Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 30 April 2007

30 April 2007

It was always going to be too much to expect of GTFC and the local children that they let us say goodbye to McDermott properly, wasn't it?

With nothing to report this morning but a bad taste in the mouth - and it isn't just the dodgy Bullion in the Rutland - it's a good thing Town's official website has received some fascinating photographs of "a Grimsby football team playing on the Philips field in Eindhoven on 31.8.1913, to mark the 100th anniversary of the independence of Napoleon". The match is against Willem II, who I seem to think Town played another friendly against in July 2004, and this hitherto unknown (at least by the Diary) detail of Mariners history - assuming it is the Mariners and not another Grimsby football team - makes you wonder how many other nuggets from the past have gone largely undocumented. If we take as little care about preserving and rediscovering the past as we do about commemorating the present, there are probably dinosaur bones just under the goal at the Pontoon end.

Sir Macca of Macc is not the only one around these parts to be taking his leave, as Ben Gresswell has emailed the Diary to observe: "I see the Postbag has done one again! Shoddy." Yes - where is the Postbag? He always seems to be there at the start of the season, then disappear for half of it, to re-emerge promisingly in the springtime but finally vanish again right at the death. The rumours are yet to be started that Letters Ed is in fact Clive Mendonca.

Last up today comes an email from Berkshire Clap Clinic, in which the redoubtable Felix Oliver-Tasker reprises a Diary theme from last week. "With Ms Battersby joining the ranks of the ladies of the night," he writes, "I expect an rise in the number of punters attending our new and state-of-the-art establishment for the cure of Cupid's Measles and other rashly, pardon the pun, acquired maladies, especially if they have visited the Manchester area. I have instructed all staff to keep a sharp look out for a z-list celeb in dark glasses in case she turns unexpectedly. I've told them to let me know so that I can strike up that clamp/thumbscrew thingy I described a week or so ago. We may yet find a use for it. The delectable Nurse Bumm-ffondle can hardly wait to get started." And I thought saying goodbye to Macca was going to make my eyes water.