Cod Almighty | Diary
Easy to ignore (again)
7 December 2022
Middle-Aged Diary can't remember the match, can't remember the smallest thing about it, except that we must have won. It would have been in the early autumn of 2015 and what I do remember is the feeling of profound contentment as I sat outside the No 2 Refreshment Rooms, pint of Hancock's in hand, waiting for the train back to Manchester. I'd not have been too unhappy if it had never arrived, a sentiment which appears to have become a cornerstone of the business strategy of Transpennine Express. The sun was beginning to sink and the big red sky suggested immense possibilities.
It was not just that we'd won. Before the game, we'd met in the Trust Bar, a very happy meeting as the book We are Town, the distilled essence of three decades of fanzine writing about the Mariners, progressed towards reality. It may have been the meeting where Pete Green shared their page designs, with Dave Roberts, Nigel Lowther, and me. The book - both its content and its production - was an expression of the ways we weave our lives around the club.
That word "club", a relic of the nineteenth century when ex-public schoolboys organised themselves according to their common tastes, or local clergy sought ways to engage the interests of working class youths. Those clubs grew from there. For some the FC has become Football Conglomerate, for us it is Football Community, the spirit transcending sport so that even those who consider it 22 people kicking an inflated bladder still know that success is good for the town.
It is why we keep going. It is why, even in hard and contentious times (and 2015-16 was an oasis in two bleak decades), there are always pockets of great good will.
Long live the Mariners.