Cod Almighty | Diary

Take Me On. Take On Me

28 April 2023

Who have Scunny got tomorrow? Well, the best way of finding out is of course to ask Morten Harket of the band A-ha, though he insists on letting his band play lots of fiddly keyboard bits before he tells you. 

Soooo, did you enjoy Tuesday's friendly against Crewe? Tomorrow we have another friendly against the bra-prodding lunatics of Stevenage, and...what? It's still important to them? There's something at stake? Well, call me Gladys and paint my knees green, I've just looked at the table and they need to beat us tomorrow to be sure of promotion! Stevenage? But they're shit! I hope we can perform Grimsby Town's infamous party-pooping trick and at least keep them sweating until the last day.

There's no reason why we can't, of course. A peculiar feature of this season has been the opposition's performance rarely showing any correlation with their team's position in the league. I thought the two best teams we've seen at BP this season were Swindon and Doncaster, both of whom are now treading water along with us in the murky waters of midtable obscurity. The lower down the football ladder you go the more brownian motion, injuries and luck dictate results, so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. It must be hard for the players to keep going at this stage of the season, and the nine-day gap between tomorrow's game and the last game at home to the a-wimblin' and a-womblin' bonkers Mike Batt will be a particularly difficult gap to bridge in motivational terms.

It should, of course, have been a seven-day gap, but the cost of living crisis will be briefly interrupted whilst a billionaire puts on a very large hat. Makes ya proud. Queen Matha doncha lav er you could bottle her blad, etc. 

Anyone wishing to see messageboards at their worst should check out the IamWacca thread on the Fishy. Anyone wishing to maintain any faith in the future of humanity should go and do something else. I'm not going to summarise it because it is a load of bollocks. Oh, hang on, I have just summarised it. There you go.

I'm going to tell you a tale from my own life about someone who I shall call Mr. Clubs. Now, we worked together and we got on well because we were both music bores and as lazy as could be. However, I always managed to do the basic amount of work needed to get by, whilst Mr. Clubs was literally useless. Always late, always shirking, hopelessly incompetent when forced to perform a task. A waste of everyone's time in meetings, waffling endlessly on about irrelevancies. We all know, or have known, someone like him, I’m sure. When Mr Clubs was eventually forced out he went to work at another company but we remained friends.

Now, the new company was less tolerant and Mr. Clubs was almost immediately in trouble, being subject to various disciplinary procedures. When he told me and his girlfriend about them, you got the impression that the new firm were a bunch of ogres, horribly unfair bullies who were making his life a misery. But this is the point. I had worked with him, and I knew he was useless, and my sympathies were entirely with the employers. But his girlfriend and anyone else he told were convinced that Mr. Clubs was an honest and hard working individual who had been treated abysmally and that his new company was reprehensible and cruel. After he had told his tales of supposed victimisation his girlfriend was ready to march upon the new company with pitchforks and raze them to the ground for being so unfair to her wonderful boyfriend.

Workplaces are like relationships. Unless you are one of the participants you simply do not know what the dynamics are, who is telling the truth, who is responsible for any problems and what happens when nobody else is watching or listening. The best thing you can do is butt out and let them get on with it as best they can.
What has this got to do with our beloved Mariners? Absolutely nothing, obviously. I'm just having a chat. Chewing the fat, letting you know about this and that. Something about a cat in a hat. 

Thank you to 'Tommo' on Twitter for pointing out the current excitement at the top of Scottish League Two. Currently, East Fife are fourth and Forfar are fifth. They play each other next week. If it finishes Forfar 5 East Fife 4 then Forfar will go fourth and East Fife will be fifth. But if its Forfar 4 East Fife 5 then East Fife will be fourth and Forfar will be fifth. I’m sure we will all be keeping one eye on that particular battle.

Good luck to anyone going to Stevenage tomorrow. I don't mean the Town fans, but to anyone else, because if you are going to Stevenage without good reason your life obviously isn't working out according to plan. I used to live near there, and the whole place seems to be built out of cruel lego and dead souls. It's like a new town built specifically for people who are too bland and too pointless to live in Luton.

To the Town army, do us proud and remember to wear your best underwear. You never know who's going to see it. Cheeky!