The first week's a holiday. That's how long I and my companion and confidant Mitchell allowed ourselves to adjust to the climate, gather a bit of local geography, and let the Aussie sun start to strip some of the reflective lustre from our Colgate-white skins. We'd done the holidaymaker stuff, seen the sights and taken photographs, eaten some kangaroos, spent time on the beach and gotten a generous dose of the Pacific Ocean lodged in our sinuses. Five out of seven nights we had gotten crunked up, and whatever our reputations might be that is not an average week for either of us. We have known since before we left England that we are going to have to work to make it around this country. We've been looking forward to earning some AUD, and it's gonna be healthy for Mitch and me to have a little independence from each other in our schedules. After our adventure in the Blue Mountains we had another few nights with our suburban Sydney hosts, and we were going to make the most of the peace and quiet and the Internet access to write our CVs and look for some work. I mean, not right away, obviously. We could still afford a day for a picnic in the Botanical Gardens.

This was where I saw the benefit of Mitchell's habit of spending more time talking to people on Facebook with his iPod than he does talking to me with his mouth. He had arranged a lovely day out with strangers, known to us only through the Australian Working Holiday group. We met up with Beth, Anne and Craig on the steps of the opera house and the five of us made the short walk from there to a quiet patch of grass just far enough away from the harbour that we couldn't accidentally throw our ball into it. We were soon joined by three German lads we had met at the Wakeup hostel, and a couple of friends they'd made since we left. I'd invested in a litre of sunscreen from Coles (the Australian equivalent of Tesco. They still have Woolworth's over here, but it's more like a mashup of Sainsbury's and Morrison's, with Big W taking the role of the old British style Woolies. You can find an Aldi in most towns, too, and we're holding out hope of coming across a Lidl before we leave New South Wales), and since the Blue Mountains had taught me that a big woolly dreadlock tam is not proper headgear for any kind of physical exercise, it was only the factor thirty between my delicate Englishman's forehead and the savage southern sun, so I had it lathered on so thick it was opaque. This picnic day has been the third hottest of my trip so far. Christmas day was an even greater challenge, but it was New Year's Eve that finally finally defeated me; towards the early evening it felt like being grilled. No sooner had I finished slapping the cream on my feet that I had to start again on my face. I'm not even exaggerating. NYE I finally had to seek the shade of a nearby building. I'm not proud of it, but I certainly wasn't the only one.

I'll get to 'Chrissy' and New Year in more detail shortly. Up to then we'd made steps towards living sensibly in Australia. After leaving our gracious hosts in the suburbs we were hosteling it back up, just down the street from where we started, in a place called YHA Sydney Central. We'd written our CVs (or resumes, as we need to get used to calling them) and earned our Responsible Service of Alcohol certificates, necessary for any kind of bar or licensed restaurant work in Australia, and fired off a few emails to potential employers. We still hadn't completely let ourselves down from holiday mode. We've hit most of the major beaches in Sydney, and were making frequent use of our hostel's rooftop pool and sauna. "Rooftop pool and sauna?" I hear you cry! Well, from the website I was expecting some piano shaped swimming bath with springboards, and bikini girls lounging on sunbeds overlooking the central Sydney skyline. I had perhaps expected too much from a backpacker's hostel, but it was probably enough to make the workers above in the high rise offices hate us a little bit.

We'd been taking it gently since our return from Katoomba. We'd watch a film at night in the hostel's cinema or one of the TV rooms, or splash out on an hour's Internet time. We'd sup a refreshing few nips of goon and lemonade to help us get to sleep. I can't go any further in this story without explaining the phenomenon that it goon. All the backpackers know what goon is, and we've found certain hostels it's banned in for the trouble it supposedly causes. It comes in boxes of between two and five litres, in red or white varieties, and goes down well with a drop of traditional cloudy lemonade, but it's not called wine because about as many grapes go into making it as into the average DVD player. It's made of milk and eggs and nuts and fish and I'm not making any of this up. Nowhere on the box will you find printed the word wine; it's labelled as 'crisp dry white' or 'soft fruity red' and at eleven dollars for four litres there's been only four nights of drinking so far where we weren't drinking goon. The third of these four nights was Christmas Eve.

We met up with Cpt. Paul, one of the regular Pitcher and Piano barflies, who was on holiday in and all around Australia with three other of Derby's most notorious buccaneers. We met him in Scubar underneath our hostel for a pizza and a jug of Toohey's New. From there we hit the Sidebar underneath the Wakeup where it was a good deal louder and busier. For whatever reason, my mojo wasn't brimming over that evening. Not unhappy, but a little quiet. Paul said he had the remedy for that, and it was in the form of one measure of a magical fluid known as chartreuse. It's green and French and dangerous strong. It's similar to Absinthe but much more pleasant to shoot down. Sixty seconds later I was on the dancefloor, shaking my thang like I was trying to dislodge a lamprey. We tore it up in a club on George Street for a while, but we had to return to Scubar for the prize draw. While we were enjoying our pizzas a staff member had come round and given us all raffle tickets. It was free to enter and there was a prize bonanza, including a sweet surfboard that had my name all over it. When we'd gotten back to Scubar at about half eleven someone else came round and gave another set of raffle tickets to all four of us (we'd picked up Simon, another Derby swashbuckler, at some point through the night). Paul and Simon agreed that this surfboard and me were meant for each other, and since they had no use for it in the East Midlands they kindly donated their tickets to me. At midnight we waited expectantly for the draw. As well as the surfboard, the prize was two hundred dollars worth of surf lessons, ten nights' accommodation in any Australian YHA, three nights' car hire, a skydive, a shark dive, a 4x4 self-drive tour around Fraser Island and a bag full of hats and t-shirts and s*** all worth almost a grand and a half, so you can imagine I was pretty happy that I was about to win all this. The winning number was called out. Alas, as you might guess, I didn't really win.

