NICK Politis is on holidays in Greece. Yeah, right. The Roosters have been telling us much the same for weeks, taking advantage of our collective stupidity, credulity and the pathetic failure of David Gallop - a tie-wearing lawyer no less - to bring habeas corpus to the NRL. Sure, Philip Ruddock can salt away the bodies for 12 days in the Brisbane watchhouse after sprinkling fairy dust on a nation's tired eyes but rugby league deserves better, Mr Gallop.

Show me the body, Mr Canavan. Take the truth serum or we'll lock you up with Gus and a smelly blue jumper and we'll let him keep talking until your eyes pop out just like his. You can laugh now but after a few days of that - just enough for Gus to clear the phlegm off his chest - you'll be screaming out for mercy, begging to pull on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's orange jumpsuit.

Nick was on holidays. Maybe that part was true. Nick was in Greece. Maybe that part was true. But where is he now, what's he doing, who has he spoken to and what is he looking for?

If you say a decent plate of calamari, I'll smash all your crockery on the kitchen floor and storm out. If you don't, then sit down and I'll tell you about one dark and stormy night, about a fishing boat from Karpathos across the Mediterranean, about the smell of cheap, black tobacco and the cold, salty spray that pulled my cap down tight until morning found me in the Syrian port of Ugarit, home of the Temple of Qadash Kinahnu.

It was Nick who shook the sloth from my eyes, pulled my body clear of the mud and fish scales. "Walk," he said, the only word he's ever said to me, pointing high up the hill and way back into the mists of time.

Blowing away those very mists, Nick, leader of a great and mystical tribe of seekers, led me to a door - well, a type of portal that Aldous Huxley might have referred to. A great hunk of stone, carved in the shapes of animals - and I think I could make out a rabbit, a rooster, a tiger. Eels, panthers and a beautiful white sea eagle seemed to have been scratched more recently. Someone had scrawled a mad-looking horse in texta.

Nick put his hand on the rooster and made as if to calm him, running his fingers down the comb. The door creaked open an inch and, together, Nick and I lent on it hard. We were in.

The steam smacked my face and my eyes screwed up tight. But I swear on the grave of Issac the Blind that it was Gus who lifted the chalice, twice refused by the northern teetotaller, to my lips. That's almost the last thing I can remember. Except everything. The cosmos began to hum from within and my legs were vibrating like a tuning fork. The warm light wrapped me up in silk cushions as Nick laid me gently on the floor.

If that sounds weird, imagine where I woke up.

"Nice arse," said Constable Maggie Doyle as she rearranged the toga I'd somehow found myself wearing.

I mumbled something. I could hear the words coming out and they made perfect sense but something got lost between my lips and Maggie's ears.

It was then I saw the stars - Centaurus, the peacock and the mystical saucepan. What were once meaningless dots were now lines of communication. Not just a new way of understanding the world; here, written on the ceiling of the cosmos, was a new way of playing and coaching rugby league.

Out, in an instant, went the pop psychology of Gibson, the applied Marxism of Masters, the flat-line geometry of Anderson. The herald angels were singing, the Age of Aquarius had arrived. No more would second-rowers need to study endless hours of video, no longer need they memorise attacking routines. Swept away for another 2000 years were tackling drills. Bugger training: just read your stars, son.

"Earth to Aquarius, Earth to Aquarius. Come in Brad." Freddie Fittler was flabbergasted when I told him this week of my discovery. Flabbergasted because he already knew. He was no longer travelling alone, no longer the only one who had woken up with his body in the Glebe clink, his moon in Uranus and his head in Pluto.

"It's freaky, spot on. I can't stop thinking about it," Fittler told Jonathon Cainer, Chief Rugby League Writer for the Daily Trumpeter. "I've been trying to tell people this for years.

"Sticky said Nick was mad and look where that got him. Cronulla might be a great place to live but imagine having to watch them play each weekend? And poor old Chris just wouldn't listen, reckoned there was something in the Second Vatican Council about the black arts.

"My lucky black arse, I say - or I will, if I can just wake up Gus and get a game plan out of him before he gets back on the juice with Nick."