Jul 31 2026
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A Thursday night odyssey

I went to the cinema last night to watch The Odyssey. I enjoyed learning about Greek mythology at school but I’ll be honest, I haven’t continued to learn more as an adult so I was able to go into the screening blissfully unaware of much that was about to happen. And I reckon I got more out of it as a result, so that’s another little victory for ignorance.

I’d been looking forward to it all day, but I was annoyed at myself for how tired I felt. Now that I’m in my forties, it’s perfectly okay to fall asleep at the cinema, and I won’t deny that I’ve enjoyed a power nap on a couple of occasions previously (although they’ve always been at showings for kids).

I was determined to stay awake for this one, but I felt a little intimidated by the running time of nearly three hours. I bought quite a lot of pick ‘n’ mix, and just for extra insurance I also grabbed myself an energy drink. I wasn’t going to be denied.

If there was one thing the film taught me, it’s that my tolerance for violence is waning. Parts of the film made my throat close up a bit, yet I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I don’t mind a bit of bleakness, but this went to the edges of dispair and back, and despite it having license to lean into fantasy and outrageousness, it was so well directed it made everything feel real and made me feel anxious.

I was being entertained, but at no point did I feel relaxed. Turns out that I didn’t really need the sweets and energy drink. By the time I got home, just after 11.30pm, I was absolutely wired.

It’s a compelling story, told brilliantly, and I can understand why the critics absolutely love it. I have a similar story of my own, actually, of a fraught journey home from Leeds one day last year when the trains got cancelled and the roads were closed due to a 10k event, and no taxis were available because everyone was nabbing them. I was with my son who was seven at the time, and we had bags of gifts because it was just a few weeks before Christmas. We’d run out of options. Our situation was hopeless.

I’d love to see how Homer or Nolan would’ve brought that tale to life.

In the end, we walked out of the city for about half a mile where my wife came in the car to collect us. No one died that day, and I guess that’s the difference.

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Jul 23 2026
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Thou shalt have a fishy

Now that my son is on his summer break from school, my wife and I are having to divide and conquer childcare while juggling with finite annual leave — a familiar challenge facing parents up and down the country at this time of year. It seems cruel to pack him off back to school for summer club when he’s just rejoiced finishing there.

And so I’ve travelled back to work from my parents’ house in Cleethorpes so they can entertain him while I work from their house, which is also the house I grew up in.

Yesterday they took him to a country park not far away, where he fed carp, ducks, peacocks, and had a stand-off with an owl. Today he went to the arcades along the sea front and won an array of sweets and four mini rubber ducks.

Tomorrow they’re planning to take him to the Fishing Heritage Centre.

“The best display of all was one showing what the interior of a ship’s galley was like in rough seas…This was everything a museum should be – fun, imaginative, thoroughly absorbing, wonderfully instructive.”

Not my words, Michael — the words of renowned travel writer Bill Bryson!

My son has seafaring ancestry on both sides of the family, so I’m happy he’ll get to learn about the reality of fishing — even though it’ll likely ruin his idea of it (which is heavily if not entirely based on Animal Crossing).

We got a new prime minister on Monday. I’m not sure what this will mean for UK politics, and I don’t really want to go into it here because I want to keep this light-hearted.

That said, it was sad to hear that Kevin Keegan had died. Maybe he’d seen the future under Andy Burnham and decided that Monday was the day to go — much in the same way the Queen had probably seen the fire and brimstone that awaited under the crack leadership of Liz ‘Pork Markets’ Truss and decided it was under her reign that she must pop.

I must admit, Keegan wasn’t known as a particularly prophetic man and so maybe his death occurring on the same day as Burnham’s appointment will have to go down as purely coincidental.

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Jul 20 2026
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A complete shit-show

In the end, you have to say that FIFA got the World Cup final they deserved. After pooling their collective wisdom, they somehow managed to concoct an event that was a complete shit-show in both the figurative and literal sense of the word.

This isn’t bitterness talking, much, but Argentina should never have been allowed to make that final. Their awful brand of sportsmanship was enabled by officials throughout the tournament to facilitate the progress of a few ageing stars that really needed no help anyway, and what the billions of football fans around the world got served as a result of this was a big stinking pile of garbage.

And that that was just the half time entertainment! (Have I Got News For You can have that one for free.)

It was hard to fathom — a bit like the dream I had just a few nights ago, in which I was told the actor who plays Ian Beale in EastEnders speaks with a Northern Irish accent in real life. So he does. He doesn’t, of course, which came as a disappointment when I double-checked his Wikipedia page the next morning, just to make sure.

Honestly, I was so angry at Argentina’s anti-football approach that I actually found myself willing them to score a late equaliser to take the match to penalties, just so they’d be able to return some of the entertainment they’d stolen from us.

