I'll level with you all.

I'm a sweaty, large framed individual who last saw daylight when the pizza man dropped the dinner off at the front gate because he thought Rufus would tear him apart. The fact that Rufus couldn't tear off a healthy fart without dislocating his arthritic left rear leg is neither here nor there and has very little to do with what I have to say to you today.

The fact is, without Dockerland to keep me company over Yuletide, I was looking down the barrel of another lonely Christmas relieved only by the sight of a turkey cooling off in the kitchen sink and a couple of leg hams sweating it out, like me, under the ceiling fan in front of the cricket. It wasn't looking too good, as you can imagine.

To say, then, that I wandered in a wilderness for many days and even more nights might stretch the truth a little, then... you now know that the wilderness, for me, is the far end of the hallway where that lightglobe blew back in 96 or 97 and you can hear, if you stand very still and hold your sweatglands tight, the ragged uneven breath of Something Else. I tells ya, that hallway is a dark and dangerous place and anyone who wants to return to the wild can slope off down there and have a look at something that is no country for old men,

 but I digress.

The last few weeks have exerted a toll, fellow Dockerlanders. I have visited the depths of my sorrow. I even cleaned it while I was there... and, I gotta say, I'll be easing up on the pickles and relish next Christmas after that lot. Either that, or pay someone to come in and clean the... anyway,

I have toiled under the unforgiving sun of the wilderness. I have faced the wild beasts of the field, I have drunk the sweet nectar that only the lost can know when the dew falls on the morning grass and I have stumbled, lost, bleeding, hurt, hungry and alone, at the edge of endurance, the last ragged scraps of humanity hanging from me like a Prime Minister with a disappearing majority until, at last, feet bleeding and sores weeping, I came banging on the door of the Dockerland Inn, desperate for succour.

How sweet, then, that immense wash of relief when Dockerland engulfed me in her massive bosom once again and squeezed me into those billowing depths until I thought my ears had been rubbed off my head and the last breath in my body had followed them into the valley of death but I was home once again... home where it all makes sense if you've got your face buried in it.

Dockerland's back. We're back. I can't wait. And, Shane... I'll keep it to footy. No worries. Did I mention the footy... oh, bugger.

next time, then.