Cod Almighty | Diary

Me ears are alight

30 September 2025

Your newly minted monthly Deviant Diary is here with the big news in Townland. My fellow Mariners, rejoice! The 28th mug has been secured and added to the pottery pyramid. The Cod Almighty Museum of Mugs opens next year, so long as we get funding from the council. Perhaps we'll just say we need someone to read our emails, that should do it.

Real Town news? There is this and that, but also something or other about another cup game. Shall we start with this and that?

Yesterday, all our reserve team went so far away. Well, Alfreton. A soupcon-bell of the half-crocked and a smattering of the youth of today took a magical mystery tour to the Midlands to meet up with some soiled and oiled Spireites in the Indoor League Cup. And don't you know Town thrashed 'em 1-0, thanks to a couple of da kids combining. At roughly the same time as your diarist was accidentally stalking Jaydon Sweeney around a supermarket, Lavelle, Gilsenan, Turi, Eccleston and Rose all got those fabled minutes in the legs as they reacquainted themselves with the mystical power of pitch geography. Me, that is I, personally, was transfixed by the mystical power of the ice cream aisle.

What about the other? Yeah, the Worst League Cup Draw Ever. We could have had a sexy away game against a big club like Swansea or Wycombe, but oh-no, we just get a mid-table Premier League team at home. What a let down, hardly worth going is it. The club, similarly filled with inertia, has finally got around to telling us that the Brentford game has now been fixed, though not in the gambling sense, for Tuesday 28 October. Those cynically rapacious capitalist exploiters in our boardroom are refusing to charge more for this game than a normal, run of the mill league match against Bromley AND you'll have to buy your own programme! They're really taking advantage of our loyalty now.

Season ticket holders have an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny window of opportunity - just eleventy days - to get around to securing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get into the quarter finals (if you are under the age of 24). Only eleventy days, it's an utter disgrace.

They're taking us for mugs!

There are facts and there is fiction. There's also science fiction and science friction, or in footballing terms the Brighton/Brentford Bossman face off. Both clubs have risen after being bought by sports betting Svengalis who don't get on. If you want to know why, read this. If you can't be bothered, it's basically one rich man getting the hump because someone who used to work for him sort of used the knowledge acquired through working for him to set up a rival business.

Ah, but buried in it is the reason why the commentatorati should stop quoting xG (it's dumb automation, it doesn't use human judgment) and cease blathering on about Town tapping Brentford up for data and player links. Our Dear Mariners are already connected to Brighton, via the Jamestown hook up, and the Seagulls' Supremo's permafrosted feud with the Bees' Bossman means it ain't gonna happen.

One more thing, facts are facts: despite what is claimed in last Saturday's programme article about David Neilsen, he never referred to himself as The Golden Dude. It was merely a CA-confected comic mishearing, much like Desmond Dekker when his ears were alight.

My own personal favourite that recently popped up on Pick of the Pops: "Portaloo, why did you bother to quote the law", where Benny and Bjorn predicted the rise of an unfeasibly coiffured and trousered Tory boy. On the face of it, much like his attire, this may seem a trivial conceit, but it is very important to us that we take these steps to gently mock the mighty.