Okay, that last one wasn't very brief. I'll try harder this time. Or maybe not.

Monday was a bit of a quiet one. I had a spot of breakfast with Rebecca and then went online for a while. In the evening I met with Joe & Rachel for yummy Thai food in Dickson and then we went down to Filthy's to have a drink with a friend of Joe's who was up from Melbourne on business. Filthy's was a good deal quieter on this, a Monday night, than it had been on Thursday, Friday (I assume), Saturday or Sunday.

On Tuesday I resumed my sightseeing tour of town, tackling the High Court building, which is fabulous in an unashamedly Brutalist 1970s concrete cathedral kind of way, and the National Library, which had a wonderful exhibition of Australian photography that I feared was going to be the same exhibition I had seen in the Library of New South Wales but was in fact completely different.

That evening I went to the cinema with Rachel. Tuesday is cheap night - only 5 dollars! - so we hit two movies. The first was Million Dollar Baby, which is definitely the most moving film I have ever seen in all my life. I was in floods of tears, as was most of the audience. But I'm not going to say anything about the story, because I don't want to spoil the magic. It's bloody bloody good though, and deserves to win many many Oscars.

We barely had time for a bite to eat between films, but sustenance was required, not to mention rehydration for my tear ducts. The second film was Sideways, which was (thankfully) a much more light-hearted and lovely story which could be summarised as a forty-something Californian road trip with angst and romance. A good antidote to the emotional sledgehammer we'd seen a few hours previous.

Wednesday I spent wandering around the hot, sunny streets of Canberra. I walked over to the Parliament side of the lake and visited the other half of the National Portrait Gallery, the half I was hoping was the good one but which actually was even worse than what I'd already seen last week: just a bunch of black-and-white photos of (presumably) famous Australians, none of which engaged my attention. Oh well.

I found my way to the National Museum of Australia, which is fantastic and full of interesting stuff. In fact I suffered information overload and determined to come back tomorrow for more. My favourite exhibit was video footage from inside a fire engine during the enormous forest fires that hit Canberra's southern suburbs in 2003. I've never seen anything like it: it was daytime but pitch black under apocalyptic clouds of smoke and ash, the road invisible under the transverse coursing of a river of glowing cinders, gum trees spitting hot fury over home after home, a fire engine that itself caught fire.

Thursday was more of the same. After a lie-in (ah, the joys of not working! I must make the most of them before I re-enter the rat race) I headed into town, milled about, went online, and ended up back at the National Museum, this time concentrating on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history.

That evening I headed over to Filthy's (well, it was Thursday) to join Drew and a few mates of his for a drink. I managed to totally miss my stop on the bus, and ended up having to trot fifteen minutes back into town from a godforsaken suburban row of shops. On the plus side, this gave me ample time to admire a fat, juicy harvest moon hanging over the horizon, its full orange face turned to me in a mildly mocking but ultimately kindly way as I negotiated the ill-lit streets of south Canberra.

At the pub, Joe & Jess joined us for a while. The conversation was very high-brow, considering where we were, and turned on European integrationist politics (one of my interlocutors was a Frenchman by the name of Benjamin who works here for IBM) and recent global history. But, needless to say, as the evening wore on, so the topics of conversation descended to a more comfortably Filthy's level. I ended up crashing at Drew's, having spent the latter part of the night chatting with him to two bona fido examples of white trash - let's just say that one of the sisters had a front tooth missing, and she was the pretty one.

Friday was necessarily a quiet one. Or it would have been, had I not managed to lose one of my contact lenses in Drew's flat! I can't remember the last time I lost a lens. It was most galling. So I had to go to the optician to have a check for new ones. Lots of annoyance factor. Plus, I managed to be extremely stupid in the afternoon: I decided to walk barefoot to Joe's office to collect his house key because I had a blister on my toe that was rubbing on my shoe, but ended up with massive blisters all over the soles of my feet owing to the extremely high temperature of the pavement - hardly a surprise given how sunny and hot it was. I don't need to ever walk on hot coals now; I've been there and done that.

I met Dave and a few of his friends for beers after work in an Irish pub in town. It was great to catch up with Dave again, and nice to meet some of his work colleagues and old uni friends. I must say, working for the Defence Department here sounds like a bit of a breeze! I'm tempted to get myself a Civil Service job; it could be a good way to ease myself back into working life.

Joe, Jess & I went for a couple of drinks in a stylish lounge bar called Trinity that evening. It was sort of a yin & yang thing, I guess, to balance Canberra's Beautiful People with the Filthy's Folk of other nights. Trinity is also owned by Nick, the owner of Filthy's, and I can't think of two more diametrically opposed watering holes. Both are fabulous in their own way. Trinity reminds me of the trendier bars in Leamington Spa - I'm thinking Voodoo or Bar Cuba (for the cognoscenti who may be reading these lines) - whereas Filthy's is more like a Hog's Head or even a Cov Arms, but better than either of those.

We headed home, and I ended up watching the second half of a bizarre Russian post-Soviet gangster-children-on-the-run movie on telly before hitting the hay.

I've just had a corker of a weekend! It's left me with great memories but also a sore head, so this is going to be a bit briefer than other entries.

