Cod Almighty | Diary

The smoky grey town in the stillness is dreaming

5 December 2014

Retro Diary writes: Firstly I must echo yesterday's tribute to Peter Furneaux. I only ever met him properly during one short evening at Blundell Park, along with his wife Ann, not all that long ago. Beforehand, for some reason more to do with my own hang-ups and prejudices than anything he'd done, I was prepared not to like him. In the event, he not so much shared, as exuded, the subject of Grimsby Town with such easy generosity, enthusiasm and candour, despite having no obligation to me whatsoever, that by the end I felt thoroughly ashamed of my former judgment.

My lasting memory, apart of course from many great days in the life of Town, is of Peter explaining to me during an impromptu tour of the backroom why Town's trophy cabinet contains a stuffed puffin. I'll pass it on sometime – it's a great story.

There is no match tomorrow, as our should-be opponents Eastleigh instead take on Southport in the FA Cup. For once we get to see a winter Saturday afternoon as others see them. No stress, a wander round B&Q, a quick check to make sure Scunny have lost, and home for tea. On this sort of afternoon the vexed question of why we put ourselves through the whole stressful football thing inevitably comes to the fore. There is, after all, no law of nature that says we have to do it.

We know why the players do it – for money and adulation. I'm sure they don't much care where they get these superficial pleasures, and it's frightening to think how many players will sign for, play for and leave Town without ever setting foot in the town proper. I'm prepared to believe that they enjoy being a bona fide VIP in someone else's community for a short while. But when they come back and score for someone else they usually seem pretty pleased with themselves.

We the fans, of course, have entirely different motivation – because it is our way of expressing our sense of 'home'. Of all the country's professional football teams, Grimsby Town must be one of the most fascinating in terms of psychogeography. First of all we sit, not unusually, on the edge of land and sea. Secondly we sit right on one of the country's great cultural divides, which except for one short, ill-conceived experiment has always separated different 'kingdoms'. One side of the Humber is the north, the other the East Midlands. One is Anglo-Saxon Northumbria; the other, Mercia.

Also, according to the University of Sheffield's 2007 study,  Town's catchment straddles the modern north-south divide. This makes us, at once, the northern tip of the south and the eastern tip of the north.

Here in Grimsby we identify strongly with Lincolnshire, although the rest of Lincolnshire doesn't want us. On the other two sides we are hemmed in by the militant uber-northernness of Yorkshire. Yorkshire folk seem happy enough to be friendly with us, but when we cross the border and encounter their flat vowels we are under no illusion that we enter a foreign land.  

And finally, our team represents two very different towns which are treated so interchangeably that it is apparently OK for Grimsby Town to play in Cleethorpes and Cleethorpes Town to play in Grimsby.

Cleethorpes is currently enjoying something of a renaissance, with its booming, blooming holiday industry, air shows, beaches and miles of glittering sea views. Grimsby, on the other hand, is a town in which the nicest buildings can be found by following a bulldozer, and where a brief historical period of plenty has long ago left much of the North Sea beyond ecological recovery and a whole generation of trawlermen grieving for a cold and dangerous industry which no longer exists. By the time Channel 4 and Mr Baron Cohen have finished with it, Grimsby may well have sunk beneath the point where it can possibly recover any dignity.

Despite this it holds, for us at least, an intense nostalgic resonance which we cannot excise – an affliction for which Grimsby Town, our team, acts as counsellor and crutch.

These geographical accidents make us uniquely misunderstood, especially by southerners. The way we try to put this right is by putting our football team on the map, so we get noticed. This is what made 482 people go all the way to Telford last week on a cold winter's afternoon. When we have no match, like tomorrow, our identity loses its point. We're not mentioned on the BBC; there's no cause for anyone to wonder where, or who, we are. It's like we don't exist.

In this respect, life in the Conference can actually be pretty hard work for us every week. That's why we do it, of course; and it's also why we need to get promoted very, very soon.

Next week: idiotic substitutions, and the silly cup.