For 15 years I've played the victim as Barnsley sent me through a rainbow of emotions, the power of my will alone unable to redirect the bounce of the football either away from or towards the goal as per my desire.
I've watched the last embers of games through variegated fingers, or in a screaming, gesticulating half-dance whose symbols I don't pretend to be able to decode. The significant idea here is that, throughout all of the above, I have acted with the utmost seriousness, because I was convinced that what was unfolding before me mattered.
In the past six weeks or so, the games have been drained of significance and emotion - each one is a dead rubber. I have probed my mental apparatus as best I can, and my conclusions are senseless; words vomited into the air and landing in no particular order.
Now an event is about to take place the outcome of which might as well dictate that the sun's gravitational pull will cease to be felt; that the universe will be pricked by a cosmic pin and deflate to the size of an atom.
In the course of the next 24 hours, Bluefish goes into hospital overnight for the first time in her life, and her nerves are already taut. We've known what's coming for weeks now, of course, but understandably, no amount of long-distance reassurance or support can ease her mind.
When you are 12,000 miles away from the person you love, a mere sneeze is interpreted as an earthquake, meaning that a night in hospital is way off anything the Richter scale can report.
As with the other nights of my life that I used to consider were important, I am again reduced to the role of a partisan, terrified observer, waiting for a news bulletin as the faithful await updates on the condition of a sick Pope.
