Spent the morning wandering around the old cemetery. It’s a lovely one, with lots of ivy and trees and some fabulous family tombs in various styles, lined up like rows of kooky little old closed-up houses on grassy lanes. Franz Kafka is buried in the Jewish cemetery, but I’m not a worshipper of Kafka, and by the time I’d walked around the Christian cemetery I’d had enough of the dead, however picturesque their resting places, so I didn’t visit his grave. Walking around the cemetery I was bothered by morbid thoughts about how I’ll face the deaths of loved ones when they happen, and how I’ll face my own. I’m not very brave about the idea of dying. I wish I had a certain belief in an afterlife. It would be a comfort, and if you were wrong, you’d never know.

There’s a shopping mall next door to the cemetery. I wander around looking for warm clothes, as the weather is starting to get cold. Nothing really appeals, and it’s all kind of expensive for what it is. I stop at a cafe for a hot chocolate. Expecting the usual sweetened cocoa-like drink, I’m utterly unprepared for the decadent beast of semi-liquid sin they put in front of me, which appears to be a melted block of chocolate mixed with just a little milk. I drink 1/3 of it and spending about a week’s ration of willpower leave the rest. Last thing I see of it it’s slouching off in the direction of Bethlehem, while I slouch off in search of sundries like razors and hand cream that I forgot to bring with me.

Downstairs, a couple of Israeli girls are selling a kind of fancy nail buffer at a stand. One of them insists on demonstrating it on one of my nails. I’ve seen this product before, at a stand just like this one, in some other place, where there were also two Israeli girls. The one buffing my nail even looks familiar. Surely it wasn’t her last time?

The buffer does a good job, but if I want to waste time I can think of more entertaining ways to do it than sitting around buffing my nails. The girl says her friend travels a lot and lives in different places.

“It’s the best,” says the traveller girl, but she doesn’t sound entirely sure. I’m not entirely sure either. I can’t think of any place where I really feel at home - not even in Melbourne, much as I love parts of it and appreciate many things about it. Bangkok takes all comers and never assaults you with cold weather, and I did feel at home there for a while, but that’s starting to fade - though I suspect I’ll be happy to get back. In Britain and Europe I always feel like I’m looking through a window into a familiar-looking house that I don’t have the key to. America is an entirely foreign country. I’d actually like to feel at home somewhere, but I don’t know how to go about it.

The exotic can quickly become commonplace. Prague’s lovely streets are starting to feel as familiar and unremarkable as Bangkok’s high rises and grubby terrace houses. This always seems to happen to me in places overseas. Oddly, the only place that has the ability to constantly seem strange and interesting to me is Melbourne. Maybe that in itself is some kind of crazy arse-backwards sense of home.