Cod Almighty | Diary

Which one is the Etihad and which one is the Emirates?

21 September 2021

Daubney Diary would like to take the baton from Miss Guest Diary and weigh in on this Blundell Park parking thing. Sort it, Grimsbys. A 20 minute walk is a good thing, not a bad thing. Get out of practice and before you know it you'll be asking to be dropped off right outside the door of the mobility scooter place. There's no turning back once you enter, moving slowly past the note on the door of "No tyre-kickers (with replacement hips or knees, our insurance doesn't cover them)" as you do.

I use the singular of "the mobility scooter place" but locals will know that there are several thousand such showrooms between the precinct and Meggies alone. At least. Popping up like mushrooms in prime tourist real estate where you'd expect a candy floss stall or the saucy souvenir pen shop to be. My fear is that it's only a matter of time before the Arnold Palmer Crazy Golf will be lost to a mobility scooter park with squadrons of the blighters doing half-pipes. And what a loss that would be, especially for this dude. His visit in 2019 was the 482nd course on a crazy crazy golf tour that makes the Cod Almighty team's obssession with grammar and funicular railways seem normal. Ish. 

I'm not saying Cleethopes and GY being to mobility scooters what Modena is to Ferrari is all bad. Town managers have been using the ease of their availability to lure thirty-something players to the area for years but it's a slippery slope. I was shocked to find my uncle in a wheelchair on my last pre-Covid visit. When we asked what happened to his legs, he said nothing but the "nurse said she could get me a wheelchair so I took it." A gateway drug! He'll be doing very slow donuts on the prom next time we see him.

There is a drastic alternative that after two seasons of Covid, no one wants. We can fill the ground with fake people and avoid the hassles of parking and walking altogether. Award-winning Lloyd Griffith vehicle Ted Lasso has been doing it like this. Only a matter of time before this technology is used to fill Man City's ground or used relentlessly to mock them by rival fans.  

Sorry, there's not much GTFC happening and it was either this scooter nonsense or a round-up of the Telewag headlines and no-one wants to... hang about, what's this? A screening of Jaws in a swimming pool with a special appearance from someone in the film? Cancel the funicular tour and sign me up. An unbeaten football team, crazy golf and now this. Spoilt. For feelgood purposes we'll just ignore the adjacent headline of Ten-mile A18 closure brings misery to motorists with 30-minute diversion through Grimsby which surely could have ended without the last two words.

I'd better end with some football. Chants. We need to sort them out. Concerned Town fans have been tweeting about what is, when you consider it, a good problem: new and returning fans don't know the words, and in some cases the speed, of our back catalogue of terrace songs. Join the discussion via our feedback form or on Twitter as we attempt to come up with a solution that preferably doesn't involve a load of Lincoln fans laughing at us in the same way some of our lot did when they handed out hymn sheets. The suggestion on Twitter that we get the bloke from Ted Lasso to make another GTFC video surely has to be a contender. Laters.