IT WAS observed recently by those close to him, as well as the man himself, that Mark Thompson was in "a good head space".
 
For those attuned to Thompson's life in the recent past, it was genuinely warm and good news to learn of the turnaround in his lot.
 
But, as has been the case with Thompson since mid-2010 when he decided to walk out on Geelong, he was selective when it came to addressing matters concerning Essendon, the club at which he now resides as an assistant coach to the equally selective James Hird.
 
Thompson says he didn't lie to anyone about the how and why of his decision to join Essendon.
 
The problem for Thompson as he now seeks to get on with his life is the reality that being either disingenuous or economical with the truth in the past means that one can actually forget what the truth is, or was.
 
Thompson wanted us to believe him in 2010 when he walked out on the Cats.
 
But now he wants us to believe a different version of that story, and clearly one version of events cannot be right.
 
The Thompson exit from Geelong and arrival at Essendon story had almost played itself out, but Thompson opted to go public 10 days ago with a fresh public positioning of what he says happened in 2010.
 
It is a positioning which has left flabbergasted many people at Geelong.
 
Let's recap the 'facts' as they were presented in the days after the Cats had lost the 2010 preliminary final to Collingwood, when much of the football world went into meltdown at the prospect of him joining Hird at Essendon.
 
Three days after that loss, Frank Costa, the Cats' president and a man who had always supported Thompson, said: "Mark Thompson is not going anywhere. He told us he wants to have one more year at Geelong."
 
Added CEO Brian Cook: "Mark will be the coach of the Geelong Football Club next year. There is nothing surer."
 
Line that up with Thompson's recent admission.

When asked if, with hindsight, he would have done anything differently, he said: "I probably wouldn't have told a soul I wasn't going to coach."

He went on, admitting he had arrived at this decision halfway through the 2010 season and lamenting only that "I should have kept it (the decision to leave Geelong) to myself."
 
Asked if he had lied to Geelong, he said: "No. But I never told them the full story."
 
For nearly two weeks after Geelong's preliminary final loss, Thompson was involved in the Cats' list management decisions as well as off-field staffing discussions. Heavy stuff for a man who now tells us he had decided he wasn't going to be a part of the club's future.
 
Colin Carter, who replaced Costa as Geelong president, gave that observation his own context when, in November 2010, he told Cats directors that the club's phone records revealed a "flurry of phone calls and SMS messages" from Thompson to Essendon people, including Hird, chairman David Evans and Tim Watson, dating back to July.
 
Thompson refused to elaborate in the recent article on exactly when Essendon made its first approach. This is in keeping with what he said on the early October 2010 day when he officially resigned.
 
He said then he had "no idea" what his future would hold. "What I'm going to do tomorrow is sit down and reflect and see what I want to do next. And I clearly have no idea ... "
 
Essendon went to such extraordinary lengths to keep secret its 2010 discussions with and about Hird and Thompson that people at the club rarely, if ever, mentioned the two by name.
 
Instead, they referred to the two as 'wholesale' and 'retail' in the regular conversations about the progress they were making in their project to get the two to Windy Hill, and of ousting then-coach Matthew Knights.
 
Evans has apologised to Costa for how it all played out, and there are now no grudges on that front.
 
But it wasn't just Knights who was treated shabbily by the Bombers as they went about their "wholesale and retail" pursuits.
 
Dean Laidley and Mark Williams both went for three interviews for the coaching vacancy. Both knew deep down at the time they were being given lip service.
 
After his third interview, a Bombers official drove Williams to Melbourne Airport for his flight back to Adelaide. The official took him via the land that had been earmarked for the club's new home base. Williams had reason at that point to feel confident he was very much in the mix for the job.
 
But he knew something was up when, minutes later as he alighted at the airport, he was told Hird would that night be "making a statement about the job" on his Fox Sports TV program On The Couch.
 
That night (September 27) Hird said: "The (Essendon) job I've gone for is the senior coaching job, and they've spoken to me about a senior assistant who would assist me in certain parts of the role and I'm comfortable with that."
 
Early the next day Williams' wife received a call from the Bombers (Williams was on a bike ride) telling her Hird had the job.
 
The Thompson to Essendon charade continued for some time yet, though.
 
It took until early November that year for the club to reach its most arrogant extreme on this issue. Hird said on that day: "At 10.30 am yesterday, on the middle of Essendon Grammar training ground, it was one of the most bizarre situations I think I've been a part of.

"We were running a drill, with the players running back and forth, and there's Bomber (Thompson) standing in the middle of the oval. I thought, 'What's going on?' And he said, 'Yep, let's go, let's do it'."
 
In between Geelong's loss in that year's preliminary final and his formal exit from the club, the Cats held their best and fairest count. Thompson attended, as did Gary Ablett, who was to soon to head to Gold Coast as the new team's cherished recruit.
 
Ablett and partner Lauren Phillips approached Thompson that night in an attempt to say thanks for a great partnership, despite a souring of the relationship throughout 2010.
 
Thompson refused to engage in conversation. One teammate of Ablett's nearly intervened. It was ugly.
 
Ablett had copped it from Thompson throughout that year - publicly, privately, on and off field. Thompson had made a massive thing of Joel Selwood's decision to recommit to the Cats during the year, describing it as 'wonderful' while observing Ablett's indecision.
 
That Thompson himself now admits he had decided mid-way through 2010 to leave the Cats makes that stance seem even more hypocritical than it did at the time.
 
There are still some people at Geelong who hold the view that Ablett would still be a Cat if he had known Thompson was not going to be a part of the club's future.
 
But, as we now know, Thompson is OK with how everything played out.
 
"I'm quite comfortable knowing I did the right thing by everybody," he said in his recent cleansing of the soul.
 
One is still left to wonder, though, which version of events Thompson now wants us to pay most attention to. His 2010 account, or his March 2012 account. The "full story", as he puts it, is in there somewhere.
 
Wonder if he will ever feel the need to tell it to the people at Geelong who provided him with the platform to become a two-time premiership coach.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the AFL or its clubs