On Thursday I left Dave's house (Dave had a busy weekend ahead of him) and went to stay with Joe, a mate from my Uni days. I haven't seen Joe for some years now, because he left the UK for a job in Canberra while I was still working. It has been great to catch up, and to meet all the fantastic friends he has made here.

Joe was at work, so I had another day of tourism: I visited the excellent War Memorial museum, which very successfully brings home to its visitors the full horrors of all the wars Australia has been involved in - very depressing actually - and then I had a gentle walk up to the top of Mount Ainslee, which overlooks Canberra from the north-east and is absolutely heaving with kangaroos. Yes, folks, I have now seen kangas in the wild. And in the not-so-wild: judging by the evidence of my own eyes, they have no qualms about foraging for food on the streets of the suburb of Ainslee, including right outside Joe's house!

Canberra really is a welcoming place, with very friendly locals! Joe took me to a nearby pub where we ate very good schnitzel (although I scared people around me by asking for jam with mine instead of mushroom sauce - but who are they to tell me, an Austrian, how to eat schnitzel?) and met up with Rachel, another Pom living in Canberra and a lovely lively straight-talking girl who had me in fits of laughter.

The three of us then drove down to Kingston, slightly south of the centre of town, and I was introduced to Filthy McFadden's, a truly memorable Irish pub. Memorable in a funny way: I got so pissed that I couldn't really remember much about the place at all! Joe tells me this is a normal reaction to the charms of Filthy's for first-time visitors to Canberra.

But it must have been a good night, because I ended up leaving around 4am and crashing at the nearby house of a good friend of Joe's called Matthew (also normal for Joe's mates who visit, apparently). He is a very entertaining and interesting guy, and a fixture at Filthy's by all accounts, and I seem to remember having deep conversations about all sorts of things with him. I also met Nick, the owner of Filthy's, and a bunch of other folk, but individual recollections are very hazy and have coalesced into a happy alcohol-infused cloud.

Friday was a bit of a wipeout, as a consequence of waking up around midday feeling like twenty kinds of shit. (Still, I shouldn't complain: Matthew had to go to work that morning.) I managed to crawl into town (okay actually it was a bus that took me, but whatever) and grab Joe's keys off him at work. After a shower and a change of clothes - it was way too hot to be wearing jeans in the day - I went to the Old Parliament House and the National Portrait Gallery that is housed there. A bit crap, really. One or two pictures were engaging but the majority were very flat, I feel.

In the evening, I met Joe's girlfriend Jess, a local and lovely with it, and we went to have dinner with Rachel and another friend, Drew. The food was good but slow in coming. Luckily we had lots of beer to entertain us while we waited. After a couple of drinks in the very loungey cocktail bar called Hippo we called it a night and headed home to Joe's.

Saturday was a fabulous day, jam-packed with action and entertainment. Joe & I drove with Drew to pick up Drew's motor boat, and then we headed down to the coast at Batemans Bay to do a spot of wakeboarding. We met Jess there, along with a friend of hers called Helen and a friend of Drew's called Jackie from Melbourne. The six of us bought provisions (well actually it was exclusively beer, but whatever) and then hit the water. We went upriver to avoid the worst of the jellyfish, but there were still plenty of big scary yellow tentacular nasties in the water. Luckily nobody got stung.

The last time I tried wakeboarding was in South Africa, and after failing again and again I was rewarded with the sorest hands of my life. This time was much better. I even almost managed to get up on the board, albeit for less than a second. But I could sense what I need to do next time. The other guys were successful to varying degrees, but Drew was far & away the best on the board. He was doing jumps and spins and all sorts.

We drove back to Canberra just as it started raining a bit. It had been cloudy all day, but the sun was still strong enough to make my tan a shade darker. After a few hours of chilling out time (the boarding was knackering) Joe, Jess & I headed back to Filthy's. Once again it turned into a huge night. I ended up crashing at Nick the bar owner's this time. Not content with imposing on his hospitality, I then imposed on his sleep time by chatting with him for two hours until 7am - the first time I've been up till daylight in quite a while.

On Sunday, shock horror, it was raining. This broke the pattern of sunny, cloudy, sunny, cloudy days I've had in Canberra. But it wasn't actually horrible; in fact it was really quite pleasant. My sore head was not assailed by harsh rays of sunlight; instead it was gently caressed by the light shower. I caught up with Matthew for a spot of late breakfast, and was about to head back to Joe's when we made the foolish mistake of going to Filthy's to use the toilets (the coffee shop where we had breakfast was not furnished with a public convenience). Before we knew it we had had beers pressed into our hands by Nick and a Scottish guy who lives in Canberra.

Well, that was that. The rest of the day I didn't move from the pub, except for half an hour where we all popped into the pub next door for a spot of karaoke. It was one of those sublime Sunday all-day pub days that you just have to savour. Later on I got to know a girl called Rebecca, who is a primary school teacher, and crashed at her place. Another night of dirty stop-out-hood. This is habit forming. So I had truly been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle that is Kingston and especially Filthy's. It was as Joe had predicted. But I'm not complaining!