Cod Almighty | Diary

1984, Paradise Lost and Frankenstein - that's your holiday reading list sorted

20 December 2024

It’s the last Friday diary before the big day, the last time you, dear reader, will have the opportunity to hear a few words about the jolly old man who, with a ho, ho, ho always promises to bring so much joy to our lives. So, your A46 Diary would like to wish you all a very merry Day of Hate ahead of the game against Swindon Holloway Town tomorrow.

It was Orwell in his book 1984 who introduced the idea of a celebration of hate in the concept Two Minutes Hate (it was Orwell who left out the apostrophe, so don't @ me). Each day citizens were expected to watch a film depicting the hateful characteristics of the opposition leader of the moment and vent their frustrations in an openly aggressive and hostile manner. A cheaper, more easily edited and more British version of The Purge. The central character, Winston Smith, had no trouble joining in:

"A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."

Tomorrow, the blow lamp will be directed at Holloway, the not so much jolly old ho, ho, hoing dodgy Santa as Steptoe-like sinister chuckling villain of our pre-Christmas Ninety Minutes' Hate. No, change that, he's not a Steptoe, nothing of the loveable about this old rogue. Humourless, conniving old bastard. An Emperor Palpatine, a bloodless Dracula, a Voldemort, a Frankenstein's monster with none of the charm (and I can't see him reading Milton's Paradise Lost either).

Holloway's time as manager was a microcosm of decades of GTFC, with the disparities between quality and dross, optimism and fatalism as vast and vaster than ever before. As always with Town, adversity seemed to hit harder: ITV Digital made us suffer more than anyone else, hiring big-named-but-fallen-to-drink managers ruined us more than anyone else, sticking with former players as managers through thin and thin created a longer run of games without a win than anyone else. And lockdown. Lockdown killed us more than it killed anyone else. We were the zombie at the back of the horde, the shuffler who barely even realised there was fresh meat to be had. We were the zombie that couldn't get enough brains to cover a broken Dorito.

Given that the first half of that season was all on the telly and bad football on the telly is always the worst football, it's hard to say for certain that Holloway's Town were the worst, the bluntest, the limpest team we've had in the last 40 years, but if there were blunter or limper I must have blotted them from my mind in a reflexive trauma-avoidance mental shutdown.

But is it all on him? No. He's not a Palpatine or a Voldemort, or a bloodless Dracula, certainly not a Big Brother. So, Frankenstein's monster he almost is, another victim in this internecine warfare that is football, yes, but don't imagine I’m suggesting any sympathy for him. The creature in Shelley’s book has compassion, a desire for companionship, is driven to his evil deeds by the evil treatment he receives and so he may be argued as an innocent victim merely playing out the role of monster that was forced upon him. Not Holloway, he is the agent in his own villainy, a Frankenstein's monster who sharpens his darts rather than reads Paradise Lost.

And Frankenstein himself? Well, that’s where the comparison falls short. Our own mad scientist was driven not by grief or the fear of death but by that dark expedience of hubris, a feeling to whom tomorrow’s villain is surely no stranger.

So, enjoy the three points if they come along, enjoy them more than usual, and also try to remember that hate isn't the way forward, that after the 90 minutes there will be room and need for love, something that we have now. We can leave the past behind. We can look forward. We can imagine a flat-capped loser in rearview mirrors.

And, win, lose or draw, we can wish each other a very merry Christmas.