Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 27 November 2012

27 November 2012

If, like Middle-Aged Diary, you are old enough to remember the days when offices had typing pools, you may remember that they were often decorated with flippant notices: a list of instructions along the lines of "Please do not write neatly as we enjoy deciphering your scribbles". When this inversion was repeated for five or six bullet points, one was almost forced to agree that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.

As Cod Almighty cannot afford you to come to that conclusion, I will resist the temptation to rewrite today's interview with Michael Rankine in the same style. Suffice to say that beyond the hint that he'd like a permanent move to a northern club and a certain degree of self-awareness about his style and form, it largely obeys original/regular Diary's dictum that if the opposite of a statement is nonsensical, the original statement is not worth making. Let's move on.

I am approaching a not particularly significant birthday (I can hang on to the Middle-Aged moniker for a good few years yet), leading me to reflect on the place of football in our overall lives. Often, the two contrast. In the spring of 1992, I was in gainful employment and confident that 13 years of Tory misrule were about to come to an end, but I also feared Town were certain to get relegated. By the end of May, I was out of a job and putting up with a lot of Conservative gloating, but at least the Mariners were in the laughably renamed first division.

A couple of years later, I finally returned to work after gaining some qualifications, and Town promptly went on a winless run that transformed us from play-off hopefuls to mid-table non-entities. Sometimes, football complements life. I'll never forget being at Gigg Lane when we ended a long winless run, in large part because my son was alongside me and I'd never seen him so caught up in an occasion.

It is in something like this spirit that Cod Almighty launches a new feature by asking you: "Where were you when Jim Dobbin scored at St James' Park?" We want not only to celebrate one of the great days of the Alan Buckley era, but to show how that day fitted into the fabric of our lives. So whether you were at the game, listening on the radio or only heard about the win after the final whistle had blown, we would like to hear from you. For now, all you need to do is send an email to the CA postbag with Newcastle in the subject line and a line about how and whether you followed the game in the email. We'll then get back in touch with a few questions about your memories of the game and the day.

We look forward to hearing from you.