Mitch did.

My boy got whisked off to the stage for photographs and handshakes. He was told to collect all his gains on Boxing Day, and when he came back we had fresh jugs of beer and snakebite by way of congratulations. We danced a little more. We drank a lot more, with renewed vigour and a new sense of celebration. Then Paul bought me my second shot of chartreuse and I had to go to bed.

Bondi Beach is where the backpackers and orphans spend Christmas Day. And it's unlike any Christmas day I've ever had in England. It's the first one I've ever been away from my family, for one thing. Also, when you're diving through the breaking heads of six foot waves in seawater as clear as what comes out of the tap, it's amazing how quick a hangover disappears. Snacking on our ham sandwiches it was hard to believe it was Christmas at all. Our multicultural, multilingual conglomeration had bagged ourselves some prime territory over at the southern corner of Bondi. Beth and Anne from the park were celebrating with us, as well as our new good friend Andrea, a French newcomer called Cynthia and a group of French, Canadian and Swiss chaps who had somehow strolled a great big coolbox of beer past the guards who sat at every entrance checking everyone's bag to make sure nobody brought any glass or alcohol onto the beach.

What we desperately needed was a Christmas tree, and increased German representation in our party. Luckily, both were only a phonecall away, in the form of our friends from back in the Wakeup, who had bought their own Tannenbaum from a nearby Coles and set it up right in the centre of the beach. They were hammered on goon, and enjoying lots of attention from festive revelers who wanted their photos taken with the tree. However many people wanted a piece of the action while they were stationed on the sand, it was nothing compared to the adulation we received when Mitchell took it upon himself to relocate the tree to our camp, and him and myself and the four rightful owners of the tree marched in a procession along the shore, the prosthetic Christmas tree borne aloft like a trophy. Nobody could get in a photo with it without us cramming ourselves into the frame too. By the end of the day our faces were saved on the camera memory cards of a thousand strangers across New South Wales. We were bawling and boisterous and most of us were drunk, disturbing the peace, tramping through sunbathers' camps as if they appreciated us being there. A lot of the English regard Germans abroad as pests. I think it's because they don't appreciate how similar we are.

The next day we were told that our Christmas tree antics had made Sky News internationally, though this claim later turned out to be apocryphal. To wind down from all the Bondi fun Mitch and I, our roommate James, and Andrea from two paragraphs ago decided to make full use of YHA's kitchen and have a proper Christmas dinner. We tripped out to Woolworth's for stuffing mix and gravy and veg and hit the bottleshop for plenty of goon (one major difference in Australia is that the supermarkets don't stock booze). There are no ovens in hostel kitchens, so just as the veg was nearing completion we divided ourselves into a base-camp team to watch the vegetables and a fast moving strike squad to grab a couple of cooked chickens from the closest supermarket. This was the best we have eaten in a hostel so far, and the best we expect to eat in a hostel ever again, frankly. In the evening we all sat down to watch How to Train Your Dragon in the hostel's cinema, and afterwards us three gooned-up males toured up and down the floors to the various TV rooms to bother whoever was sat in them, sometimes to the point where they'd leave, embarrassing Andrea - who doesn't drink - to mortification.

The last day of 2010 seems like a fine place to end this chapter. Hungover from the night before (the fourth and final occasion so far we have been drunk on something other than lab-manufactured fish wine), a party consisting of myself, Mitch, James and an ultra-tan Frenchman named Sab we had met on one of what became regular goon-cruises of the communal areas of the YHA jumped in a taxi at midday and set off to Thornton Park, which is where Andrea and the German Christmas tree brigade happened to be spending the day. Our taxi driver, it turned out, knew as much about the layout of Sydney as we did, and after failing to flog us some unregulated, pharmacy-strength Red Bull smuggled in from Thailand he dutifully dropped us off somewhere on the wrong side of the harbour, practically underneath the bridge. In a stroke of luck, a short wander brought us to a patch of grass with perfect views of the action, a great pick of where to sit, and convenient toilet facilities. Armed with four litres of crisp dry white to a man, and plenty of traditional cloudy lemonade to lengthen it with, we set about making friends with our neighbours (who regretfully turned out to be mostly Brummies). My recollection of the day grows hazy as time wore on and the bags of goon gradually emptied. Being unprepared for a swim in the harbour didn't stop any of us from diving in the second the police patrols had moved on, nor did an eerie and unavoidable school of jellyfish that a reassuringly Australian merrymaker assured us weren't dangerous. I stripped down to my boxer shorts to dry off, for some period of time that recent photo analysis suggests was longer than I remember and included a leisurely stroll around the ritzy residential estate we were in. After nightfall I laid down on all our bags for a cozy nap. I got woken up, with five minutes to go, in the company of a foxy blonde that I stole a kiss from at midnight (and whose surprised squeek I like to think conveyed less-than-absolute revulsion). Mitch was wearing a banana costume I'm pretty sure he didn't bring with him. The fireworks rocked, and the walk back over the bridge smelled fantastic.

This has been a fast-paced update, I know, but I've had a lot of lost time to catch up on and it's been a hell of a busy fortnight. Next week's should be a little more reflective.

I wish all of you a joyous and successful 2011. Make it a year for going after the things you want, without trepidation or hesitation. And I hope you all had half as much fun this holiday season as I did. Okay maybe more than half, but you better not have had more fun than me. I didn't come right the way around the world for that.