Cod Almighty | Diary
We're not from London
3 January 2017
Farewell, then, to the Imperial. After standing empty for more than a year, Blundell Park's local will now – like so many other pubs – be converted to flats after North East Lincs council granted planning permission.
The loss of any pub is a bloody tragedy. It doesn't matter whether it's your preferred pub or not. Like every pub everywhere, the Imp meant something to many, and an awful lot to some. Like every pub everywhere, its very joists and mortar retained the echoes of decades past, of countless scenes, raucous and melancholy. Both of those moods, and many others, will inevitably play across the bars and tables of any pub so close to the football – and perhaps to the home of Town in particular.
Finding a really excellent pub can be the making of an away trip. Straight away your original/regular Diary is thinking of places like Macclesfield's Railway View, the Great Western in Wolverhampton, the New Beehive and the Corn Dolly in Bradford, and the astonishingly good Coopers Tavern in Burton upon Trent. And I'm remembering about 15 years ago, when I was starting to go to matches with a new group of people. One Saturday, some of us went along to the Vine before West Brom away – a joyful, endless cacophony of a place where the chicken tikka was going down as well as the cask beer. Before the day was out we'd hatched a plan to create a new digital fanzine – although it was only a little later that we agreed on the name Cod Almighty.
CA isn't the only Grimsby-related institution to have been conceived in a pub, of course. In this we follow the noble tradition of our football club itself. Don't forget that GTFC was formed in 1878 after a group of local cricketers got chatting at the Wellington Arms and decided one of these new-fangled soccer outfits would be just the thing to keep themselves fit through the winter. Many ideas people have in pubs turn out to be great, while others prove disastrous in the cold light of sobriety. I'll leave you to fit particular ideas into particular boxes.
Mourn the Imp, then. Whether your matchday drinking, dreaming and two-pint punditry have gone on there, or at the Rutland, or elsewhere – or indeed, even if you haven't been in a pub since 1984 – mourn it. As we close the doors on the Imp, we call time on a piece of our football club.
In other news today, wahey, bloody hell, we beat Carlisle! Smiley Marcus is, as you might expect, more than usually smiley as he hails his players' performance in overcoming hosts who had lost only once all season before yesterday and not at all at home. Check out Baz Whittleton's match report, debut goal for Adi Yussuf and everything.
Finally, it looks like Town have gone back to Smiley Marcus's old stomping ground of Solihull Moors with a new offer for that Jamey Osborne, and the Hartlepool chairman is turning himself inside out to answer questions about the departure to Shrewsbury of former Town defender Toto Nsiala. It's probably fair to say Toto's fortunes during his brief stay in the north-east were, I don't know, mixed? While GTFC fans remain divided about his status and abilities as a footballer, we're probably all relieved as hell that we don't have to play him again when we travel to Hartlepool this weekend.