In seeking to sum up my experience of this season as a lifelong fan of Leyton Orient, two quotes immediately come to mind.

The first, "It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand" is taken from John Cleese’s character in the mid-80’s classic, Clockwise. The second is Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

When we first started planning and then making our podcast, we were, by Einstein’s definition, insane. We were also, unwittingly as well as insanely, trapped in John Cleese’s cycle of despair and hope, hope and despair.

Last season, we had enjoyed what had seemed for much of the time like a glorious feel-good movie come to life, as our plucky team of free transfers battled their way to recently unparalleled levels of success for many months, only to edit the script into being something artsy, depressing and Swedish with the very last, agonising, kick of the season in a play-off final penalty shoot-out.

Nevertheless, we turned a blind eye to any insight our history as Orient fans should have provided and committed ourselves to chronicling what we felt sure would be another push for promotion. It pains me to think back to the me of three months ago.

I was so much younger and more optimistic then; I cringe when I think of my own idiocy in thinking that this season would be anything other than what it has turned out to be: the despair part of the cycle.

What fools we were to ever think things could be different, but perhaps that is being too harsh because, objectively at least, we seemed to have real cause for optimism before a ball was kicked in the first of an ongoing series of games that have very often felt like watching a slow motion car crash.

A new and mega-rich owner and pretty much the same team as last season, but with plenty of real pedigree additions, had a lot of O’s fans expecting the season to be little more than a formality. Something to get out of the way before the real good times could roll. How, we asked ourselves, could anything go wrong?

In Russell Slade, we had a manager who had worked hard in unearthing free-transfer players we had never heard of and put together a group that would have achieved promotion in any other season. Surely, with a large cash injection and, as he memorably phrased it, "the chance to shop in Harrods rather than Primark", we couldn’t help but turn up on day one as champions elect? What we had forgotten all about was the Orient way.

Ways are a modern phenomenon in football; they have a way at Manchester United, a way at Tottenham, at Arsenal and the like. In Spain, Barcelona never stop banging on about their way; they love it and it’s something to be proud of.

The Orient way is something more along the lines of a harrowing secret shared in silently agreed upon silence by every fan of the club. It lurks and it lingers and it’s always there in the background, turning Cleese’s cycle over and over. Simply put, it is being a bit rubbish and incredibly frustrating. Those new signings, they weren’t fit. That manager, he upped and left and ended up in the Championship anyway. That new owner, he turned out to be completely inscrutable. That hope, it turned to despair incredibly quickly.

Three months into the season and the one thing we should all have accepted by now is that it is far more than a formality and we have no right to take success for granted.

There have been glimmers of horrible hope and life for a fan who is able to attend away games has certainly been far more enjoyable than those wretched souls who confine themselves to attending only those games taking place at the open air torture chamber that Brisbane Road has turned out to be thus far.

Jay Simpson has suddenly come to life and scored five goals in his last seven games, Dean Cox has continued to invest Dean Cox-ian levels of effort and demonstrate commitment that continued to make him look like the hero we both need and deserve and Gary Sawyer is injured. I’m so sorry, Gary.

Overall, though, we know by now that we are in for an all too familiar season of struggle. We’ve been here many times before; we know the steps to this dance. There’s something comforting in the rubbishness of it all.

Making the five hour round trip to Stoke to see us turn in an abject performance and get turned over 3-0 by Port Vale felt nowhere near as bad as you might expect, because we had turned up on the day expecting little else.

One of the features of our podcast is to make a parody song about the club, a player or manager. You can chart the downturn of the cycle by having a look at these songs in chronological order, as we went from covering "Take me Home, Country Roads" the week before the season started, to feeling sufficiently motivated to do "Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now" only a few weeks later.

The managerial situation remains a mystery and at the time of writing this, Mauro Milanese is the third man in charge, making for a neat one per month rate so far. He has brought in his first signing, in 6ft 6in Italian striker, Gianvito Plasmati who has shown some promise and the 2-2 draw against Coventry suggests the cycle might be firing itself and getting ready to turn again.

We know we aren’t getting promoted this year, that would require the sort of exceptional good fortune that we have had ample time to remind ourselves doesn’t ever get enjoyed by Orient fans. It’s hard not to let your thoughts turn to the summer of 2015 though and the chance to put right the wrongs of this year and go for glory once again.

By then, it stands to reason that all the teething troubles experienced by the new owners will have been overcome, we will either have Mauro still in charge because he did very well, or a new man with money to spend and a presumably large personal incentive to take us into the Championship, just like we were promised.

We will probably all turn up again, next August, as much as we might tell ourselves otherwise during the two months of summer we get off every year for good behaviour. The sun will be shining on Brisbane Road and we will all bounce our way into the ground, just like we have every other season before, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Just like Einstein said: insane.

E10Mess is a weekly podcast available at www.soundcloud.com/e10mess or by searching "E10Mess" on Itunes. It features interviews with former players, managers and club characters, as well as tribute songs, chat, analysis, moaning and more.