Cod Almighty | Diary

The Windmills of Your Mind

29 November 2024

A weekend without Town should be a cause for gloom, but right now it feels like a good time to take a break. Last weekend your A46 Diary had been secretly hoping that Storm Bert would postpone the fixture. But it didn't. And we lost. And many screen inches have already been dedicated to the failure. And so, we need to move on.

A fixture this weekend might have given the opportunity to do just that. A fixture this weekend would have given us a break with FA Cup action, but we had the misfortune of a home draw in the first round. A fixture this weekend might have given us a chance of a confidence-boosting away result. A fixture this weekend would have given us the chance to deploy comforting clichés, like away results boosting confidence in players that look scared to death at home. Not a cliché, a platitude.

But there isn't a fixture this weekend. No opportunity, no quick chance for a little redemption, just an emptiness, a void, a hole to be filled with boardgames and trips to the pictures. A facade of happy distractions blurred by raindrops on windows, windscreens, bus shelters and the glasses of passersby.

We're stuck, held fast by increasingly bitter recrimination. Feels like old times. Are we destined to forever spin around polarised positions on the ones who operate the club and the team, like stagnant water replenished by drips from a rusty tap swirling around a half-blocked drain? Sounds like life as a football club supporter. Just ask the supporters of Swindon, Morecombe and Carlisle, even Man City

Moving on is a circle, a spiral, turning up, turning down, rarely flattening, often frustrating, sometimes thrilling, usually accurate: a harmony of pleasures in the up cycle, a discordance of self-harm in the down, a congruence of factors that explain these moments of enchantment and disenchantment, reasons the spell we so willingly fall under is strengthening or weakening its grip.

But not now. Explanation is a phantasm, a shadow at the edge of our awareness, something that we cannot quite see and certainly can't grasp. This is a rare level of swirl and churn, making it all the harder to accept the turn, to ride the jarring gear changes, to manage the juddering halts and reverses in the spiral, to ignore the faults and the failures despite the adversities and the victories. It's harder to somehow not conflate and separate these two things and use one to blame the other, to convince ourselves that it is one or the other, home or away, the black or the white.

It's harder and harder to remember that we are both: the black and the white, the dark and the light, the failure and the success. Too hard in times like this. In the coming weekend of emptiness, we will find little to satisfy us. We can only wait.