Cod Almighty | Diary
If you work it out, tell me what you find
23 November 2015
Many exiled Town fans left the Grimsby area, in the first instance, to study. Many don't go back afterwards, because of what they see as the greater employment opportunities in other places. My story half fits the template. I left the area to study, but then when I didn't go back afterwards it was because I figured being on the dole would be more fun somewhere else.
It's not just the work thing that drives – or keeps – exiles away. It's not even being hassled on the street for the transgressive combined possession of hair that is longer than half an inch and a penis that is any length at all (and even that sort of unpleasantness seems less prevalent than it used to be). There are more subtle collusions of culture, mindset and circumstance at play. There is a curious local aversion to colour, ornament and informality. Witness the outrage at the pretty sign on the prom which renders "Cleethorpes" in a child's sweetly untidy handwriting. Witness the uncomprehending stares when your original/regular Diary steps into the Rutland Arms for a pre-match pint wearing a stripy top without the crest of a football team on it.
Witness, too, the small-c conservatism which is unable to countenance any possibility of change, even for the better. Boom in renewable energy which might reverse 40 years of local economic decline? Let's vote Ukip – the party of head-in-the-sand, fossil-fuelled partying like it's 1959. New football stadium and associated development with regeneration at the fore, potentially creating hundreds of jobs in one of the most deprived areas in western Europe? Let's cite two-decades-outdated stereotypes about fans and petition the council to strangle it at birth.
No sooner has Freeman Street been mooted as a potential alternative site for Town's new stadium, then, than the usual suspects are posing for the local paper's concerned face photograph and evoking the usual transparently flimsy images of 1980s-style hooligan carnage. As one observer rather marvellously pointed out at the weekend, we can't be having anti-social behaviour around Freeman Street, can we.
The Mariners Trust, meanwhile, has published on its website a superb response to recent developments on the new stadium. It gives some hitherto unseen context to the consultants' report that appeared last week, explaining where the club and North East Lincolnshire Council are coming from, and it sets out the trust's own position. By contrast with pretty much all the communications that come from the football club on the same subject, it's balanced, it's open-minded, it sounds well-informed and convincing, it makes me inclined to trust rather than cynicism, and it's written so that I can actually understand every word it says.
If you haven't read it yet, read it now. It's a supporters' trust doing exactly what a supporters' trust should be doing. Well done there!
That'll do me for today, but not until we've got unreasonably excited about The Actual Football. In case you missed it, Saturday's excellent win at Eastleigh takes Town, for the first time this season, to the league position they finished up in last season – third place in the Conference – and closes the gap on top spot to five points. Paul Hursts both sounds and looks uncharacteristically ebullient off the back of it too. Don't underestimate the determination of a quiet man, as one ultimately successful psychopath said in 2002.