This is what I get for being away from the internet for more than five minutes

I am Gabriel, the messenger, the teller of astonishing truths. Now I am dying, my temperature soaring, my hands and memory tremoring: perhaps I should be held accountable for everything I say.

Gabriel, in Sonya Hartnett's Surrender


I get home early from work. That's what happens when 80% of my students - in a class of five - don't do the required reading. At least they got a kick of reading Jas H. Duke poems.

Then instead of doing my usual thing of getting straight onto the net to check my messages and forums, I decide to put the dishes away.

I follow that up by making a peanut butter sandwich, and putting on an episode of Rocko's Modern Life - trying my hardest here to be ahead of the 1990s revival curve.

I eventually log on. Emails. Tweets. Even phone calls. People (apparently) refreshing the blog looking for news. For the second time this year, things have gone off tap - and Scott Munn is forced to concede that this is the second time an offer has been made by South. Well, that was certainly news to me.

After the attempt to do whatever it was with the Central Coast Mariners (here and here), it appears that we've lined up another target, this one closer to home, and kicked off the South Melbourne Heart rumours again. And you also have the rumour, as seen on soccer-forum, that we're calling up up every A-League franchise on the fringe of real or imagined imminent disaster trying to buy our way in.

It begs the question - why not just try and buy our own way in, as ourselves? Anyway, for those waiting by their keyboards, the scuttlebutt that I'd heard – not from a committee member, mind – was that South was going to 'go for the jugular'. And let's be honest here - we'd all heard that phrase too many times before.

Well, maybe not exactly that phrase, but re-entry to the top flight was always something that was sought by our supporters. A hope occasionally dangled in front of us by the club, by fringe parts of the media, and even occasionally by the FFA. But mostly by ourselves, wallowing in our hubris and sense of entitlement.

It's strange how in the company of some, you can not only find such statements as plausible, but also as tangible, almost done. And then in the company of others, you can only laugh at the audacity of hope that people at this club still cling to.

But beneath this veneer of objectivity and stoicism, I'm just as likely to get swept up in the ludicrous moments that this game, this Australian game, and our club, our Australian club, provides on an equally ludicrously frequent basis.

So much so that I write the most heinous sentence in any of the at present over 1400 entries on this blog. It helps that Steve from Broady has only started writing recently here I suppose.

And then my internet breaks down, again, and I find myself in an early 90s technological silence. No way of dealing with cacophonous forum fallout, at least for a little while.

Before that happened. I managed to get one or tweets in, an email dealing with other correspondence. But the majority of this was done the old fashioned way, on an eight year old computer with no internet access. And the thoughts on the matter that I have had for quite some time still ring true.

South Melbourne as South Melbourne, playing in blue and white. No more compromises, no more lies. We are who we are, and the rest can take it or leave it.

And maybe a special section in the ground for those of us who stuck it out in the bad times, guaranteed for life. Did I mention our famous sense of entitlement? LOL!