Cod Almighty | Diary

Another riff on death and taxes

17 June 2025

"Death and taxes". It's the punchline to many a quip, and Newbegin Diary must admit that I only checked it out with the intention of adding another to the heap. But a fuller version of the quote speaks to our times:

"Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

That same United States Constitution is now observed only in name. Nations which have endured for hundreds of years face an existential threat and millennia-old ecosystems are dying. And yet here you are, spending a warm June day reading about the Mariners.

The moment often comes to mind. It was the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced and I was on the bus home. A few seats away, a small group of adults were keeping entertained a fractious baby, with lovely patience and humour. However people vote, from their fears, from their partial knowledge of the world, they are human: kind and caring to those around them.

Yes, we aren't all of us kind all of the time, but we are multi-faceted. Two world wars, strikes and unemployment did not destroy people's taste for sport, it enhanced it. The world's ills we will tackle together, and sport brings us together.

Nowadays, there are men (nearly always men) so rich that taxes are someone else's problem, so Benjamin Franklin was only half right. But writing 89 years before their formation, he could not know that our two certainties would prove to be death and the Mariners. Governments change, economies change, even football changes, but Grimsby Town will always be with us.