Can you imagine a world in which that happened, and Argentina won the shoot-out? It would’ve justified their whole approach even further and sent ripples around Trump’s ever expanding waste line. As a warmongering convicted felon with no morals whatsoever, I’m sure he’d have loved their dirty underhand and manipulative tactics while claiming ownership of an overseas territory in a post-match victory banner.

In the end, though, Spain won and Trump got served a load of rubbish for the one match he actually managed to attend, which felt very apt.

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Jul 17 2026
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Argy-bargy!

Oh, England! Thomas’s team tanked once he’d brought off James and Gordon and we simply ran out of steam. If they make a documentary about this match to stir the emotions of England fans ahead of the next major football tournament, they should get Ringo Starr to narrate it.

I was so happy with my Thomas the Tank Engine gag there that I decided to use it in my fortnightly Cod Almighty diary too. I don’t let anything go to waste.

If the first half was scrappy then the second half was messy. (You won’t believe how much time I wasted thinking about whether I should’ve written that as ‘messy’ or ‘Messi’. I think the gag was obvious enough, but it’s one those that works better said than written. You say tomato, I say tomato. See? Rubbish.)

I said from the outset that Argentina would win the World Cup. I didn’t quite know how much assistance they’d be getting from FIFA when I said it, but now that we’ve all witnessed the events of the past six weeks with our own eyes it’s hard to bet against them in the final — despite the way Spain made France look incredibly ordinary in the other semi-final.

There were tears at full time after our poor lad had got very excited about the prospect of England winning a World Cup. In his relatively short existence on this planet he’d never known England fail. We’d topped our group, we’d beaten Doctor Congo, we’d defeated Mexico, we’d stopped Haaland, and we were supposed to have knocked out Argentina and shrugged off the Spanish in the final to lift the golden trophy.

And for so long it looked like everything was going to plan. We’d got our noses in front, and with just five minutes (and injury time) to go, we had one foot in the final.

So to lose the match and not even take it into extra time was a shock to the system. Maybe it wasn’t a shock to my system, because I could see the way we were playing, but for an eight-year-old with unchecked exuberance it was cruel to basically be given something and then have it snatched away with no chance of getting it back.

The consolation to all of this is that we have season tickets at Grimsby Town. Onwards and upwards!

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Jul 14 2026
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You must be choking!

When I began this blog a couple of months ago I didn’t intend for so much of it to be about football, but since England have gone deep into the World Cup it’s been impossible to ignore.

Our quarter final match against Norway had a much friendlier kick-off time. Pre-child, I used to spend non-work nights drinking Tesco own brand energy drinks watching films and playing on Football Manager into the small hours, so yes, staying up late on a Saturday night was (and still is) child’s play for me!

Sadly, swallowing pills isn’t. I’ve always struggled on that score. At full time, I decided to use the pause in play before extra time began to take a couple of vitamin supplements. The first one went down fine (as it usually does) but it’s the second one that always gives me grief, and this one nearly ended me.

Well, it didn’t. But my god, did it wedge itself! I retched a few times as it tried to decide whether it wanted to go up or down. My wife, being as sharp as she is, immediately knew what to do and offered me advice — in this case, it was to eat some bread. So, while the England match (and my life) hung in the balance, I chewed down a slice of white bread, even though I wasn’t hungry for it. Now that’s the sort of length I’ll go to, to make sure I stay alive!

It was hard to concentrate on the football when I was focusing on my breathing and swallowing. The pill must have slid past the sticking point, or dissolved, eventually, but it left its mark (a sensation that made it feel like it was basically still there). When it comes to high-pressure sporting occasions, I’ve always taken the term ‘chokers’ to be figurative, but in my case it was very literal. But hey, I survived! And so you get to read this, you lucky thing.

I thought Norway played well and I don’t mind admitting we probably benefitted from some strokes of fortune (that said, I thought our penalty should’ve stood), so that must have been a bitter pill for Norway to swallow, or choke on.

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Jul 10 2026
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Fat Cucumber

First there was Fart Verruca, now there’s Fat Cucumber!

Once again, my son misheard a BBC commentator during the football and thought he’d said ‘fat cucumber’ when in fact he’d said ‘Vancouver’. Easy mistake to make, I’m sure you’ll agree. He didn’t share in our laughter or find it outrageous because if New York can be known as the Big Apple then why can’t Vancouver be known as the Fat Cucumber?

I’ve never been to Vancouver. I have been to Seattle, though, where our cruise ship docked when we went to Alaska. The city, I gather (from those who know this area of the world better than me) falls a little short of Vancouver’s general appeal and aesthetics. So maybe Seattle has more of a shout for being known as the Fat Cucumber. A modern nickname for the Space Needle perhaps.

