since the time of Goethe, some 200 years ago.

So all in all a busy weekend, not just activity-wise but also weather-wise: we left Munich on Thursday morning in bright sunshine and temperatures in the high 20s, and then suffered a lurch into single-digit territory on Friday night, returning to a cold windy rainy Munich on Sunday evening. Yuk. Ah well, perhaps the summer has drawn to a close. Bring on the snow!