One by one my fellow voyagers gave Morpheus a decent boot to the castanets and rose to join me in the land of the wakeful. I sung the praises of our quarters’ shower – a mighty contraption of consistent heat and flow. Soon they had all washed, both individually and in pairs, and off we went, cleansed and rested, ready for a newly minted Victorian day. First stop was breakfast, in a nearby Smith Street joint called Alimentari.

As regular readers will know, I am not a fella given over to too much hyperbole – ‘there goes Mansfield’, they no doubt say, ‘stating things mildly and thoughtfully again’. So when I write that this establishment served up the greatest eggs I have ever eaten, you’ll know that this is not idle exaggeration. They were, I cannot stress this enough, dang good eggs.

A Gay Arctic Monkey then led The Associated Press and Chatham House Rules across to Carlton Park for a swift constitutional, while The Eagle an I returned to the abode, eager to catch up with our old buddy Jon Snow and gaze in rapt wonder at Lena Heady’s masterfully jutting chin.

At twelve noon the others returned and we were picked up by the cousin of Chatham HR, a fine fellow with a curious Iraqi-Canadian-Australian accent who had come to ferry us out to the far-flung Melbourne suburbs for a veritable House Rules reunion. En route we stopped at the largest offie I’ve yet seen, where this good gentleman insisted on purchasing half a hundredweight in Australian beer for the team, an act which placed him firmly in the best of our books.

Once at the bungalow of Chatham’s aged aunt and uncle we were thrown into a cacophony of Assyrian, Arabic and occasional Australian, and we were ushered onto comfy chairs and endless drinks were placed into well-shook hands.

Food came and the spread was a good one, cold mezes and hummus and a spectacularly tasty cheese/spinach/bread dip concoction which we very much enjoyed.

“Thank you all so much, that was just delightful!” I proclaimed munificently, to much laughter and general hilarity.

Chatham HR’s uncle, an old fella with an apparently infinite capacity for fine Scotch whisky, began to mock me with his nephew in chuckling Assyrian (I’m not much of a linguist, but I know when I’m being mocked in any number of languages, from Afrikaans to Zande). “What’s the jest, CHR?” I enquired.

“Hahaha, habibi, he says that they haven’t even begun!”

Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw it. I saw the horror. Out from the kitchen came sailing a petrifying series of the most gargantuan dishes imaginable, each more formidable than the last. Even The Eagle, a seasoned trencherman with hollow bones and a metabolism which power a medium-to-large nuclear reactor, visibly blanched.

“My word!” exclaimed The Associated Press, “and you eat like this every day do you?”

This foolishness received an even louder laugh, and I was the centroidal clown of proceedings no longer.

And then, in earnest, the eating began. We had been told by Chatham HR that his sainted aunt would be most insulted if we did not give a good showing; but also that she would not be satisfied, no matter how much we managed to consume. So-briefed, we culinary Sisyphuses tackled the piles of spiced chicken, rice, peas, lamb (minced and chopped), stuffed peppers, stuffed vines, more rice, more lamb and so on.

The more we ate, the larger the remainder became. Fear now entered our faces, sweat beading on brows. The fare was uniformly exquisite, but the portions were terrifying – it was too much, we were being summarily and incontrovertibly defeated by our lunch!

At that moment, the cavalry, thank goodness, arrived. News of Chatham’s arrival had spread, and expatriate Iraqi second cousin after expatriate Iraqi second cousin had arrived to pay homage. While each of them helped themselves to a perfectly normal plate of food, rather than the Texas-sized portions forced upon us, little by little we began to make progress. Finally, we felt that the dents made in the godly offerings were sufficient and that we could do no more. As one we dropped forks and knives and threw in the figurative and literal (paper) towel.

Our efforts had not gone unnoticed.

“She says you’ve barely eaten anything,” noted Chatham HR.

“Ah.” I looked around. The Associated Press was comforting a sobbing, Gay Arctic Monkey and The Eagle had passed out upon his plate. “Ah.” I repeated. There was little else to say.

“Also, we’ve got five minutes at most before dessert arrives.”

“Ah…dessert. Lordy be, should we make a run for it?”

“We can’t, I have more cousins coming.”

“More?!”

“Yep.”

“But what are we to do then?”

“Eat my aunt’s baklava, I’m guessing.”

“Oooooh! I like baklava!”

I took from my waist my stretched, protesting belt and lobbed it out a nearby, open window. “Let it begin!” I cried, as syrupy damnation descended. “We go again, my friends! Again, I say!”

*

That evening we were, as you might have already guessed, quite a sleepy bunch.

However, we had but two more nights in Melbourne and we had barely painted the town a soft peach, let alone the scarlets and reds for which we usually aimed. Thus, we forced ourselves up and out of the house and popped over to neighbouring Fitzroy and a swanky bar called ‘Naked on the Roof’ or ‘Naked for Satan’ or some rot like that.

The décor was questionable, but the night-time views over all of Melbourne were really rather wondrous. Together we gazed out at the city lights, nursing schooners of fancy beer and pretending that we did not secretly long for our beds. A nice enough spot, all-told, despite its silly name and ‘ambitious’ pricing strategy.

