Ahem. Oops. Another month has passed. Better get down to it:

September - a month of contrasts. It started on a high note and ended on a sick note. But first things first...

So I was in Riga! Great place! So beautiful, so varied, so tasty. All sorts of beers, insane fried lumps of rye bread, one of the best rums I've ever tasted (okay it wasn't Latvian but Venezuelan). Sun, wind, rain. German friends, English friends, Spanish friends.

I arrived at lunchtime on the Friday - which was just early enough for me to overlap with my good friends Peter & Bernd for a few hours before they flew back to Munich. We did the Art Nouveau quarter in glorious sunshine and finished on a few well-earned beers before driving out to the airport.

There I met Lorna off her plane from Düsseldorf just as I said goodbye to the boys. Lorna & I proceeded to have a delightful weekend - and I even had the warm, glowing feeling of being able to show her around a bit, rather than both of us milling about like, well, freshly arrived tourists!

We walked, we ate, we drank, we walked some more. It's a very walkable city - and our hotel was right in the centre, on the very edge of the the Old Town. On the Friday the highlight was probably the Hangover Bar (no, it's really called that). Or rather, the fact that we survived a) long enough into the night for it to seem like a good idea to go to a bar with a name like that, and b) the nasty nasty drink they served us there: some uber dodgy local spirit that tasted uber yuk!

On Saturday we spent most of the day wandering from café to café, starting in town with an innocent orange-juice stop in a Cuban bar that became a free tasting of Metusalén 23-year-old rum - "a thing of beauty", as our barman so rightly described it. The rest of the day we were in the Art Nouveau district again, whiling away the day in a delightful daze of cafés and beers. Even the rain couldn't dampen our spirits: it made the cobbled streets all the more bijou to photograph.

On Sunday we ventured out to Jurmala, a small seaside resort just a short train ride away. It was fresh but very sunny - yay! We opted to take a boat back to Riga. It was fresh and not at all sunny - shiver! Back in town, we treated ourselves to a slap-up meal in a posh restaurant, then had a few more drinks here and there, ending the night in a Kiwi (no, really!) bar and heading to our hotel at three.

Lorna had to fly home on Monday morning, but I had most of the day still in Riga. Which gave me time to catch up with my friend Juan from Andalucía, who was also in town (why was EVERYONE in Riga???) and with whom I had another few beers round and about before heading off to the airport.

It was a short week in Munich - just time for dinner at Béné's with Ivo & Rüdiger and lunch with Dan & Wendy and drinks with Remco & Ben - before I headed off once more, this time for a weekend in Berlin with Bernd. Bloody bloody Lufthansa decided to strike, so I had to catch a train there on the Friday evening and didn't get in until midnight - but Bernd met me and we still went out for drinks. It's that kind of city.

Saturday was a day of shopping, drinking & eating. Hooray! Not having got in until 8am, Sunday was necessarily a bit of a short one, but I had time for a big breakfast (at 4pm) before my flight back to Munich. There, I headed straight to the Nockherberg beergarden to catch up with Michaela, the boys, and Russ & his parents. After one there, we headed back to mine for manzanilla and whisky (in separate glasses!).

The next week was a week of choir rehearsals for our concert at the end of the month. I felt increasingly ill, but managed to drag myself out to visit Marie with Béné just before she moved away to Zurich with her job. On the Saturday night I was Diane's 50th birthday surprise, dressing up as Frank'n'Furter and doing a mini-striptease in the Brazilian restaurant where Michaela, Jackie & Diane were eating. We then went round the corner to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show - which has been shown at the Lichtspiel cinema in an unbroken run of over 30 YEARS!

My health was pretty much bobbing along the bottom by now. Another bout of bronchitis - and this after having been ill essentially since July. But I had to pull myself together for the following weekend, because I had Dietmar & Dirk from Leipzig staying for the opening weekend of the Oktoberfest!! We had great fun at the Oktobfearfest Party on Friday night, a quiet one recovering on the Saturday, with dinner in town with Christian and drinks with Norbert, then more fun in the sun all day on Sunday at the Fest, first in the beergarden of the Bräurosl tent, then on various rides, then in the Bräurosl with LOTS of friends...

As soon as Dietmar & Dirk went home, my body collapsed. I was properly, PROPERLY ill that week. I didn't budge all weekend, even though Béné had loads of friends down from Amsterdam. It pained me greatly - but it did me a world of good, after what had been a hectic five months, to just lie still for a bit. And it meant that when Lorna came for the weekend the following Friday, I had the energy to spend the day with her at the Fest on the Sunday, at a table with Christoph in the Schottenhamel like last year.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: that was in October! More on that month in my next blog, peeps.