Bohemian Football Club Crest

@bfcdublin Ken Farrelly is struggling with his conscience. He's gone on holidays to Thailand during the season ...

I’ve just checked the thermometer and it says 30 degrees. The sun is splitting the rocks outside, I’ve just come back from the beach after a quick swim to cool off and was lying back relaxing on the couch when it started again.

These home thoughts from abroad, to borrow another man's words, will not leave me alone. Over here, nobody knows, but inside it’s like a guilty secret I carry with me. I’ve gone on holidays during the season.

 I knew when I booked the flights what I was doing. The season was already four games old when I did it. It was a last minute thing, booked on the Tuesday after the Dundalk game and gone 12 hours after the Galway debacle.

Sitting on an Asia-bound plane trying to rub from my mind the memory of another Galway defeat. How do they keep doing it to us?

But,  half way through the 12 hours, I realised that at the start of the year I’d have settled for seven points from the first four games, because I wasn’t sure we’d have played any games at all.

But we have, and that game still hurts, never mind that game at the back end last year.

And so on to Richmond Park for some of us, and for some of us Thailand. I’m not going to say I wish I wasn’t here, but I will say I’d like to have been at the Pat's game.

Football is about emotion. It’s about experiencing something that you cannot generate alone. The highs and lows, frustration and jubilation, fear and excitement, and at the end of it all in the great scheme of things it really doesn’t matter, but that’s not how it feels at the time.

All things are relative; a goal four minutes from time when we’re three up can be enjoyed but not felt like an injury time equaliser away from home.

A penalty save when we’re two down might not mean a lot, but away from home and ravaged by injuries going into added time with a team that we thought we might not even have up to a month or so ago, a penalty save when it’s scoreless is like having the gates of heaven thrust open and all its glory felt for a brief moment.

Well, maybe it’s not quite like that, but because I wasn’t there it’s a perverse form of punishment to magnify the feeling I would have felt if I had been. The football part of me telling the rest, ‘You fool.’

 Not many things concentrate the mind quite like a last minute penalty when it could alter the game. For a brief time, reality is suspended, real life cares and worries slip away and emotion takes over. Fear or excitement depending on if it’s our peno or theirs.

To score or save for a time becomes all-important. And yet I gave it all up to be here.

I suppose I’ll have to abide by the old saying, ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.’ For me, that means lying on the beach for the next couple of hours. I have to say it’s not a bad day when your biggest concern is not to get sunburnt.

Like my sister's little twins say, We de Bohs.