And there’s a river of consequences that flow from those miserable life moments. A river that rises and falls in our memory as we pass down through the years.

The way while we’re staring through the steam of our tea, at the ice cubes of a drink, or into the waning flames of a winter fire; the way our important failures return to flood the fields of our mind.

And the way it can take years to make sense of them. Decades to corral the swirling confusion of a moment gone wrong, to lasso the deficiency and finally surmise the error, to see the event through wiser eyes…

And I go back unintentionally, and of my own volition, back to a few of them episodes dear reader, to evoke the power and beauty and importance of those occasions.

And the way I was there again in one of them losing change rooms the other day. While I was down sitting on Belmore Road eating a nice cake at Icky Sticky, I went time travelling, back to a cold and lonely far-away Argentina below-the-grandstand change-room.

And I remember well the cavernous emptiness of not quite getting where I wanted to get to, remember well the dripping-tap silence of that losing room. And the way there’s a great melancholy to be found in cold, tiled rooms such as that - and I know we all gotta feel them there rooms. Know we gotta feel the sad, icy misery of such a space in order to truly appreciate the delirious warmth of the other room, the one down the corridor with the cheers and beers…

And the way I remember learning important things about me and people and stuff in them lonely made-too- many-mistake rooms. The way the truth and humility and humble-pie taste of them places often comes rising up from the deep to meet me again. 

And because I went to that Argentina room, I went on to New Zealand, to another nonfulfilment. Another weeping, songless room.

But there, in the wretchedness of that hour, in the clench of that monumental woe, I found a brotherhood that for me, is as potent as any winning suite I have been.

In there I found how collective suffering makes for a lasting unity. And so goes the beautiful lesson of defeat.

And so it goes. Goodnight.