Suffering post World Cup stress disorder...
I'm pleased to say I'm back, eyes narrowed blinking in the sunlight. Finally it's over. And for many it couldn't have come soon enough.
For those of us locked in our darkened rooms in front of widescreen TVs with relationships temporarily put on hold for a month, the World Cup has presented its fair share of logistical and personal problems - not least how to keep the wife, whose name you may or may not have forgotten, from filing for divorce.
With work sweepstake choices clutched to our hearts and enough chilled lager in the fridge to keep Threshers profits buoyant until the next World Cup, we've had to plan our viewing of games with military-like precision.
Afternoon kick-offs had presented their own particular problems, especially if you are lucky, as I have been, to have a television on all day as part of your job.
Lucky then that redemption comes in the form of a boss who is as particularly entranced with the prospect of the footballing feast that is Saudi Arabia v Tunisia as this particular blogger is!
Like the purest of football trainspotters I had hoped to tick off every televised game as keenly as my younger self slavishly pursued that elusive final sticker for his Panini World Cup album. (Spain '82 my personal favourite, if you were wondering)
However, like my most lofty ambitions, life has a habit of getting in the way - or should I say in this instance, egotistical, cynical, play-acting footballers.
As the World Cup hoved into view I anticipated it as eagerly as a five year-old on Christmas Eve, but with the fulsome realisation that like a yuletide present from your gran, you're never quite sure what you are going to get.
So it was that the first two glorious weeks of Germany 2006 was like being locked in Toys R Us on a 14 day trolley dash. Each glorious game provided the sort of thrills and spills that had office conversations ruminating over whether this really was going to be the greatest World Cup ever.
Well no, it wasn't, but how were we to know when Germany opened the proceedings with a couple of blockbusting, net-stretching screamers - the new official World Cup ball giving goalkeepers sleepless nights as it swerved devilishly in the air.
Those dynamite strikes continued, with Thomas Rosicky, Arsenal's new wizard-like Czech Republic midfielder, the pick of the bunch. Wales will do well to keep him in check (if you pardon the pun) come September's Euro 2008 qualifier.
But like most things in life, all good things come to an end, although a little earlier than one would have hoped or anticipated - and I'm not just talking about England's predictable exit at the quarter finals stages once again.
If footballing talent was equated to an ability take a dive or deceive a referee, then we have most surely seen the greatest tournament in the history of modern day 'football'.
Many games were reduced to non-contact sport, as the slightest touch saw mock-anguished players pirouetting dramatically in the air as if that imaginary sniper secreted away in the stand had successfully hit its mark.
So who's to blame for this machievellian comedy of errors? The players, for perpetuating the deceit? The referees, for failing to deal with it? Or FIFA, for allowing the continued play-acting of cheats to infect the game?
The answer must most surely and sadly be all three. Players knowingly and willingly took dives, referees looked unsure and uninstructed on how to deal with it, while FIFA's gnomic hierarchy trotted out their usual empty platitudes of fairplay without ever stating their desire to address this endemic problem.
That's why, despite the best efforts of the carnival of football fans who made Germany 2006 such a colourful, vibrant and occasionally joyous event, it will surely only be seen for what lurked on its soulless dark side.
That insidious foul play neatly polarised in one shutter frame as the finest purveyor of beautiful football Zinedine Zidane became a beast in the World Cup final in front of a global audience, inexplicably headbutting Italian defender Marco Materrazzi.
How tragic that the greatest artisan had succumbed to the malaise.
Well done then to Italy, they deserved their victory - but how strangely fitting that the team of a country whose national sport is plagued by fraud and corruption should get their hands on the richest prize in sport.
Sometimes, you can't help feeling cheated.