During an international break, especially a long one like this, and especially when Celtic have dropped a lot of points, gone out of Europe or something else has gone badly wrong, it can sometimes be difficult to know what to say and what to write.
There are times when you wonder whether you are simply finding a million different ways to make the same basic point.
There has been a bit of that during this international break.
And I am grateful to every person who has stuck with me while I have tried to find different ways of saying that this is a badly run football club.
There are things I will not do simply to get hits or manufacture content.
I will not regurgitate every rumour and every piece of gossip. I do not particularly like doing the same stories as everybody else about who is injured, who is not, who is away with his country and who is not, unless it illuminates something I was already trying to say.
I will not get every article right.
I will not hit the mark every single time.
Paulina, who is writing two pieces a day now, will not hit the mark with every single piece either. But we try, and we work hard.
And there are desperate measures neither of us is willing to resort to.
Other Celtic sites do their own thing during periods like this. Some of them do not change their approach at all. They will continue to write any story with a Celtic connection, and that is a perfectly valid way to operate, even when there is very little real news around.
They are not inventing things. They are not going out there and writing the most horrendous rubbish simply because traffic is harder to come by.
The mainstream media, on the other hand, appears willing to go much further.
And to be fair, they are not bad at finding creative angles.
The problem is that some of those angles are so peripheral to Celtic that I would not touch them with a 24-foot pole, and no serious Celtic sites would either.
Some of these are just the plain weird ones.
And yesterday we got one of those.
Yesterday was the day The Daily Record decided to tell us that Martin O’Neill will be Celtic manager for the next two years and that, after him, we will hire a “grizzled veteran” as our next boss.
This did not come from a former Celtic player, as so many of these bizarre managerial and transfer stories do. Frank McAvennie did not come up with this one, and everyone knows how absurd I find some of the things which come out of his mouth.
No, this was so far off the deep end that I genuinely could not believe a national newspaper had run it.
These were the predictions of a celebrity psychic.
I want you to ponder that for a moment.
We are now in the realm of the fantastical.
Right now, everybody is sitting around waiting on real news. A lot of us have concluded by now that it simply is not going to come.
We are waiting on the announcement that O’Neill has decided to step down, or that the club has relieved him of his responsibilities, or that suddenly there is a new manager waiting in the wings.
We are waiting on the beep from the phone. The notification. The message that tells us something big has happened at Celtic.
And as time goes by, it becomes less and less likely that we are going to receive it.
I said at the start of the week that I am resigned now to the likelihood that O’Neill will be in the dugout when Celtic play again.
But this psychic nonsense is not a substitute for that.
It is not a news story.
It is not really a story in any discernible sense.
It is the bottom of the barrel being scraped, followed by the cracking sound as whatever was scraping it breaks through the wood and starts shovelling up the dirt underneath.
That is where we are now.
This is fantastical fictional nonsense masquerading as a Celtic managerial story.
Of all the possible sources of information on which we might base any judgement about what happens next during this international break, this is surely the least impressive imaginable.
And frankly, I think I am doing it far more justice than it deserves by including it even in that category.
There is pressure on everybody in this business to do things that might make them feel a little queasy.
Any time I write another transfer story, it makes my teeth itch.
But sometimes those stories matter.
Sometimes they tell us something about what Celtic might be trying to do. Sometimes they tell us something about what is happening behind the scenes. Sometimes even a rumour can be useful if it illuminates a wider point about the way the club operates.
I wrote about Paulo Bernardo yesterday, for example.
That was not really a story about Bernardo leaving on loan.
It was about why Celtic signed him in the first place, why those reasons still do not make a great deal of sense, and why so much about this club’s recruitment remains incoherent.
That is a story.
It tells us something about Celtic.
It tells us something about how this club works.
I could write nonsense all day if I wanted to.
I could write fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden stories until midnight and come back tomorrow morning to write another dozen.
I am simply not prepared to do it.
There has to be some tone of seriousness about what we do here, especially at a time when there is so much about Celtic that deserves to be taken seriously.
Yes, we may repeat ourselves sometimes.
Yes, we may occasionally miss the mark.
Yes, there will be articles which work better than others.
But there are certain things I am not going to do simply because it is a slow news day.
And if somebody is sitting in a newsroom turning the predictions of a celebrity psychic into a Celtic managerial story, then perhaps they should take a look in the mirror and ask themselves exactly what business they are in.
News?
Fiction?
Or fantastical nonsense?
Because the last two fit this story far better than the word journalism ever could.
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