The Diary

Cod Almighty | Diary

Couch potato fodder

21 November 2018

Now and again, we get asked when Cod Almighty is going to do some more T-shirts. The long answer involves the words should, if and maybe repeated in different combinations. The short answer is "probably never".

But here to take the pressure off us is Super Clive Content.

Last night, Tom Denton performed the hat-trick (Middle-Aged Diary has been reading some early 20th-century football reporting the last few days) to ensure that Chesterfield will face Grimsby at home in the second round of the FA Cup. At 2pm. On a Sunday.

Instead of a T-shirt, Cod Almighty is going to work on a new app. Let's call it an unfit bit. Every time you get the deadening feeling that you are wasting your life, you press a button. The results are captured, building up a picture of the most soul-destroying leisure activities in the UK today. Things like trailing around a shopping centre so vast that it has generated its own toxic microclimate. Finding yourself watching a TV programme in which someone famous for their name being vaguely familiar is telling you about their "incredible journey"...

And finding yourself watching a TV programme in which you watch ex-professional footballers watching football and pretending to argue about it. The souped-up, FA Cup version has reporters at the grounds and clips of the goals. For the dead at heart, for the people who record nothing on their unfit bit because they lost sight of the meaning of their own life decades ago, this gives the illusion they are enjoying multiple games of football all at once. They can sit, bloated and unengaged, thinking that perhaps they ought to clean the car, but no, they'll sit and wait because any moment now a player they have never heard of may score a goal for a team they have vaguely heard of.

This is not even living your life vicariously. It is a vicarious purgatory.

It is to provide a part of the entertainment for people lacking the imagination ever to be entertained that our second-round tie at Chesterfield will kick off at 2pm on a Sunday. Yes, we've arrived.

Now what shall we do?