Cod Almighty | Diary

When did asking "When did X ever win three points on a Saturday?" ever win three points on a Saturday?

29 July 2021

Middle-Aged Diary is going to have a potter around the wilderness of topical Grimsby Town affairs. You are welcome to join me, but I won't be offended if you don't.

A combination of my dodgy eyesight and the official site editor's has the the Town manager branching out in two unexpected directions today. Am I the only one who started on the headline "Paul Hurst joins Grateful D..." and filled in the name of some legendary Californinan rockers? Legendary as in my young, Punk-dominated days they were a band everyone had heard of but no one had actually heard. More Devon Diary's thing, I suspect; I don't suppose they did a cover of Suzanne?

The potential for confuson is no doubt entirely intentional. The Grateful Dads are raising money for the Sheffield Children's Cancer and Leukaemia Ward by performing a skydive. They may have been joined by Jack Lester, but probably were not.

While I am pointing you at fundraisers, friends of the family of John King have started a Go Fund Me appeal to help meet the costs of his funeral. King died at the age of 58, after working 41 years at Grimsby Town, and it is evident from the Grimsby Telegraph report that the circumstances were especially difficult. We pass on our condolences during a painful time.

Hurst is clearly a man of many parts, a football manager by day, a rock musician by night and, in his quiet moments, a bibliophile. It is lovely to learn that even as he is away at a training camp in Cheshire, he is thinking of buying "one or two more editions."

If I were him, I'd be tempted by the first New York edition of Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, a book with much to recommend it, not least a passing but positive reference to the town of Grimsby. At £900, the seller might be persuaded to take one of Holloway's signings in part-exchange. The Bard is more expensive of course, although the name itself would be enough to stop that Philistine barb "When did Shakespeare ever win you three points on a Saturday?"