Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 12 May 2003

12 May 2003

Is your love for the Mariners so unhealthy that you lack any other interests or passions of any kind? Do you support Town to the extent of having no life? Then you could be looking at a free pair of season tickets courtesy of the Nationwide Building Society - league sponsor and provider of the Diary's mortgage, fixed for five years at 5.25%. In a wicked cool new competition the mutually-owned, Swindon-based home loan provider is preparing to reward people who can prove using 100 words or less that their personality is the least well rounded and most anally retentive among all their club's supporters. Trouble is, the season tickets you win are for "pre-designated seats", and if you're such a big fan then presumably you'll already have a season ticket, so you'll have to be prepared to go and sit somewhere else. But you'd get the thing for free, obviously, so, I dunno, swings and roundabouts, eh.

Speaking of obsessive personalities, Diary reader Lee Cobby clearly has too much time on his hands. I would like to submit as evidence the following email. "I read with interest the snippet that Barrington Belgrave was available on a free, but the notion that he has the most outlandish monicker is flawed. I would like to point your reader in the direction of the Scarborough dole office, where a P45 has just been handed in featuring the name Bimbo Fatokun. Unbeatable, surely. I tried - and failed - to come up with a full XI of such names as suggested. However, I would like to propose a full team's worth of players for Paul Groves to sign in the summer, all consisting of body parts. Well, obviously the players themselves consist of body parts - what I mean to say is that their names are all body parts too:

"While we're all twiddling our thumbs over the summer, why not invite the other Cod Almighty readers to submit a team of eleven players with some obscure connection, and dream of the amusing commentary should Grimsby sign them all between now and August." Yeah, maybe - or on the other hand maybe we should just all go out and interact with other human beings a bit more.

Over to Mark Wilson, then, who strikes me as just the sort of chirpy, well-balanced individual who wouldn't stand a chance of winning free season tickets. This week finds him in iconoclastic form. "I have supported Town for nearly 30 years now (I started going when I was very young!) and I have never heard of us having a problem with Town keepers in green," maintains Mark. "I recall many an occasion when Nigel Batch would wobble onto the pitch in green, warm up like he had spent the previous night in a lock-in (because he had) and then turn into a goalkeeping superhero as soon as the whistle went. If it was bad luck that Batchy was suffering, what would he have been like if he'd worn a luckier colour? I bet George Tweedy wore green and I've seen Harry Wainman in green. And then there was Peter Grotier, he wore green...er, righto, I see where you're coming from."

Mark also contributes his twopenn'orth to our recent debate on the merits of Town's new kit and the best and worst Mariners attire in history. "Agree that the pinstripe Admiral kit was a monstrosity. Ribero-era kit was good, especially the blue and white away kit which was very cool and had Ciba-Geigy on the chest. And I really like the new kit but what does GTS stand for? Frankly, if we were sponsored by S Hussain, Baghdad, it wouldn't worry me if he was prepared to give us £100k." Now that sort of moral pragmatism is probably why Mark works for a leading pharmaceutical manufacturer in the prosperous south of England and my Sunday afternoon drinking sessions are increasingly having to be subsidised by Mrs Diary.

"I think you should keep the Diary going over the summer," concludes Mark. "We'll find 300 words worth of crap to fill it daily." So far, so good...

Finally, I'm sure you would all join the Diary in belatedly congratulating both Brigg Town, who at the weekend exacerbated Lincolnshire's already dangerous case of football fever by winning the FA Vase, and Doncaster Rovers, who the Diary has a big soft spot for since they provided the opposition the first time I ever watched Town and of course returned to the Football League on Saturday after a five-year absence by winning the Conference play-off final. Rah.