Cod Almighty | Diary

"On hearing the last cuckoo in Spring"

11 June 2020

Town fans generally seem to think that our season was pretty much over before the lockdown, and we were sauntering gaily along with the mid-table boys on the way to next season's promotion party. However, I asked my friend Neil Ferguson to model how many points we could have accumulated if the season had carried on. He came up with 45,978 points. That would have been enough for the play-offs, surely? I feel cheated.

They're selling GTFC face masks now? Since Fenty did, erm, whatever he did, and put Phillip Day in the spotlight, the club has been better run, communications have improved dramatically and you get the feeling that grown-ups are now in charge. Clearly our merchandise is now on trend as well, catering for the new fashion of looking like a sewage operative.

Have you ever lived in a far-right, far-left, communist-fascist, anarcho-collective before? Interesting times. As someone put it on Twitter, future historians will be asked which quarter of 2020 they specialise in. The one thing Bottom-of-the-Barrel Diary can say for sure is that football - glorious, ludicrous, thrilling, exasperating football - will be back, played in front of full stadiums. There will be new heroes, new villains, terrible refereeing decisions and Saturday nights whose atmosphere depends entirely on what happened in Walsall four hours earlier. I have to remind myself of this because, at the moment, there is no denying that football is currently the least interesting thing that is happening – or isn’t happening – in the world.

This makes writing a football diary rather difficult. Speculation is futile, jumpers-for-goalposts nostalgia has never been my thing, and, unlike Retro Diary of old, I have no interest in football stadiums, except for having a preference for a low roof.

Luckily, to fill the gap, I'm currently engaged in a thrilling beef with Deviant Diary. It's a bit of a West Coast/East Coast, Biggie and Tupac scenario. Sadly, after three months of lockdown, I'm definitely the Biggieest of the two. Which means I get to claim the East coast, which is undeniably the more geographically appropriate for Mariners’ fans. Could I call myself the notorious BOTB, I wonder? Best not.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes. Deviant accused me of being a cuckoo in the Cod Almighty nest, which is a typically alliterative and rhythmically pleasing piece of prose from the match report meister. Why he thinks I'm a cuckoo I don't know – but I would point out that the cuckoo has a very successful strategy. Once hatched it pushes out any other eggs and young it finds and takes over the nest of the host. Yeah? You get what I'm saying?

Shots. Fired.

As a coda, I'll mention that Michael Levitt, Nobel Laureate and winner of a Nobel Prize for interpreting complex data, has a report on Covid coming out this week. It should be the definitive work on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in pandemics. I urge people to read and digest, and, if they disagree with his findings, to contact him on Twitter. He is a brilliant man, yet humble and self-effacing with it. He especially loves hearing from arts graduates. Hit 'em up.