Cod Almighty | Diary

Announce Mick Lynch!

13 January 2023

Awww, jeezy peeps man! Thirteen days into January, 78 pages on the Fishy January Transfer thread, and not one incomer for BOTB diary to dissect with his precision football analytics tweezer. I’m going to have to talk about Swindon instead.

Swindon, Swindon, Swindon. What is there to say about Swindon that hasn't already been said? My regular reader may know that Swindon isn't a place that holds particularly good memories for this particular diarist thanks to a diving incident involving Jan Age Fjortoft in the early nineties. It was a long time ago and I should just let it go but, I can see him, his brown skin shining in the sun. You've got your top pulled down and the radio on, baby. Whoah, what on earth am I talking about?

Incidentally, it is now nearly 40 years since Don Henley's The Boys of Summer was first released. Forty years before that, WW2 was still going on. Forty years before that was 1904. History isn't as long as you think it is.

Is anyone still following this? Swindon are 8th and we are 16th. Swindon looked pretty good when they beat us at the BP earlier this season so we travel in hope more than expectation. I've been trying to think of a joke about being at BP raising my BP but I can't think of one. Feel free to add your own here. Town, at the moment of writing, still have very few strikers in a country ironically awash with them, which won't help, and like most Town games this season it defies prediction and will depend very much on whether we are in fight or flight mode.

Has the word Swindon ever made you laugh? Its appearance in the Spinal Tap song Diva Fever (can't go back to London, can't go back to Swindon, can't go back to Waterloo!) normally raises a smile, and fans of old-timey Brit sitcom The Office will doubtless remember the Slough offices being made to accommodate 'the Swindon lot' after their branch closes. There is a reason Gervais chose Slough and Swindon as the locales for this series; both represent the death of the soul in geographical form, a kind of purgatory between the beauties of the countryside and the culture and bustle of the cities, filled with ugliness, hopelessness, yearning and sales reps called Keith. Swindon, like many other places including our beloved home town, has been the victim of awful planning, hopeless councils, Tory governments and low-key corruption since time immemorial. I've been to Swindon a few times and it is, however, no worse than most places. Indeed, it is much better than Reading, which is admittedly a low bar.

My mate Terry once said something that really stuck with me. There is no need for anything – anything – to be ugly. Factories, houses, motorways, housing estates – all could be made beautiful, at least from the outside. If you ever see anything ugly in Britain, it is there because someone couldn't be bothered or was trying to save money on landscaping (the cheapest element in new developments) or was just in a rush. Remember that next time you criss-cross Britain and find yourself thinking what a dump much of it is.

Back to footy. The Boys of Summer cannot surely be expected to go through this season unaided. We need reinforcements, and we need them now. What are the chances of Plucky Little Grimsby Town Manager Paul Hurst unveiling a Billy the Fish-style surprise before kick-off tomorrow? I don't know. I'm just a bloke writing a diary. But wouldn't it be great? Anyone will do. You know, give us something to talk about. Let us enjoy the golden weeks and days between us signing a player and finding out that he isn't as good as we hoped he would be.

It's the hope that kills you, but it is the hope that keeps you alive as well.

UTFM.