Bloody hell, man.
I leave the Berlin bunker for ten days for a well-deserved break in the Spanish sun, and all 
hell breaks loose. Firstly, I see The Mag made the decision to stop publishing the print magazine after over 25 years. Naturally I was shocked, and saddened, but I didn’t really worry about this esteemed publication until a day or two later, when I got back on the internet (na’ve, I know).
I’m actually only a handful of years older than The Mag (I’m 30), so my whole time supporting the Toon has seen the Mag in the background ‘ firstly on the shelves of paper shops, then outside the stadium before a match, and later on, occasionally writing letters to them. In fact, when I go back to the Toon to me Mam’s, I can still see the cover of issue 193 on the wall of my old bedroom, and I had the cover of issue 238 on my wall in Berlin (the missus recently pulled it down when we got back from Lanzarote in an effort to ‘tidy the place up a bit’, and I have no idea where it is now).
I used to buy both sporadically, but over time gradually began to lean more towards true 
faith – it’s not necessarily that the writing was better (both usually have a range of cracking articles), but I found that I tended to enjoy reading true faith a little more, for whatever reason. One man’s Ameobi is another man’s Ameobi, I guess.
Despite being a relative young’un compared to a lot of the readers (at least, in my head I am), and being pretty much ‘down’ with all of this here technology and all that, I rarely go on the websites of either fanzine. Reading that back to myself, I’m actually pretty embarrassed to admit it, but I much prefer having a paper copy of one or the other in my ‘office’ (shitter). Sports I came to later, such as American Football, I can process digitally, but the Toon is something I prefer to experience in person, on a screen or on paper. Aside from the awesome NUFC.com, I haven’t really been able to digitalise my love/hate/emotions for NUFC in the way I have other things.
Now I will have to.
And that’s not a bad thing, but it will definitely take some getting used to. Ironic really ‘ I used to write in the magazine off and on over the years, and made the transition to writing a blog quite easily. It’s just how I consume all the info has to change.
Luckily, like the players, coaching staff and ownership, I have also given up on this season, so I have a bit more time on my hands.
What else am I gonna do? I sunburn too easily to go outside…
NEIL CRANSWICK’
