Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 7 December 2010

7 December 2010

Your Guest Diarist (who is only here, by the way, in case Idle Diary can't make it later on due to having a very complicated life and a very recalcitrant car) told you yesterday that club skipper Lee Peacock is in the form of his life. And the man himself has been rabbiting on about how he feels better than James Brown in a paid-for Mariners Player interview filmed in the dark at yesterday's indoor training session.

"I was the only person who made it to the training ground!" exults Lee. "Like, because I've got a Jeep. I made it in and I was the only one there and I got stuck, like!" babbled the player, who, I bet, lists his favourite bird as a phoenix and whose favourite box set must be Top Gear (the one where they get stuck in the snow). Someone needs to deflate his tyres a few psi - the man is on fire!

Bergman-style mid-winter camerawork shows what appears to be a five-a-side game played to a low-key grinding musical soundtrack. Peacock, resplendent in high-vis bib and Abba-style beard, struts imperiously. "Right now! Right here!" drones the club singer repetitively and almost plaintively. The film cuts to the man and Peacock says the word "Yorkshire" and makes himself sound strangely like Armando Iannucci. "You do what you can, in and around the house," says Lee invoking images of chin-ups on door frames to a background of Jeremy Kyle and strange rituals carrying frozen water butts around the snowy garden.

Our man for the moment (which has sadly arrived in a time where there are no games to see him at his beautiful best, like a butterfly who lived only on the one day of summer where it pissed it down like November) is excited about all the cancelled games, citing as his reason the fact that there will be loads of games close together so the team can go on a run and get loads of points quickly. Yes, he talks in these long exciting sentences, overjoyed at the prospect of what is to come. By the end of his first page it is like being in James Joyce's head. It's the end of February - everything is going great - no injuries, no suspensions, no - nothing but winning and optimism like the England Ashes side. We're on a great great run. Phew - it's a relief to the frazzled brain when it ends, gentle reader.

Meanwhile, Curtis Woodhouse has been telling the Telegraph how Neil Woodses is under-appreciated and musing on his football career: "I played a few times for Sheffield FC last season but now my boxing is starting to get harder. I've still got a pair of boots and have told Sheffield they can give me a call. But to be honest my left foot has got a mind of its own now; it doesn't do what I want it to. And the phone doesn't ring as much as it used to." My boots got lost when we moved house but otherwise it's pretty much the same for me, Curtis. Apart from the boxing and the telling Sheffield, and, ermm, the left foot as well, I suppose.

The Telegraph also runs a pretty speculative article about Town fans facing the prospect of watching the Christmas Mansfield fixture at Alfreton. And we have had a letter from David Elvidge:

"With not much news about of our heroes can I use an admittedly spurious link to talk about something else? Just finished reading today's Diary (still great reading even when Town are in temporary hibernation) and then turned to BBC Sports' web page to find a mention of the black and white stripes - I mean Newcastle United. Why the hell have they sacked Chris Hughton? Newcastle are only in their first season back in the Premiership and, that considered, are not doing too badly. I have been impressed by the quiet way Hughton has gone about things when they got relegated and since their return. He seems a decent bloke and does not deserve this before Christmas.

"Back to Blundell Park, a few years ago Kenny Dalglish and Terry McDermott were sitting a couple of rows in front of me in the Findus, as it then was. Presumably they were on a scouting mission for Newcastle, rather than having followed my black and white scarf believing they were at St James's Park. Perhaps the Diary could invite 'I saw someone famous at Blundell Park' stories to while away these winter days.

Finally, a happy Christmas to all at Cod Almighty, and all avid readers of the Diary."

Thanks David, and I'll add, although unseasonably early perhaps, the same felicitations to all the folk who hardly ever read this bollocks and who hate it really. See yer.