The next morning we woke a little later before wandering into town – via, of course, yet another ten out of ten coffee shop. A Gay Arctic Monkey – one of four GAMs, by the bye, who sprung to brief prominence in the city of Cardiff, several years back, through the performing of their “homosexually-inflected indie rock” (sic) – had found us that most dreadful and questionable of things: a free walking tour. It was to this cruel fate we trudged, coffees in hand, through the chilly streets of Victoria’s premier city.

After entertaining a sizable crowd outside the State Library of Victoria with some over-sized speed-chess (I lost to a GAM, as is my custom), we bit the bullet and joined the multicultural throng following a local lass in a lurid green t-shirt throughout the centre of ‘historic’ Melbourne. Yes, of course she had a septum piercing – I mean, you scarcely had to ask…

Overall, despite my cask-strength cynicism, it was pretty good – though my worst fears did look to be realised when the guide paused her tour after three minutes to point out a white van pulling a ‘hook turn’, whereby – hold the front page – the driver turned right from a left-hand lane.

“If this is the general standard of tour content, one can readily see why it’s free!” I quipped.

“Shut up, Mansfield,” suggested a GAM, and I did as bid, albeit temporarily.

As suggested above, things did indeed improve – almost to the extent that we continued on with the second half of the tour, off towards the ‘art laneways’ outside the city centre. However, we bid our farewells halfway through, tipped our guide generously (there is no such thing as a genuinely ‘free’ tour…unless you’re verging towards the ‘tight-fisted baaaarstard’ end of the ‘good bloke spectrum’) then retraced our steps one hundred yards or so.

Here we bundled into the ‘Empress of China’ (a well-recommended Chinese restaurant, not a fancy Han lady with expensive clothes). Chatham House Rules, you see, had had dumplings on his mighty mind for a good while now, and he simply would not be denied a moment longer.

The fare was cheap and delicious, and the fine waitress ladies were even good enough to permit our cracking open of a good few offie-purchased beers to wash it all down. Thus sated, we wandered our own way through the rest of town, up to Melbourne’s rather splendid botanical gardens.

The Eagle, a famously noble bird, found a kindred spirit in a large, friendly black swan, and Chatham HR fell asleep on a park bench with a level of nobility and class few others could hope to emulate. Even when one of Australia’s curious, colourful birds favoured his shoulder with a serviceable amount of crusty guano, he kept his poise and sanguinity, simply muttering that it augured good fortune to come.

Sadly, this was not the case – for a combination of sub-par tips and questionable map-reading meant that The Associated Press took us uphill and down Chapel Street for quite some time, our eventual reward being only a bog-standard Irish pub serving bog-standard Aussie lager.

A GAM, natural centurion that he is, then took matters into his own, Welsh hands. He had heard tell of a good Fitzroy bar which served $4 pizzas, and he wished to investigate. Hailing a cab, he marched us all in, throwing our previously laid plans and schemes from the moving taxi windows.

Up and across town in ‘the Bimbo Deluxe’ (please don’t blame me, dear reader, I don’t create these ‘zany’ names), where the beer was clearly priced to subsidise the frankly absurd value of the pizza, an epic and spectacularly low-quality series of pool commenced. As a quintet, our group has many a talent: one of us holds a PhD from Cambridge; one speaks numerous, complex tongues with fluency; and one has been on television, both network and cable, on multiple occasions*. Pool, however, and bar games in general, simply ain’t amongst them.

[*Yes, yes, these are all Chatham HR – but the point still stands…]

That being said, when a couple of locals came to challenge us for control of the table, The Eagle and The Associated Press rose to the occasion manfully and veritably smashed them off the felt, missing nary a ball. When you comes at the kings, as they say, you’d best not miss.

Josh the Giant, he of the MCG and the mighty Tiges, then joined us and furnished the group with further pitchers of the good stuff. I, by this point however, was starting to feel ‘the pace’. Noticing upstairs by the bathrooms that there was a quieter little snug, replete with soft sofas, I thought it best to sit down and attempt to clear my foggy head.

My eyes snapped back open perhaps an hour later. “Damn,” I damned. “Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!”

‘The boys,’ I thought, ‘will make mock of me. They will assume I had spent the past hour on the porcelain and that my blameless digestive tract is actually that of an African bull elephant, and not a well one neither!’

However, when I returned to the now teeming downstairs area of the bar, my companions were nowhere to be seen.

‘I can’t blame them,’ I reflected. ‘Not really – the ‘no man left behind’ rule can surely be waived when a fellow has seemingly been fifty plus minutes atop the Iron Throne.’

I staggered outside and was immediately heralded by a GAM, standing outside a cocktail bar, not twenty yards from the (sigh) Bimbo Deluxe.

“There you are yer pissed idiot!” he yelled. “You got lost trying to sneak off home early didn’t you?”

“Er…yes?”

“It’s that way,” noted The Eagle, adding in a few expletives at my expense which demeaned him and his ancient house.

“I say, The Eagle old man…”

Just then The Associated Press emerged, his eyes wide in panic, his white knuckles grasping a tray of what I am reliably informed were ‘expresso martinis’.

“Wow. How much did that set you back, The AP?” asked Chatham HR.

“I… I…” he stammered, a freshly broken man.

The others, cruel and callous when knee-deep in their cups, turned their scorn upon him, and I slunk away into the night, towards Collingwood, home and bed.

In short, my friends, the scores had come in. They read, ‘Melbourne 1 – a jetlagged Mansfield 0’.