Cod Almighty | Diary

Groundhog Day

15 June 2023

Your Guest Diarist is full of Summer this week. Brimful of sights, sounds and smells. Young cygnets - thriving on a fenland river! Cauliflowers, sown in October, nurtured and ready to eat! Poppies, foxgloves, roses, caterpillars! So giddy that I have invited two people round for afternoon tea at the weekend. Small talk! Oh shit, I am very out of practice at that. But the strawberries are peaking, home made sausage rolls, haslet sandwiches, a big red velvet cake and scones laced with strawberry compote - if I keep feeding 'em there will be no way there will be much talking. And I will have one eye on the test match thoughout.

Football will not be mentioned, but every day brings the new season closer. I see from todays published fixtures that Brighton are very likely, on the opening day, to do to poor Luton what they did to the Mariners. There was no real gulf in class when we played Luton was there? But Brighton was a very different matter. Surely Luton are doomed.

From what I can gather next season you will be very lucky to be able to buy seats together in the popular stands without a season ticket. Popular? I mean Pontoon and the er, Findus. That stand needs a name. Not a Norris the Rubberman sponsored type name but a name that will stick forever. Maybe, if they keep patience and faith for long enough, we can name it after Shorty. Alan Buckley only got a room (or was it a suite? A junior suite at best). So the Town owners set the bar pretty damn high. The Osmond stand too. I think we have paid our dues to Mr Osmond now after all these years. I remember, as a young man doing some computer work for Osmond Aerosols, reading punched cards in and then punching out new cards on a UNIVAC 1004 - a 1959 vintage computer that needed routine oiling.

Finally I want to pay tribute to one of our own who died since I last wrote to you. A teenage hero of mine. The mighty T.S. McPhee, born in Humberston who always had a soft spot for Grimsby. Tony was a bluesman through and through - his band played with John Lee Hooker when they sent him over for a UK tour without a band in the mid sixties. Then came the Groundhogs - Blues Obituary, Thank Christ for the bomb, Split - three loud raucous albums that earned them a support slot on the infamous Rolling Stones tour of 1971. An old mate of mine bumped in to Tony (T.S. was an affectation standing for Tough Shit) and bonded with him over Grimsby roots declaring him to be the absolute salt of the earth. I met him when he played an accoustic country blues set with Jo Ann Kelly (a lady who looked like an English provincial 1950s primary school teacher but who sang the blues wondrously and fiercely). There were so few at the gig that we all had a drink together afterwards and it made my day to buy him a pint. But no more time for nostalgia, there's a long row to hoe. See yer.