Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 16 May 2012

16 May 2012

There was a piece on BBC Breakfast a few weeks ago about why humans instinctively recoil at screeching and scratching - such as running one's fingernails down a blackboard or rubbing your hand across a balloon. We all know it's an unpleasant sound (for some it's as intolerable as Serge Makofo's first touch). But no-one really understands why we react with clenched teeth and a grimace, and so a student and a professor from one of the country's reputable universities set up an online test to analyse which sounds in particular get your goat.

Now, your West Yorkshire Diary has no idea what the results from that study were because I was only interested in using that story as a tenuous link to the bit I'm about to say. What's that horrible, dull, scratchy noise? That'll be me, scraping the bottom of the news barrel. If you're not already grimacing, you should be. Captain Disley said something about us being rubbish at the start of last season and being pretty good in the middle before tailing off again near the end. But that's such old news that it should've already been recycled and turned into a reporter's notepad, upon which he'll write robotic quotes from the next Town player he gets to interview.

Since there's sod all left to report - not even a live webcam so we can see how those engraved bricks are getting on - I suppose I should turn my attention to who I consider to be the worst Town player I've seen. It's not often the name Buckley is associated with inability, but when you precede it with the forename Adam you can see where I'm going. For some bizarre reason - probably only known by Sir Alan himself - the great man chose to play his own son on the left wing in our second division side of 1999-00 ahead of the very capable Dave Smith and Kingsley Black. I feel like it's borderline as to whether he met the ten-game criterion Mardy Diary set, but it felt like much more.

I remember Adam Buckley hitting the bar against Norwich City in a televised game at Blundell Park, but everything else he did was forgettable. His consistent appearance in our starting XI caused me such outrage that I penned a letter to the Grimmo Telegraph detailing my bemusement. I know this because I've just moved house and came across the letter in an old box. I never did send it in. I kept it to remind myself that I should never write when I'm that angry because it's not good for my spelling.

Those were the days when people actually wrote letters and sent them in. The editor would assess each one and only publish those that met strict editorial criteria and created sensible debate. Today it's all about juvenile usernames, anarchic spelling, an aversion to full stops, and the caps lock. Does anyone get the impression that Shouty, if he existed online, would fit that profile? Shorty would probably be lower case and politely disagree with a lot of people.

If tomorrow's news is equally thin then may I suggest you start sending in your thoughts on who should play Shorty and Shouty in a film about their lives? It'll give tomorrow's Diary a chance to write more than two sentences - that's if more bricks haven't been engraved, of course.