Cod Almighty | Diary

When you get so down that you can't get up

16 April 2015

Five years ago, within the space of a few days, the Mariners plunged into non-League football for the first time in a century and the Tories greased their way back into government despite not having won a general election since 1992. The good times of illegal wars in the Middle East and multiple postponements at Rochdale were very much over.

The giddy, fancy dress-fuelled excitement that accompanied Town's unexpected surge into title contention fizzled out with the team's miserable failure to compete when push came to shove last Saturday. Grimsby hunkers down for the phoney war of the play-offs. It's all gone quiet over there.

And we're still quietly obsessed with our own situation. With big crowds in a small league. With what comes after the fishing. With what it means to be a Grimbarian. Orphan Boy, like Illustrious-GY before them, have proved unable to resist the temptation of doing a song about Town. Local hero status guaranteed. Good lads. You wear the shirt with pride.

But a definition is always a limit. And nobody wants to be a novelty. With every tweet about Easter's broken glass in Sheffield, I shift the word 'Grimbarian' further down my bio. With every piece about Ukip's progress in our hometown, I feel physically sick.

Your original/regular Diary left Grimsby to get myself an education. And, while I get back for Town games and family visits rather more often than is probably good for me, I've still no intention of returning 'home' for good any time soon. It's not just that, as the article points out, there isn't much to do. There are other things as well. I want my kids to attend schools that are democratically governed by local authorities, not run by shady private 'academy chains' who could be pushing any kind of agenda with almost no accountability.

Not that I'm suggesting Grimsby's problems would be instantly solved by the arrival of one more depressive, early-middle-aged malcontent with a masters in underachievement. It'd probably take me at least a fortnight.

"From this point onwards [Paul Hurst] wants our training and game standards to be very high," says our favourite player. Yes, that initial clause could be taken to imply something quite worrying about the way Town have approached the first 44 games of the season. No, you hope he doesn't mean it in that way.

Still, who knows? This is the town where our teachers would take time out to address those of us who reached out in the ink-black estuary night of our souls for something more, acting on the blind instinct that there was a larger life in an elsewhere beyond floodlit ammonia asphalt forecourts, and they would openly express a sincere and heartfelt wish that we would all fall hard and painfully on our faces.

I want my hometown to be OK. I'm not emotionally detached. I'm not one of those Grimbarians who moves far enough away to forget. I want Grimsby to do well. I don't want future generations of Grimbarians to be weighted down by their background like a thoroughbred in a handicap.

But if Grimsby really is about to vote for a party of climate change-denying morons who want to extinguish the town's brightest economic hope since the fishing was done over, what are we supposed to think? What are the wind turbine industry managers supposed to think?

And if the Grimsby branch of Ukip really is full of socialists, then Grimsby must be even more fucked up than I thought.