Cod Almighty | Diary

Baby gone to sweat town

19 June 2025

Nothing to see here, move along please. Well actually, don’t, because I’ve got stuff to say. I can’t promise it’ll be interesting (well, I’ll tell you now — it isn’t) but it’s my duty to fill a void so, you know, humour me. I’ve got nothing to work with. Jamestown’s in full power mode, overheating the laptop, yet we’re left here twiddling thumbs.

Your West Yorkshire Diary’s life has been much more pleasant since coming off social media. Instead of getting hung up on transfer activity, or fans’ increasingly unstable attitude towards transfer activity, I’ve started to notice other things in the world, like how many different types of bird visit our front garden on any given day, and that wild poppies have poked their heads out from the cracks between some old beige bricks by the train station.

Two hedgehogs started visiting our back garden last year, and they’ve returned this year. We thought they were more interesting than the people who knock on our front door, so we’ve put the Ring camera in a small animal box where we leave bits of food for them. We used to leave the food on a plate, out in the open, but the neighbourhood cat who’s an absolute menace (although name a neighbourhood cat that isn’t a menace) has been eating it before the hedgehogs can. And if it’s not the cat, it’s the crows. Apparently, crows can remember faces for up to 20 years, so don’t wrong a crow. We live not far from a cemetery so I’m on my best behaviour when I cut through it on the way to the station. It’s not yet been 20 years since I visited the delightful Transylvanian town of Turda, in 2006, where crows were (and are) abundant, and I can’t be confident that I didn’t tease at least a couple of them while there. I just need to get through the next few months, then I should be out of their bad books (in case any of them migrated and have been planning their revenge for all this time. Which, I must admit, sounds unlikely).

The cat, named Bread Loaf by our seven-year-old son, often sits in our front garden, preening herself, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. Believe me, we’ve tried. She just keeps coming back. She’s the type of cat that would turn up to a funeral wearing a Castol GTX bomber jacket asking if anyone had a battery for an Ericsson.

I haven’t got anything against cats. We have two ourselves, both 15 years old, one of them is very vomity and likes to wait until we’ve made the bed before blowing chunks on it; the other has scratched a neck scab so often that we had to buy her a cone to wear, which is actually like one of those Elizabethan ruffles, but in the style of a watermelon because she deserves the ridicule. How cats were ever allowed into our homes with such outrageous behaviour remains a total mystery. I blame the Egyptians. We’ve had millennia to nip this in the bud and yet cats are now more popular than ever. As someone once put it on social media (before I came off it), we have the entire history of humanity at our fingertips and yet we seem destined to make the same mistakes (although I get the feeling they were making a point about something else, like fascism, or war, or genocide, or all three).

I was going to suggest a topic for you to email in on, but the last time I did that on Twitter in 2017 it got precisely zero responses. My mistake — it turns out that 'The strangest thing you’ve ever found stuffed in a portaloo' was too niche a subject (mine was a rolled-up copy of Good Housekeeping, until the time I lifted the lid of a toilet at Leeds Festival in 2007 and saw a full roast dinner staring back at me).

Well, on that note I’ll leave it there. If you didn’t like today’s diary, blame the club. Sort it, 1878s, and give us something other than hedgehogs, crows and cat vomit to talk about. Please.

UTM!