The Diary

Cod Almighty | Diary

Prizes are made for those who fail

17 December 2021

Regular diary readers will know the importance of fibre in the diet. They will also know that BOTB had an unscheduled outage last week and Deviant Diary kindly captured that freaky Friday feeling. The bad news is that the outbreak of relative sanity is over, for I have returned.

The other bad news is that Town don’t have a game tomorrow. Well we do, but it is an FA Trophy game. Therefore it technically exists but doesn't show up on the radar, like a passing wasp.

As far as I can tell, the FA Trophy was founded with the worthy aim of allowing non-league teams to experience a chance of Wembley glory. The thing is though, right, that as a Town fan I've already been to Wembley loads of times, see, and I'm only planning to go back for play-offs and the FA Cup Final and a Cardiacs comeback tour with Tim Smith as a hologram. So to me the FA trophy is an irritation, a tallest of the seven dwarves contest in which victory is just a higher stratum of defeat. Do you know who won it last year? Of course you don’t. No-one outside the stadium cared, and they probably felt a burning sense of futility by the time they reached the tube station on the return journey. We're playing Stockport away as well, just to add another layer of boredom.

Town have also been attacked by the coronas, which may have implications for Tuesday’s visit of the Borehams, possibly even postponement. Doubtless your Monday and Tuesday diaries will have more on that story as it breaks. Perhaps we will be virused out to such an extent that we will be unable to play again until the end of January when we have bought another new team. Perhaps.

As part of my extensive research I tried to listen to plucky little Paul Hurst’s pre-match interview, but I got about two minutes in and my mind started to wander. Did anyone make it to the end? Our manager’s tenure is currently a controversial topic of course. The thing about football fans is that they all tend to be mates when their team is winning, but if it all goes King Kong they suddenly realise that a lot of their own supporters are a bunch of tosspots who can't tell shit from ice cream and they regret once hugging them when the team scored a last minute winner at Shrewsbury.

I'm not on The Fishy but there is one poster who has been around a long time who, in my ever-so humble opinion, is wrong on every single topic he has ever written on, football related or not. What's more, he is wrong in a really patronising way, immediately accusing anybody who questions him as being 'uneducated' When Town were top his pompous posts were an entertaining diversion, now we're rubbish again I sincerely want to throw him in the sea. But if results improve I would have no hesitation in hugging him. Indeed we may even become lovers.

That's the nature of supporting a club. We are all, for all our differences, in a way, a family group with one shared concern, a bond that is unbreakable, one goal that unites us. Indeed, being a Town fan, it's unlikely to ever be more than one goal. See what I did there? Marvellous.

Afore I go, I must link you to a short film about Ashley Cole’s visit to Grimsby Ancient Mariners. It is a nice, touching piece of work, and may well feature some people you know, including a CA diarist in what could very loosely be termed 'action' [that body swerve put my hip out just by looking at it - ed].

Am I doing a diary on Christmas Eve? I've no idea. So I might be wishing you a Happy Christmas or I might not. You'll just have to live with the uncertainty. Be strong.

And, oh yeah, one more thing, Sinead O'Connor. The woman had one hit in 1990 with a Prince cover version, and yet every time she now opens her mouth to babble nonsense the newspapers duly report it as though it's the latest mutterings from the Oracle. She's a karaoke singer, damnit! It doesn't matter if she's shaved her head or grown a Mohican or thinks the Pope is made of lettuce or Jesus liked mince. It doesn't matter if she identifies as man, a woman, a cat or a set of occasional tables. I don't care if she's been baptised in fairy liquid or holds a pants cleansing ceremony the second Sunday after epiphany, or has changed her name to Shahuda Sadauqat and has a daughter called Yeshua (these last two are actually true). Singing a Prince song whilst crying is something that people have done in every city centre at closing time in Britain for the last thirty years. It is not special! Please, please let her go back into obscurity. She is duff and there is no call for her.