Cod Almighty | Diary

Not even a lot to say

6 June 2019

Open Diary writes: Come early June and it’s tempting to say that not a lot is happening, but it’s not even that good. Rather like the poem about Blackpool, there’s no wrecks and nobody’s drownded, in fact nothing to laugh at all.

In the absence of anything significant to complain about, there is nowt but speculation and recrimination. So some time in the next 10 days it seems that Town will announce a new home kit. There is even a suggestion that it might feature black and white stripes, although there are invitations to post your favourite previous version up to increase the excitement. They describe black and white stripes as "iconic", which is a word to beware these days, because what it actually means is that there’s not a lot you can do with black and white stripes except switch to white and black stripes.

You can see the problem when you look at the latest Juve offering, which is a variation on Town’s old black and white halved shirt of ten seasons back. Or perhaps you have seen it – and once is enough. No thanks, not for me.

Personally, I liked it when Town junked stripes in the late 1950s and we played in a white shirt with a black keyhole neck design with red shorts and socks. Failing that, there were the white versions with black pinstripes. There’s someone who often wears a retro 'Ciba' version at away matches at Wycombe, so at least two of us like them.

Anyway, don’t feel tempted to increase the negative heat in the Twittersphere because the club only change the shirts every season to get us to buy the latest variety on a common theme. Come to think of it, I thought there was an agreement that clubs would only change their home kit every two seasons to avoid ripping the fans off? Presumably it was less of an agreement and more of an iconic 'voluntary code', or, in other words, meaningless hype.

If it’s not speculation about the kit, it’s speculation about which player or former player is going to be the first to sign on for the new season. Evidently the board is backing the manager’s attempts to get people to commit but, perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re all playing hard to get. In any case they are probably on the beach in the Med right now and are still on a payroll somewhere until the end of June – so anyone with half a brain is going to keep their options open and see what’s on the table before sorting out where the pay cheque for July is coming from. Come July there will be plenty of people featuring as trialists in pre-season games searching for something to pay their bills at the end of the month.

People are pessimistic about attracting players to north Lincolnshire, but give me Cleethorpes over places like Blackpool, Middlesbrough and even Gillingham any day of the week. Mind you, where I live now it’s more like Cleethorpes than Cleethorpes, with a boating lake, an outdoor swimming pool by the promenade and a couple of old forts in a river. What more do you need?

Then there are the recriminations. As we all know, Town are going to do something – quite what isn’t that clear – about the floodlights and the recriminations are about it being a "cheapjack job" because they’re keeping the bottom part of the (iconic) pylons rather than replacing the whole thing.

I’m just replacing the (uniconic) guttering on the outbuilding in the garden of the new house we've bought. The previous people had water butts standing on decking which were fed by the guttering but it’s obvious that they simply let them overflow when full and over several years the decking rotted. I’ve spent a couple of hours ripping it up and getting it cleared.

Anyway, this week I went to B&Q to get some new downpipes and fittings. It’s only two small drops because I’m leaving the guttering runs intact but I still didn’t come out with any change out of £100. Then I read all the whinging about doing a "cheapjack job" if you didn’t also replace the parts which were still perfectly functional and could be reused. So, on that line of thinking, there are people who reckon that I should shell out another couple of hundred quid on 15 metres of guttering, 10 brackets and some end and corner units.

I don’t get it. It just seems to me that there are people who are just too keen to see others spend money for no good reason.

An outlay of £250,000 on ground improvements sounds like a lot but when you get into building improvements it doesn't buy a great deal. I was in a tennis club which had a small clubhouse which we wanted to update and modernise. One of the members was an architect and she produced all the plans for free – and then the quotes came in for eye-watering numbers for the actual work. It would cost about £40,000 for new windows, a new kitchen and the conversion of two changing rooms and toilets.

This is what happens in a world where there is no real news – just anniversaries of historical events, speculation about unlikely future events and the trailing of future commercial business opportunities.

Today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day and I can safely predict that this will be the lead item even though most of us will have known this for the whole of our lives. It’s no news at all. On the other hand, it’s my birthday, and a big one, and I'll bet you didn’t know that. So don’t complain about today’s diary because it means there’s more real news in this piece than there is going to be on the TV news.