Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Saturday 13 September 2003
13 September 2003
Football's new sleepiest giant, Sheffield Wednesday, will be Town's first patch of black ice on the road to Cardiff as this morning's LDV Vans Trophy draw has handed the Mariners the local-ish derby they probably fancied the least of all with a short hop to Hillsborough for the first round. Workplaces in the Grimsby area have already set up sweepstakes offering super cash prizes for the holder of the ticket number equivalent to the total goals created by Terry Cooke multiplied by the number of mistakes by Tony Crane.
I'm sure there was something else I had to mention here, you know, but it just seems to elude me for the moment.
Let us turn, then, to the thoughts of your fellow Diary readers, who have helped this week's email harvest festival reap a bumper crop. The first of today's producers of food for thought is Alistair Wilkinson, whose crazed plans for cat-assisted global domination were revealed in Wednesday's Diary and prompted Mark Wilson to enquire on Thursday as to Al's preferred psychotropic substances. "I was on a revolving chair with a cat on my knee," explains Dr Ev-Al. "By the way, we won't be double winners, we'll be everything winners once the feline empire is dominant. Unfortunately my spies tell me that as we speak, the nefarious agents of Hull City are currently rounding up all the dogs in the world trying to build an army to rival our own. They will fail, oh yes they will fail. At this moment agents of the Cat Revolutionaries Advocating Mariners Progression (CRAMP) are infiltrating the East Riding camp to scupper their dastardly plans."
Oh yeah...that reminds me what it was I had to tell you. The Diary had a dream on Wednesday night about joining a gang of good cats to fight a gang of evil cats led by a big bluey-black-coloured one, and that was probably down to Al's email. Then I dreamt about becoming a tax inspector, but I was in a team of pretty girls who were totally cool Charlie's Angels-style tax inspectors and went around busting down the doors of tax evaders with funky kicks and stuff. That probably wasn't down to Al. Yeah, that was it. Yeah.
Or maybe it was that Paul Thundercliffe has taken up James Booth's idea of GTFC breakfast cereals with relish. He has taken up the idea enthusiastically, I mean, not that he has started putting tomato chutney on his cornflakes. "Some obvious combinations," writes Paul. "Phil Jevons and Frosties (reception when he starts training with the first team again): 'You're not grrrrreat!' Stacy and Rice Crispies: 'Snap, Cackle and Pot'. Groves and Coco Pops: 'It's what my children tell me to drink and retire from playing'." I'm sure he would if he could, Paul.
Last in the postbag is Stu Morton, who couldn't resist a dip into the dictionary after Thursday's Diary used a Posh Word. "Tmesis?" he writes. That was the Posh Word. "I thought that was one of those itchy scratchy skin conditions you get when you eat too much of the wrong food. Or an affectionate term for one's wife in some parts of Ireland." No, mate, that's scabies. "The online dictionary didn't mention anything to do with 'fucking'," continues our Parisian chum, who clearly spent his schooldays searching in vain for obscenities in his Griffin Savers Dictionary, "but it did mention 'abso-bloody-lutely'. It went on to say: separation of parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words (as 'what place soever' for 'whatsoever place'). Which is very cool, not just because I learnt a new word, but also because that might explain why we call some French cheeses 'Tome', for example Tome de Savoie, Tome de Corse (brought a big one of those back from Corsica this summer - excellent with fig jam and crusty bread, and a bottle of red wine) - where was I...oh yes, Tome, it being a hard cheese that needs to be sliced?"
"Anyway," continues Stu, "all of this to say that when you use the sort of vocabulary in the Diary that you know/suspect will be new to us vocab-challenged readers, please add a link in to a dico." But if I had then you would never have sent this wonderful email, and I would have had to have written about, er, something else that might have happened to GTFC recently, if I could remember what it was, that is - so thanks for that, Stu. Would any other readers like to tell us about the cheese they bought while on holiday?