(I’ve just remembered that London has the Gherkin, but there’s a bit of work to do before the whole city can be known as the Big Gherkin. It’s confusing because that also sounds like the nickname for Boris Johnson.)

Anyway, Brighton’s Dutch international goalkeeper Bart Verbruggen never got to play in Vancouver, and that’s the great tragedy of this World Cup — that, and Argentina’s progression.

It’s been a busy week for my son. Last Friday he took part in his school’s first ever colour run, which was wonderfully messy. The local volunteer group and the school itself made such a huge effort to make it happen, and they got lucky with the weather because it occurred slap bang between two heatwaves.

The plain white PE t-shirt he ran in was meant to go straight in the wash because apparently the paint* does come out if you deal with it straight away. But we agreed it looked cool as it was, so we’ve left it out to dry.

I can’t believe he’s coming to the end of Year 3. As parents, we’re just not ready for the summer break. Remarkably, he hasn’t missed a day of school all year — for the second year running! Maybe he’s like David Dunn (the character in the film Unbreakable, not the former Blackburn Rovers footballer).

We watched Unbreakable with a group of friends at uni that included someone who is probably a Reform voter these days. He worked out before anyone else that Samuel L. Jackson was a baddie, but it was for the wrong reasons if you know what I mean.

*environmentally friendly cornstarch mixed with natural colourants like berries, spices, plants and flowers, meeting the kind of EU safety regulations that Nigel Farage despises

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Jul 06 2026
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The late, late, late, late, late show in Mexico

I’m beginning to believe that I am half human, half owl. As the great Martin Clunes once said: Sleep is for sleepy people. Let’s get a kebab and go to a disco!

I’d like to demand that all England matches kick off in the middle of the night if that Mexico game was anything to go by, but FIFA and its bald-headed Bond villain leader only take direction from deranged incontinent old men in nappies these days. I just don’t have that sort of weight (literally) or a Micky Mouse peace prize to throw behind my demands.

What a cracker of a match it was! I needed the loo midway through the first half and it was Harry Kane’s squeaky post-match interview almost two hours later that made me realise I hadn’t gone in all that time. So, not only was it a victory for the England team, it was also a victory for my bladder (which is another thing me and Trump don’t have in common). What an outstanding performance all round!

For any young kids reading this, it was a masterclass in how to pace an evening with no sleep. Sure, you all think you can make it through the night, but there’s usually a moment when tiredness smacks you in the face like you’re Chris Rock at an awards ceremony. I wasn’t going to let that happen because I had a can of Monster (and Will Smith wasn’t invited).

I need no invitation to stay up late. On any other night I probably would’ve gone to bed as soon as I’d finished watching Haaland beat Brazil 2-1, but on this occasion the night was still young. I was ready for England’s match at 1am (although I watched a couple of episodes of Mid Morning Matters on iPlayer when I realised I had an extra hour to kill).

Never before had I stayed up to watch an England match in the middle of the night. I remember getting up early to watch England draw 0-0 against Nigeria at 6am in the 2002 World Cup. That didn’t feel rewarding, but this did.

There was magic in the air — and I’m not talking about the ghost of Paul Daniels, which I’m convinced has been stalking me since I shared the stage with his son briefly in a Christmas panto back in 2023. The game delivered drama, and then some. You couldn’t catch your breath. There were no lulls in the action to allow for any co-commentators to talk about the time their cat jumped into the back of a postal van, went feral, and had to see out its days living with relatives in Preston.

England might get knocked out in the quarter final because there’s Norway Haaland won’t score against us (lovely gag there), and if they don’t get us then Argentina will in the semis. The smart money’s on Argentina, because that’s where FIFA’s money is.

But whatever happens next, I can always look back on the Mexico match with fondness, and remember the night I never went to bed. I shouldn’t feel this sprightly on just a two-hour nap this morning!

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Jul 01 2026
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Omens

Doctor Congo certainly drank their Um Bongo tonight! I wonder if it ever was drunk in the Congo, like the 1980’s ad claimed. A quick search online tells me it was originally created in Cumbria, which isn’t quite as exotic.

It was a good game to watch alongside my son because I don’t think it would’ve held his interest had we run away as comfortable 3-0 winners. The fact that we made a meal of it worked to our advantage, so I’d like to thank Thomas the Tank Tuchel for that. England fans like nothing more than to have something to moan about, even in victory, so he and the team delivered the perfect performance.

