Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 13 May 2003

13 May 2003

Mariners fans planning a last-minute holiday or wedding this summer will be aiming to have it all over and done with by Saturday 9 August, for it is on that day that Town's second division campaign will begin. The club's official site reveals that the 2003-04 fixture list will be, er, revealed on Thursday 19 June, and that "The Mariners head for Ibiza on July 5th, returning on July 12th". Perhaps anticipating readers' alarm at the possibility of a week-long binge of Gallimoresque proportions, the site very sensibly clarifies the purpose of the Mariners' sojourn by adding: "Fixtures for Ibiza will appear here soon."

The Grimsby Telegraph returns with a vengeance to its favourite subject, crime, with two tales of villainy most grand. First up, it emerges that the disappearing Town fan and former Jarvis employee who recently facilitated the firm's sponsorship of the Mariners has done time for fraud. Having hit on the bright idea of trawling its own archives, the paper reveals that Stephen Venney received a 20-month prison sentence in 1996 for diddling a shitload of cash out of Immingham Conservative Club, where he had been treasurer, in an uncanny parallel of Joe Carter's devilishly clever scheme to embezzle funds from Mike Baldwin's clothing business, which emerged in last night's Corrie. Venney has apparently now turned up in Plymouth and resigned his position with Jarvis. The Diary really isn't sure what to make of this colourful character: on the one hand, he must have been a Conservative; but the Telegraph says he "single-handedly brought about the collapse of Immingham Conservative Club", so it's not all bad.

And if all that were not enough to make you demand of David Blunkett another reassuring "crackdown on crime", former Town winger Adam 'Son of Al' Buckley has been nicked on suspicion of theft from his current employer - Lincoln City Football Club. The player needed only a handful of first-team appearances at Blundell Park to become official fan scapegoat for half a season late in the previous millennium, but if found guilty he'll be whipping in crosses from the county jail from now on. Police were alerted to the possibility of Buckley's suspected act of larceny following complaints from neighbours after a barbecue in his garden was illuminated by a two-kilowatt beam mounted on a 90-foot pylon.

And finally, the light-hearted bit like at the end of the news, where Trevor McDonald treats you to a wry chuckle just so you don't go away from his programme filled with anger and despair at the way millions of lives are being wrecked by the resurgence of US cultural and economic imperialism. A jolly little email to the Diary points out that the newly demoted Mariners can no longer be used by sloppy-minded pundits as a clichéd signifier of sub-Premiership squalor. "Grimsby have now been replaced in the 'The likes of...' stakes!" writes our reader. "Now we've been relegated, the lazy journos have actually had to think of somewhere else demeaning for big clubs to go to. This came out in a chat about Joe Cole, who, if he stays at West Ham, 'will have to get used to the idea of going to the likes of Crewe and Wigan'. See, relegation is good for something." Wahey!