Cod Almighty | Diary

Dressed in your mother's bridal veil

20 January 2023

People of Earth. I come to speak before you at a vital crossroads for humanity. Tomorrow, Grimsby Town play Harrogate. The weather forecast is decent. The pitch has had a rest. The corner flags have been ironed. By five o'clock tomorrow we will know the result of the battle between the happy clappers and the miserable moaning bastards.

I still don't know which side I stand with. I am by nature, a miserable moaning bastard, and to be fair the Grimsby Town team of the last fifteen years has provided plenty of fuel for the moanometer. By my reckoning, and remember research isn’t my strong point, the highest we have finished in the league since 2007 is about tenth in the second division. There is a whole generation of Town fans who think that we are a club who plops around the bottom of the league and the non-league wastelands. If we ever made the third tier, it would doubtless seem to them as though we had reached the giddy heights of glory.

For older fans such as myself, the lower half of the second division is the bottom of the barrel, and non-league is below the barrel bottom and several feet into the earth's crust. Already there will be differences in perception; where you think Town 'should be' in the league depends on your life experience. The clappers will point to Bury, Darlington, Torquay and of course the Scuntonians and tell us to be glad to be alive and kicking. The MMBs will tell us to look at Accrington, Bournemouth, Watford and Fleetwood and suggest we get our shit together.

The abolition of re-election and the opening of the trapdoor between league and non-league meant there were many, many more opportunities for failure than there used to be for your average small club, and more opportunities for success for your ego-driven tinpots like Forest Green. In other words, the picture is more complicated than it used to be. I think both the clappers and the MMBs have good points. What do I think? Um. Aaah. Oh bollocks, let's talk about Alex Chilvers.

Alex Chilvers was the Town fan who appeared on Landscape Artist of the Year, a programme in which he and his fellow competitors had to paint Whitstable Harbour. He told host Stephen Mangan that he was a Town fan and Mangan, after an eight months pregnant pause, announced how sorry he was to hear that. Chilvers then told Mangan that he usually only drew footballers and dinosaurs, and admitted it was unlikely that he would see any in Whitstable Harbour. The series is currently being repeated and it is a pleasant diversion for the Town fan with too much time on his hands.

Not only are there no footballers in Whitstable harbour but there are, according to Plucky Little Grimsby Town manager Paul Hurst, none currently on their way to BP. The clappers will tell you that there is plenty of time yet, that fans are impatient, that MMBs should just take a chill pill. There is a problem with that standpoint. If they stopped playing in January to allow the transfer activity to be concluded, that would be fine, but get this, THE SEASON IS STILL GOING ON. January has a lot of points to be played for. If you are desperately short of someone, like we are with a target man, it might be better to get someone in fifteen potential points earlier. I'm with the MMBs on this one.

That lack of urgency reminds me of something. Every Town fan will remember that moment when they read something on a message board that was so bizarre it made their brain bleed. Mine came when I read someone saying that they 'would rather lose the points now than later in the season!'

Habitual browsers of The Fishy may well have noticed a message from 'Smokin Joe' on the January Transfer Window thread, which read, in exactly these words:

"no one will sine for hurst because he is a boring twit."

I like Joe's style, and I like it a lot. I'd like to see Joe do a CA diary, because middle-class Guardian readers pontificating about Town have dominated this particular arena for too long. If you're reading this, Joe, there’s a spot for you next Friday.

Finally, Cyril, GTFC's final game of the season has been put back from Saturday 6th to Monday the 8th May. Why? Because the commoners are supposed to gather around their TV sets gasping in awe as a man who needs someone to put his toothpaste on the brush sits there and has a very heavy hat put on him. A heavy hat, incidentally, which is worth more than Grimsby Town Football Club.

Doubtless he will be wearing an array of medals for shooting enemy pheasants and tutting at footmen, making us look up to His Imperious Wonderful Glorious Indomitable Majesty even more. Gawd bless 'im. Well worth moving a whole series of Football League fixtures back for, and you won't find me complaining. Indeed, on that historic Saturday afternoon I'll be standing outside Buckingham palace wearing a Union Jack waistcoat, waving a flag and very probably wetting myself. It’s what being British is all abaht.