One of my work colleagues is Mexican, but she’s so nice it’s hard to create even a slither of faux rivalry. I’d say the omens don’t look good for her, though, based on the fact that three close co-workers of mine are Man United fans, and my line manager at the time was a Sheffield Wednesday fan, and both were beaten by my beloved Grimsby Town earlier in the season. I’m on a roll.

As is Reuben. We forgot to ask him to predict the outcome of the Ghana and Panama matches, but we remembered for this one and, naturally, he chose England. He’s a cat that knows things. Two wins out of two for him! And one win out of one for me on the betting. I’m tempted not to bet ever again, so I can dine out on my 12/1 victory (which, ironically, were the odds of Grimsby knocking Man United out of the League Cup back in August). I hope we never play Man United again. We’re four unbeaten against them — an undefeated run that stretches back 80 years.

Go back 40 years and that’s when England got knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina in the very stadium we’ll be taking on Mexico on Sunday night. Suddenly the omens don’t look so good for us. I think the England players will need to have their Weetabix for this one.

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Jun 30 2026
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Opening up a hornet’s nest

As if clearing out some of the junk piled up in the dead space down the side of the house wasn’t exciting enough this weekend, we then discovered a small wasps nest on the underside of our plastic outdoor storage unit.

It didn’t look active, but just to be on the safe side I put on a full radiation suit and removed it, before it became a bigger problem down the line.

I’m not good at dealing with problems in the here and now, either. Our kitchen tap has been screeching whenever we run another tap in the house for over a year. It’s not a big enough problem for a plumber to come out and sort it, and it’s not a small enough problem for me to sort it myself. Sometimes, I get a shot of adrenaline and burst into action, but as a chronic procrastinator the source of the adrenaline is almost always an impending sense of doom (or an immovable deadline, which is often the same thing).

I wasn’t sure how long the nest had been there. I’d opened and closed the lid of that storage unit more times than usual in recent weeks while tidying around the garden, and it hadn’t caught my eye before now. It was pretty obvious. But I also hadn’t noticed any wasps flying around. It was either in its infancy, as Google Gemini suggested, or it was years old and abandoned, and I’d just not noticed it (which is also a strong possibility).

In among the rest of the junk I found a small barbecue that we used once about two years ago.

We are the worst type of barbecue owners — or, just maybe, we are in fact excellent barbecue owners. Think of how many barbecues we haven’t had over the last two years because the one we owned was too dirty to use. Think of all that charcoal we haven’t burned.

Some of the charcoal actually had green shoots rising out of them. I can’t think of anything that’s been more neglected over the last two years. How can something be alive in there, yet I can’t keen a houseplant alive? That’s what all the cool kids are asking these days.

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Jun 29 2026
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Panamanian clairvoyance

We forgot to ask Reuben to make his pre-match England prediction, but it looks as if I’ve done him out of a job! I’ll break the bad news to him later, when he wakes up from his eight-hour nap.

He shouldn’t worry too much anyway because my £13.16 winnings will only go towards the cost of his insurance cover for the next year anyway, which will amount to something like nine days. He’s a 16-year-old cat with thyroid cancer on his medical history, along with the vets’ note (and I quote): “This cat is a complete stress head.” I know this for a fact because I saw it on the screen when the vet left the room to get some medication, so he’s on the expensive end of the affordability spectrum these days.

I had a very clear idea of how England’s final group match against Panama would go: we’d be slow and lethargic in the first half, so that enough reactionary fans would have a meltdown at half time when it would still be goalless. Then England would probably grab a couple of goals in the second half to win the game — enough for everyone to be happy yet still have some suppressed angst against Tuchel and some of the players in the bank to be withdrawn at a later date.

It’s not often one of my visions plays out as accurately as this, so it spooked me more than delighted me. Don’t get me wrong, there was some delight in there (I’m not an emotionless moron, don’t listen to Reuben), but I found myself encouraging England players to fluff their shots from 67 minutes onwards, which of course isn’t in the spirit of someone who currently has two England flags fluttering from his upstairs windows.

Could this be our year? The other lucid vision I had for this World Cup was that Argentina would win it, so instinctively I don’t think so. Sixty-four years of hurt is the likely lyric for when we compete in Spain, Portugal and Morocco in 2030 — although, as my wife pointed out, the original lyric of ‘Thirty years of hurt’ isn’t particularly accurate, because what exactly was hurting between 1966 and 1970? The first four of those thirty years Baddiel and Skinner sang about would’ve been quite joyous, I’d have imagined.

Anyway, if I’d lumped on England to beat Panama 2-0 with more than a free £1 bet I’d perhaps know how it feels to be rich. Instead, this is how it feels to be Rich.

Ba-dum-tssh! I only went and involved the title in the article, didn’t I?! What an effort. See, I can write when I really want to!

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